International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences2001 Elsevier Science Ltd

Public InterestScholars debate the question of the public interestsomewhat less than they once did, but it remains animportant issue. As is true of other central concepts,the passage of time does not always lead to an increasein acuity, although it does lead to changes in emphasis(Friedrich 1962, Lewin 1991). Much that might beconsidered under the rubric of the public interest,moreover, continues to be discussed in terms ofassociated ideas such as justice, responsibility, andcommunity. This ambiguity complicates a topic that isitself elusive.1. What is the Public Interest, Conceptually?The issue of the public interest is best organized underfour headings. First is the formal or conceptualquestion. This includes problems such as the meaningof public as opposed to private, self or commoninterest, and the meaning of interests as distinguishedfrom other goods. ‘Public’ sometimes is taken asanything that is not private, so that regard for thepublic interest means any regard for interests or groupsthat are not strictly or exclusively one’s own (Lewin1991). Less broadly, a public often is said to be thoseaffected by private groups, in the sense that peoplewho are neither labor nor management are affected by

strikes. Such publics, moreover, sometimes are takento refer to those potentially and not just actuallyaffected as, say, any potential passenger might beinconvenienced by a strike of air traffic controllers.(Someone can, therefore, have both a private and apublic interest in the same matter, and ‘self’ interestneed not be identical to private interest.) In this sensewe are all members of many publics. Often, however,the public interest is taken to be what is in the interestsof ‘all’ of us, presumably as citizens within someboundary, although the questions of scope and authorityare often curiously undiscussed. There are notmany publics in this view but, finally, one public(Friedrich 1962, Barth 1992). The public is the groupthat makes law. Of course, its interests may be the sumof those of the many affected publics into which it canbe divided.Many discussions of the ‘public’ in these terms havein mind economic matters, or the point of view ofacademic economics (Friedrich 1962). A public is seenas an affected or lawmaking group of individuals thatseeks satisfaction in economically calculable terms.Publics want things that market failures cause them toreceive inadequately. It is serving such publics thatdefines the responsibilities of professionals and ofbusinesses ‘affected with the public interest.’ Onestrength of this conception is that since the 1950s

it has brought to bear an increasingly sophisticatedunderstanding of economically rational action, bothstrategic and straightforward.There are, however, limits to this perspective. Theyare evident in the narrowness of the economic view ofthe public when it is compared to other notions ofwhat is potentially common in common goods. For,what is common is not limited to what each independentlyand equally can use or enjoy, as we usemarkets. The common also can involve things ofwhich we are only parts, sometimes equal or identicaland sometimes not, as a face is common to its differentparts or a team or family common to its members. Theties that characterize what is common, moreover, arenot limited to what covers or blankets us universally,but include attaching, placing, fitting, ordering, attractingand other links integral to images of politicsfrom Plato through Hegel. Practical and economicallybased notions of the public interest will, of course,often take these distinctions for granted, but deeperexploration of the concept of the public interestcannot.Just as ‘public’ is often narrower than common, sotoo are ‘interests’ conceptually different from goodsmore broadly conceived. Discussions of the publicinterest often refer to Adam Smith and, therefore, to aview of what is good as what satisfies desire in the

somewhat flat, calculable, and exchangeable mannerof post-Hobbesian or Lockean bourgeois life. Interestsare linked to what is merely interesting, not to goods asobjects of passion, longing, pride or nobility or to thecharacter and institutions that support and directthese. Public interests are what several of us happen todesire, or means to satisfaction that we generally want.Part of the conceptual task in understanding thepublic interest is to consider the different ways ofexperiencing goods so that we can grasp how interestsare goods conceived in a limited manner that is linkedto the premises of liberal individualism.2. What is the Public Interest, Substantively?A second question about the public interest is what itis substantively. This issue involves both scope andcontent. Some scholars seek to limit questions of thepublic interest only to certain kinds of public goods.Others use it to stand for national goals, purposes orgoods more comprehensively. In practice, too, speakingof the public interest generally differs from considering the public’s interest in assuring the provision to all of some specific good such as telephone service.When the scope of the public interest is limited toeconomic concerns, so too is the content of what issaid to comprise it; for some the public interest does

