When data are shared with and explained to others, they are publicized and hence they gain a social significance that transforms *facts into knowledge. For this reason, the history of the public sphere is a crucial aspect of the history of information. Understanding the role of publics and publicity in the socialization of information helps illuminate the ways in which forms of knowledge have been created. While the role of publicity in knowledge formation plays a key role in most social histories of knowledge, the major studies of publicity or public formation have not been explicitly conceived of as interventions in the sociology of knowledge. They developed out of an interest in media history and particularly studies of the invention of news and the proliferation of print (and later electronic) media in the modern era. Work of this kind has developed into a substantial body of scholarly studies detailing the emergence of a “public sphere” that was a product and perhaps even a defining feature of the modern age.
The concept of a public sphere developed in the postwar era primarily as a result of the publication of Jürgen Habermas’s famous thesis Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), a work better known in English translation as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). Habermas posited that the modern age saw a “structural transformation” of the ways in which publics and publicity were both imagined and practiced. Habermas’s original German text did not use the phrase “public sphere,” choosing instead to use the less spatially oriented term Öffentlichkeit, which could be better (albeit rather awkwardly) translated into English as “public-ness” or the state of things being made public. Habermas noted that in German “the noun Öffentlichkeit was formed from the older adjective öffentlich during the eighteenth century, in analogy to ‘publicité’ and ‘publicity.’ … If the public sphere [Öffentlichkeit] did not require a name of its own before this period, we may assume that this sphere first emerged and took on its function only at that time, at least in Germany.” A differentiation between what is public and what is private, however, was a much more enduring distinction. Thus Habermas briefly detailed a history of the ancient and medieval public spheres before moving quickly to his main subject of interest, the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere in the modern era.
Bourgeois public-ness (Öffentlichkeit) was distinctive because it was discursive. In contrast to premodern concepts of publicity, which Habermas called the representative public sphere (representative Öffentlichkeit) because it simply involved the repetitive presentation of things by the powerful before their passive audiences, the bourgeois public sphere was shaped by the sharing of information among different people who could decide among themselves what this information meant and ultimately what should be done with that knowledge in mind. The bourgeois public sphere both enabled and legitimized the socialization of knowledge. It created public opinion as social fact, as an object of study, and ultimately, as an object of political manipulation.
For Habermas, the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere coincided with, and indeed to a large degree was constitutive of, the philosophical project of *Enlightenment. Not only was the bourgeois public sphere formed collectively and discursively, but it developed out of a sense that private individuals could and should discuss matters of common concern in a rational and disinterested manner, and that in doing so, better policies and, ultimately, better polities would result. In its ideal form at least, the bourgeois public sphere would also be a rational public sphere. It emerged through “rational-critical debate” and ultimately became “the organizational principle of the liberal constitutional state.”
Although rationality was at the heart of the bourgeois public sphere, Habermas also argued that it was enabled through the growing sympathy that members of the Enlightenment public felt for others. Fiction emerged at this time as a cognitive category that was distinct from deliberate falsehoods, fakes, or shams: it became a psychologically complex means of exploring subjective interiority in narrative form. A new kind of prose fiction called “the novel” emerged as the epitome of this new sense of realistic fictionality. Sentimental novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (The new Heloise, 1761), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Werthers Leiden (The sufferings of Werther, 1774) were symptomatic of this emergent sphere of public sympathy, while at the same time helping to develop a new and more interactive relationship between authors, works, and publics. A crucial part of Habermas’s argument is that the public sphere emerged first in the literary realm (literarische Öffentlichkeit), beginning “as an expansion and at the same time completion of the intimate sphere [Intimsphäre] of the conjugal family.”