not even include protecting rights. To limit the conceptin this way risks confusion when ‘public interest’retains its broad use in practice and even in theory; touse it broadly, however, seems to involve everyquestion of human purpose and to require some otherconcept to take the place of the idea used narrowly.Just as our understanding of the public interestconceived narrowly has benefited from developmentsin economic understanding, so too has substantivediscussion about the public interest conceived broadlyundergone notable developments since the 1950s. Thetriumph of liberal democracies in the Cold War hasdirected the concerns of the left away from socialismsimply to expanding the place of egalitarianism andcommunity within liberal democracy itself. A wishamong those who reject the revivified concept ofnatural rights to nonetheless ground the place of rightsand defend them from simple utilitarian calculationshas become widespread. Concern with the place ofvirtue and nobility in liberal democracies and, indeed,concern with these phenomena simply has been renewed(Rawls 1971, Strauss 1952). All these trendshave enriched and re-energized discussions of thepublic interest.3. Can the Public Interest be Implemented?The third question is how the public interest might be

implemented concretely and used as a guide for action.Some thinkers argue that the ‘public interest’ is toovague to be used other than rhetorically or that it ismerely a name that sums up a country’s political andeconomic life at some moment frozen in analyticaltime (Friedrich 1962). More charitably, one mightconcede that it means a certain level of economicsatisfaction and political freedom but that these arebest reached through private and political competition,that is, when no one aims at them directly.When we conceive the public interest broadly,however, it is not always so difficult to discern how itmight guide action. Constitutions, for example, cannotbe formed well without explicit attention to more thanprivate concerns: Charles Beard’s worm’s eye view ofthe framing of the American Constitution has beendebunked by more thoughtfully elevated judgments(Kesler 2000, Mansfield 1991) Once constitutionallysecured, individual rights and liberties must be exercisedindividually, but steps to protect these rightspublicly must be attended to explicitly by jurists.National defense is a public interest that guides specificlegislative and executive action.To say that the public good often receives explicitattention is not to say that it goes without debate, butto call it debatable is not to call it meaningless. Thedeliberations and result of the US’ constitutional

convention prove the contrary. Similarly, if we takeour private interest to include moral and intellectualexcellence and not only economic opportunity andsatisfaction we would not say that the disputability ofthese ends makes them pointless. On the contrary,their subtlety may make our attention to them all themore intense.If we conceive the public interest more narrowly asassuring some equitable or safe provision and distributionof certain goods then it is again clear that thepublic interest can be a concrete guide. Are expandingaccess to communications and increasing public healthserved better by explicit government regulation with adefined public interest in mind of such and such a levelof drug safety and computer ownership, or are theybetter served by discovery and application fueledlargely by private desires for wealth, knowledge, andmastery, with little regulatory adjustment of theprivate application of resources? Is improved educationsecured better by unfunded parental choice, byfunded choice, or by public provision or standards?Explicit attention to health, education and responsiblechoice as public interests seems necessary to helpsecure their sufficient provision and fair distribution, ifonly to ward off excessive regulation and allow private

efforts to flourish.4. Is the Public Interest Followed?The fourth question is whether anyone in practice paysattention to the public interest or whether privateinterest in fact dominates even in public matters. It isargued that the actions of voters, representatives, andbureaucrats all can be explained as attempts toenhance private goods; this analysis can be expandedto professionals, journalists, and intellectuals who dopublic talking, if not public business, for a living. Evenif the public interest could guide us, in this view it doesnot.Some recent research in the US and Western Europeindicates that voters do not simply or usually votetheir immediately selfish economic concerns, that thebehavior of representatives cannot always or primarilybe explained by their wish for re-election, that bureaucratsdo not always want to increase their agency’ssize, and that groups and individuals sometimes doseek benefits for publics from which they and theirmembers do not receive special advantages (Lewin1991, Wilson 1989). Of course, a link between privateand public interest is to be expected and largely desiredin liberal democratic regimes, for the responsibility we

encourage in citizens and officials is meant to benefitnot just others but oneself as well (Kesler 2000).Obviously, whether political action actually attemptsto serve public interests requires continuedstudy. Only the excessively naive would believe thatunbridled devotion to a clearly conceived commongood directs each and every political choice. But onlythe false or foolish sophisticate would believe thepublic interest to be as fleeting and airy as the summersnow.See also: Communitarianism: Political Theory; Democracy;Environment and Common Property Institutions;Interest: History of the Concept; PoliticalCulture; Political Representation; Political Sociology;Public Interest Law; Public Opinion: Political Aspects;Public Reason; Representation: History of theProblemM. Blitz

Public Reason‘Public reason’ implies a contrast to ‘nonpublic’ or‘personal reason.’ Identifying a distinctly public orshared notion of reason is only important—indeed isonly intelligible—when the concept of reason is understoodin ways which allow that individuals, employinggood reasoning, may come to divergent conclusions.This article begins by examining the lines of inquirythat have led many to question whether all fully informedand fully-competent inquirers would cometo the same conclusions about science and morals.

According to some philosophers and social scientists,the very concept of reason has broken apart, leavingdifferent individuals and groups with different conceptionsof rationality, and so of reasons for belief andaction. The article then considers the different ideals ofpublic reason that have been advanced to overcomeworries about the ‘fragmentation of reason.’1. The Diversity of Reason1.1 The EnlightenmentBefore considering different conceptions of publicreason, it is important to grasp what the very idea ofpublic reason presupposes. According to the conceptionof reasoning that dominated the EuropeanEnlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, reason is inherently universal, and so sharedand public. On this Enlightenment conception, reasonis a shared capacity of all human beings, and norms ofgood reasoning are universal. Any premise p that istrue for one person is necessarily true for all others; ifthe inferential rule ‘(p_(p_q))_q’ is valid for oneperson, it is necessarily valid for all. The true and validresults of one person’s reasoning are thus necessarilytrue and valid for all. According to this standardEnlightenment view, the use of common human reasonnot only produces consensus on scientific beliefs, it

also leads to convergence of moral and politicalopinions. To be sure, people might disagree on mattersof science or ethics, but that would be due to mistakenbeliefs or irrationality: some have arrived at the wronganswer. The process of Enlightenment was the onlyremedy for this—the increasingly better use of reasonto uncover truths about the natural and the socialworld. The ideal or model was that of Newtonianphysics: just as our common reason had uncovered thelaws of matter and motion, so too could it be expectedto uncover the laws of human nature, society, morals,and politics. Each field was awaiting its Newton.1.2 Relativism and Social ScienceIt is a familiar story how the systematic study ofcultures with radically different norms from those ofEurope gave rise to cultural relativism. When confrontedwith the very different mores of the Zun_ i andKwakiutl Indians and Dobu Islanders of Papua NewGuinea, Ruth Benedict (1934) endorsed a relativisticview—their norms were justified for them, just asWestern norms were for Europeans. As anthropologistsbegan to study non-European cultures in moredepth, and became increasingly more sophisticatedand self-reflective in their techniques, disputes aroseabout the proper method for anthropologists tointerpret the belief systems of other cultures. Forexample, was a belief in magic or a deity to be