If the origins of the bourgeois public sphere were in the private sphere of family life, the public sphere quickly assumed an intermediary space between the private realm (Privatbereich) and the sphere of public authority (Sphäre der öffentlichen Gewalt), or in other words, the domain of state power. The bourgeois public sphere had a political dimension, particularly insofar as it could influence public opinion on matters of political concern, but it was distinct from the state. This aspect of his argument has provoked some of the most vociferous criticism from historians of the eighteenth century, many of whom have argued that it was in fact the state (itself a newly burgeoning sociopolitical entity at the time) that enabled the growth of the public sphere. States regulated publishing, sociability, and even family life in the private sphere at both the national and the local levels. The Habermasian narrative of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere is at heart a liberal one—the state, at least in its “absolutist” old regime form, is seen as in some way antithetical to the civil society exemplified by the public sphere. The bourgeois public sphere ultimately became the forum for a new form of political consciousness that was opposed to absolutist monarchy and in which the universal sovereignty of “general and abstract laws” supported by public opinion came to be understood as “the only legitimate source of this law.” In its fully developed nineteenth-century form, the bourgeois public sphere became the source of legitimacy for the liberal democratic state.
An important aspect of Habermas’s thesis is that there was both a normative and a practical aspect to the making of the modern public sphere. The public sphere was both imagined and realized through the new social practices of public making that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, roughly during the century and a half between the English Revolution and the French Revolution. Although always existing more as an ideal than as a realized practice, it is crucial to the Habermasian argument that the normative ideals of the public sphere were at least attempted to be put into practice in real places by real people. Hence the importance for his thesis of the emergence of new forms of sociability and new forms of communication in the *early modern era. The paradigmatic spaces in which bourgeois publicity was practiced included the English *coffeehouse, the French *salon, and German dining clubs (Tischgesellschaften). Social spaces such as these offered new opportunities for individuals to come together to exercise their reason through discussion and debate. They were particularly important because they provided a place free from interference from the state or other forms of political control or repression in which matters of public interest could be debated. They also encouraged the discussion of new ideas that circulated in print, particularly in newspapers and pamphlets. In this way, the sociable institutions of civil society allowed for people to practice public opinion making through the sharing of information, attitudes, and opinions with one another over a cup of coffee at an urban coffeehouse or at a convivial dinner at an aristocratic salon. Coffeehouses and salons came to be seen as little commonwealths, or as refuges from the constraints on freethinking normally imposed by the state on civil society. They offered a model for how a liberal state, founded on the rock of public opinion rather than royal majesty, could function.
Despite the importance of this practical dimension to the emergence of the public sphere, the virtual (or imaginary) public sphere was possibly even more important for its ultimate fruition. This is because the idea, and the ideals, of a public opinion based on rational-critical debate was free from the messy realities of a civil society that could never live up to the utopian ideals of a reason-based political order. In the minds of Enlightenment thinkers, the virtual public sphere could truly flourish. Publicity was above all a state of mind; it was a means by which collectivities could be imagined. This “virtual” aspect of the Habermasian public sphere concept would be developed further in different ways by later theorists of modern identity formation. For Benedict Anderson (1983), it would form the basis for his understanding of modern nationalism as the product of the always strained and artificial process of imagining new communities. For Charles Taylor (2004), publics are a key “social imaginary” that comprise modern identities and particularly the modern sense of selves that come together as individuals with a common set of beliefs or interests. Modern people imagine themselves to be part of a panoply of different kinds of communities that are variously understood as nations, publics, faiths, or other interest groups.
Habermas’s public sphere concept, and his historical argument about the structural transformation of the bourgeois public sphere that occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has been immensely influential, but part of the explanation for its extraordinary success both as theory and as history lies within the ambiguities of the original work. Precisely because Habermas’s arguments were chronologically imprecise, many scholars have quarreled with the details of his historical narrative, in some cases going to the extreme of using the phrase but denuding it of any relationship to the broader historical vision of a transition from representative to bourgeois publicity, or its claim that the ideals of publicity began in the nonpolitical intimate sphere of private life and sympathetic imaginations. This approach has the benefit of allowing for a much more nuanced understanding of premodern media culture, particularly since it encourages the study of a much more diverse media ecology than the highly print-centered perspective offered by the Habermasian model. Gossip, theatrical performances, and manuscript circulation, for example, were all important aspects of information circulation both before and after the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Post-Habermasian studies of the public sphere emphasize this intermediality and particularly the numerous ways in which these forms of publicity interacted with the rise and efflorescence of print and the press in the modern era.