understood as simply a false belief on which the‘natives’ relied? John Stuart Mill (1974 [1843], pp.766–7) believed that an investigator could best understandthe magical beliefs of other cultures byattributing to them erroneous beliefs and invalid inferentialrules. Others, adopting a principle of charity,have insisted that the best interpretation of a cultureminimizes the number of false beliefs attributed to itsmembers (Davidson 1973). Thus the best interpretation—which makes sense of the ‘native’s’ metaphysicaltheories, religious convictions, and theirbeliefs about nature—might seek to show that a beliefin spirits is, after all, rational given their world view.Thus the second step in the relativist attack on theEnlightenment’s ideal of reason was to endorse relati_ism concerning what beliefs are rational in differentcultures. The last step in the relativistic project is toapply tolerance to the idea of reason itself. CanWestern anthropologists properly interpret other culturesif they apply their Western conception of reasonin their interpretation? Is the very idea of reasonculturally relative?Independently, psychological studies of human reasoningled to doubts about whether everyone sharesthe same norms of reasoning. The work of, amongothers, Richard Nisbett, Lee Ross, Paul Slovic, andAmos Tversky showed that normal adults often do

not employ the norms of reasoning long advocated byphilosophers as correct. For example, many normaladults adhere to the ‘gambler’s fallacy.’ According tostandard probability theory, the odds of independentevents occurring do not depend on whether that typeof event has occurred in the past: if the odds of a ‘six’being rolled by a fair dice is one-in-six, this probabilityin no way depends on whether no sixes have beenrolled or all sixes have been rolled in the past. Yetmany normal reasoners believe that, after a long run ofsixes, the odds of another six are less than one-in-six,or if none recently have been rolled, many areconvinced that a six is ‘due.’ Based on a variety ofstudies of such ordinary reasoners, some philosophersadvocate ‘normative cognitive pluralism.’ Accordingto Stephen Stitch, ‘Normati_e cogniti_e pluralism is nota claim about the cognitive processes people do use;rather it is a claim about good processes—the cognitiveprocesses that people ought to use. What it asserts isthat there is no unique system of cognitive processesthat people should use, because various systems ofcognitive processes that are very different from each

other are equally good’ (1990, p. 13).1.3 Pluralism and IndeterminancySocial science thus provided one source of the‘fragmentation of reason.’ Of course there was, andstill is, lively debate within social scientific andphilosophical circles about whether any such relativisticview of reasoning is justified, and if so to whatextent individuals employ different, but equally good,norms of reasoning. Nevertheless, some form ofcognitive relativism is widely accepted. Concurrently,developments in the philosophy of science were challengingthe idea of common, human, reasoning in thevery citadel of the Enlightenment—science itself.Whatever doubts may be entertained about the applicationof Western reason to other cultures, ordepartures from expert norms by ordinary reasoners,surely science is still the model of rational discoursetending to convergence of opinion leading to the truth.To many, Thomas Kuhn’s analysis of scientific practicedemonstrated that, rather than a shared project ofpursuit of the truth, judged by rules of reason held byall, scientific inquiry takes place within ‘paradigms’that determine not only what constitutes researchproblems but what constitutes success in a researchprogram. Within a group of scholars sharing aparadigm the Enlightenment’s ideal of common norms

of reason and consensus on the truth will be approximated;and insofar as ‘normal science’ is dominated bya single paradigm in each field, there often is a commonmode of reasoning. But in times of scientific crisis,when paradigms compete, some have insisted thatthere is no rational, impartial way to adjudicate amongthe competing theories.The crux of Kuhn’s analysis is that because dataunderdetermines theories, scientists draw on values inadjudicating among theories. ‘To a greater extent thanother sorts of components of the disciplinary matrix,’writes Kuhn, ‘values may be shared by men who differin their application. Judgments of accuracy are relatively,though not entirely, stable from one time toanother and from one member to another in aparticular group. But judgments of simplicity, consistency,plausibility, and so on often vary greatlyfrom individual to individual … Even more important,in those situations where values must be applied,different values, taken alone, would often dictatedifferent choices. One theory may be more accuratebut less consistent or plausible than another’ (Kuhn1970, p. 185). The crucial claim is that there is nouniquely rational way to order these various desiderata—simplicity, consistency, plausibility—and differentorderings endorse different scientific theories

upholding competing truth claims. Equally wellinformedscientists employing their reasoning inperfectly legitimate ways can arrive at different judgmentsabout what is true. Fred D’Agostino hasgeneralized the analysis. In any field of inquiry, whenthere exists both a plurality of criteria and no impartialway to order the criteria, the criteria are apt to beindeterminate in their application. Different orderingsproduce different outcomes—reasons for belief.According to D’Agostino, the criteria only yield adeterminate result when an ordering is provided, butimpartial reason cannot give us that. Much of postmodernismis based on this key idea. Reason isinherently perspectival because of the inherent pluralityof relevant considerations for which there is norational, impartial ranking.1.4 Reasonable PluralismKuhn’s analysis of scientific practice and D’Agostino’sgeneralization rely on the idea of indeterminancy:reason undetermines choice between various theoriesand perspectives. A more modest view maintains thatour powers of reasoning are inconclusive on manycomplex matters of science, morality, and politics.Claim C is characterized by reasonable pluralism ifsome perfectly reasonable agents do, while others do

not, have good reasons for accepting C. For acontroversy to be characterized by reasonable pluralismit is not simply the case that people actuallydisagree about the merits of C, but that it is reasonablefor one person to assert C and another not-C. This isa far less radical claim than was examined in the lastsection: it is not argued that the question ‘C or not-C?’is inherently indeterminate but only that present beliefsabout C are inconclusi_ely justified. According to JohnRawls, our disputes about value seem subject toreasonable disagreement because our understandingof what is good and valuable is especially subject towhat he has called the ‘burdens of judgment.’ Accordingto Rawls, reasonable judgments so often areat odds because:(a) the evidence is often conflicting and difficult toevaluate;(b) (as in Kuhn’s example) even when we agree onthe relevant considerations, we often weigh themdifferently;(c) because our concepts are vague, we must rely oninterpretations that are often controversial;(d) the manner in which we evaluate evidence andrank considerations seems to some extent the functionof our total life experiences, which of course differ;(e) because different sides of an issue rely on

different types of normative considerations, it is oftenhard to assess their relative merits;(f ) in conflicts between values, there often seems tobe no uniquely correct answer (Rawls 1993, p. 57).Because these matters are so complex and uncertain,different people will reach different, competing, credible,or reasonable conclusions. In the face of complexity,our powers of reasoning do not produceconvergence.2. Conceptions of Public Reason2.1 Public Rationality and Public ReasonsImportant movements in social science, the philosophyof science, and moral and political philosophythus have combined to cast grave doubt on theEnlightenment’s confidence that the free exercise ofhuman reason leads us to agree. In the face of thesechallenges to the ideal of common human reason,theories of distinctly public reason have been advancedto show how people can share reasons (Korsgaard1996, Chap. 10). However, this idea is ambiguous. Itmay constitute a response to relativistic social science(Sect.1.2), which challenges the very idea of a sharedconception of human reason. Understood thus, theideal of public reason is an ideal of public rationality,or a shared conception of rationality. The challengeposed by reasonable pluralism (Sect. 1.4) is moremodest. Advocates of reasonable pluralism maintainthat even if we apply shared standards of reason, our