Related to this attention to intermediality and interactions is a greater recognition of the multiplicity, variability, and temporal limitations of any given public sphere. Rather than speaking in terms of a unitary public with its own clearly recognizable opinion, it is much more common today to think of many publics, each of which competes for members, recognition, and influence. From these post-Habermasian perspectives, the public sphere is not the product of a grand structural transformation in social and economic relations as Habermas’s original Marxist thesis posited; it is rather a multivocal, constantly evolving marketplace of attention in which new publics are continually formed and re-formed. It is now common to speak of publics, rather than the public.
With this more pluralistic public sphere model in mind, post-Habermasian perspectives have devoted greater attention to the reasons why publics were formed in the first place. What brought people together to see themselves as participating in something that they understood to be a public? The answer is: things. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s theory of the thing, scholars such as Bruno Latour and others have stressed that a key property of “things” is that they bring people together—they are objects of attention that can create publics. This line of thinking reminds us of the original meaning of the Roman res publica as “the public thing” as discussed by Heidegger: republics do not begin as states fully formed; they emerge out of “that which, known to everyone, concerns everybody and is therefore deliberated in public.”
The material aspect of things also plays a role in post-Habermasian public sphere theory. Although things need not necessarily be material objects, they may be, and as such they offer a physical instantiation of what would otherwise be only a virtual reality. Obviously, the material forms of knowledge collection, such as books, newspapers, databases, and so forth, are key things that help bring publics together when these works are read, used, or discussed. But things are as multifarious as publics, and they need not be material objects. As Heidegger noted, “the Romans called a matter for discourse res.” Public-forming things could be discursive as well as material.
The idea of a public sphere is here to stay, even if the concept is now used in ways that Habermas could not have imagined in the context of postwar Germany, where it was first conceived. What was once an attempt to salvage the Kantian Enlightenment project of explaining how rational-critical debate could guide the way toward better public policy in a liberal democratic society has in the twenty-first century become something different—the public sphere concept offers a valuable guide toward thinking about how ideas and information have been disseminated, debated, and ultimately turned into new forms of common knowledge. What was once thought to be a unitary phenomenon produced by an inexorable historical dialectic is now more commonly understood to be something that can be found in many different times and places, each with its own local complexities and variability. Post-Habermasian understandings of the public sphere are more pluralistic and less rooted in a narrative of European historical development, and they are more inclined to see the relationship between publics and states as mutually constitutive rather than separate entities or even antagonists.
The history of information should attend to the histories of public formation. Without a public to receive it and discuss it, the meaning and significance of information remains limited to those select few individuals who have it. While the history of secret information—arcana imperii (secrets of government) classified information, and the like—is an important counterpoint to the history of information in the public sphere, even secrets gain resonance through their oppositional relationship to publicity. The act of concealing information in itself recognizes that it is too sensitive to be revealed to a wider public.
It is not an exaggeration to say that publics turn information into knowledge; if so, then the role of public spheres needs to play a key role in the history of knowledge formation. Equally so, histories of public spheres are enhanced by the history of information. While few historians of the public sphere today believe that rational-critical debate was at the center of the activities that brought publics together, even during the supposed rational high-water moment of the Enlightenment era, publics are fundamentally communicative entities. Therefore, if we are going to understand what publics were up to in the past (as well as in the present), we must know what kinds of information they were interested in communicating, and we should attend to the various ways in which that information was communicated. The answers may not confirm Habermas’s view of what a public sphere should look like, but they will lead to better histories.
Brian Cowan
See also information, disinformation, misinformation; journals; knowledge; media; networks; newsletters; newspapers; privacy; publicity/publication