deliberations will not yield shared reasons for belief. Ina weaker sense, then, the ideal of public reason is anideal of public reasons, or how we can arrive at sharedreasons to believe and act. A theory of public reasonmay advance a theory of public rationality and_orpublic reasons.Three main conceptions of public reason stand out:(a) the epistemic, (b) the consensual, and (c) thepolitical. 2.2 Epistemic Theories of Public ReasonIn philosophy, ‘epistemology’ refers to the theory ofknowledge or, more broadly, the theory of justifiedbelief. Epistemic theories of public rationality, then,maintain that at least some common norms of reasoningcan be justified to everyone. The Enlightenmentview was that all valid norms of reasoning can bejustified to everyone—reason was inherently public.Epistemic theories of public rationality need not,however, advance such a sweeping claim. Importantly,an epistemic theory of public rationality may adopt amodest version of the ‘relativism of reasons’ (Sect.1.2), according to which in some cases person Alphamay have a fully justified norm of reasoning N whileBeta accepts a fully justified norm of reasoning M,where it is the case that N and M are inconsistent. Incases where onlyNandMare relevant to deliberation,a relativism of rationality will manifest itself; Alphamay have reasons based on N that Beta will deny onthe basis of M, and both will be justified. However, toestablish a thoroughgoing relativism of reasoning that

undermines the possibility of public reason, it is notenough to establish that this can sometimes occur; itmust be shown that no common norms of rationalitycan be justified to all—that it is always (or at leastusually) the case that for any justified norm ofreasoning held by Alpha, some person Beta will bejustified in accepting a competing norm. That is thesweeping relativistic claim rejected by epistemictheories of public rationality (Gaus 1996).Advocates of epistemic public rationality can replyto both the anthropological argument for the relativismof reasons, and psychological studies uncoveringthe diversity of norms employed in reasoning(Sect. 1.2). In reply to the anthropological argument,advocates of public reason can embrace Martin Hollis’view that an anthropologist must build up an interpretationof an alien language by locating a ‘bridgehead.’The assumption underlying the bridgeheadstrategy is that others generally perceive what weperceive and tend to say about it the sorts of things wewould say. Relying on these assumptions, the anthropologistbegins by translating everyday, basic perceptualsentences such as ‘Yes, this is a brown cow’and ‘No, it is not raining right now.’ Now, Hollisinsists, this bridgehead not only includes translationsof such basic beliefs, but basic logical rules, since ‘whata sentence means depends on how the beliefs whichthey express are connected, and that to justify a claim

to have identified a belief one must show the belief isconnected to others.’ Consequently, in the main, thelogic employed by those in different cultures musteither be very similar to our own or unintelligible.Axioms such as ‘p_p’‘_(p__p)’ and ‘(p_(p_q))_q’are more than simply our norms of reasoning. Theyare constituents of any system that we can identify asa way of reasoning (Hollis 1970a, pp. 214–15, 1970b,p. 232.) If ‘natives’ reason logically at all, then theyreason as we do. The point, then, is that the contextthat sets the stage for the possibility of relativism—thatwe confront others, different from us but of whom wecan make some sense—presupposes widespreadshared norms of inference as well as beliefs. Thus thevery possibility of mutual intelligibility sets a limit onthe extent to which we can understand others asemploying cognitive processes different from our own.In reply to psychological studies showing the diversityof norms employed by normal reasoners, advocatesof public reason can rely on evidence supportingthe hypothesis that people employ a mental logic—asystem of mental inference rules—in their actualreasoning. Indeed, most psychologists studying actualreasoning suppose some version of the mental logictheory. To be sure, mental logic may depart from thestandard propositional calculus. Psychologists studying

English reasoners, for instance, have found thatEnglish speakers do not interpret connectives in a wayconsistent with standard logic. Particularly troublingare interpretations of ‘if, then’ statements (as well as‘or’ connectives), which are not typically used in waysthat correspond to standard analyses in logic. Inresponse to these findings, psychologists such as LanceJ. Rips and Martin D. Braine have developed sets ofnatural inferential rules that correspond to the way inwhich speakers of English employ connectives. Ripshas gone beyond this to develop rules modeling causalreasoning as well.Mental logic views strongly incline toward thehypothesis that these logics are in some way natural orinnate, though to precisely what extent is open toinvestigation. There may well be a complicated interplaybetween language and logic, such that Englishspeakers tend to employ some inferential rules notutilized by others. A plausible hypothesis is that thecapacity to develop a mental logic is innate, though theprecise developmental path taken depends on a varietyof factors, including one’s native language. If so,however, this is sufficient to undermine the plausibilityof a radical relativism of norms of rationality. The set

of possible mental logics—laws governing thought—isapt to be pretty severely constrained.2.3 Consensus Theories of Public ReasonEpistemic accounts of public reason uphold our abilityto reason together because they insist that we do,indeed must, share basic rules of inference. In contrast,consensual accounts of public reason conceive it asarising out of a shared social life and_or shareddiscourse (see Shared Belief ). A number of otherwisediverse philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein,Ju_ rgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Susan Hurley, andPhilip Pettit all point to the idea that reasoning is asocial phenomenon. In order to be a deliberator, onemust be a member of a community in which one’sbeliefs and rules are intelligible to others. One comesto understand what is a justified or unjustified belief,and what is a good or a bad way of reasoning, bysharing the norms and standards of communities,including communities of inquirers. Thus some insistthat ‘ultimately, there is only one criterion by whichbeliefs can be judged valid, and that is that they arebased on agreement reached by argumentation’—weconverge on them (this is Habermas’s 1991, p. 14 glosson Rorty’s ‘particular version of discourse theory’).Habermas draws an intimate connection betweenmutual understanding (Versta_ndingung) and agreement(Ein_ersta_ ndnis). It would seem that to understand

others we must in some way arrive at intersubjectiveagreement about norms of rationality andgood reasons. Consequently, the phrase of ‘publicreason’ becomes almost redundant: something canonly be identified as reason because it is the object ofpublic, interpersonal, agreement.Wittgenstein and his contemporary followers suchas Hurley (1989) and Pettit (1993) suggest a broadlysimilar view. Reasoning itself presupposes a ‘community’—common rules of thought. Wittgenstein(1958) argued that one could not have a private rulethat one only followed once—for in such a case wecould not know whether the rule was actually followed.More generally, it has been argued that onecannot have a purely private rule, for one needs to beable to distinguish when one has correctly followed therule and when one has gotten it wrong. But, assertWittgensteinians, the difference between correct andincorrect application of a rule cannot be located inindividual belief systems, but only by the individualcomparing her application of the rule to those of herfellows: each must look to others to check and correcther rule-based performances. Since thinking is necessarilyrule driven, the analysis applies to reason itself.Thus it seems that the very idea of rule-following—and, so, of reasoning—supposes convergence withothers. If so, the search for reason is a search forconsensus.

In one respect this view, somewhat surprisinglyperhaps, returns to the basic idea of the Enlightenment—all reason is public reason. But whereas theEnlightenment was confident in asserting this becauseof the widespread faith in a universal, common, humanfaculty of reason that could accurately representreality, consensual theorists see reason as arising outof a shared public life. To put it crudely, rather thanreason producing consensus, consensus generates reason.Thus the publicness of such reason, unlike that ofthe Enlightenment’s, is consistent with a culturalrelativistic conception of rationality. The public, intersubjectiveagreement, reached by one culture—whichis constitutive of their very conception of rationality—may be very different from that upheld byanother.Because consensual accounts of public reason stressthe constitutive nature of public consensus to the veryidea of reason, and because public consensus may bepromoted by political institutions, more radical consensualtheorists such as D’Agostino give politicalinstitutions a constitutive role in determining whatreason is (1996, Chap. 9). This is a radical viewindeed—however, it is not entirely novel, perhapsgoing back as far as Hobbes. For Hobbes ([1651]1948), the conflict in the state of nature arises from

conflicting private judgments; people’s private reasoningyields conflicting judgments of right and wrong, aswell as matters of fact, and this leads to the lessintellectual conflict that characterizes the state ofnature. Hobbes’s solution is to appoint an ‘arbitrator.’This ‘judge,’ says Hobbes, provides ‘public reason’ towhich private reason ‘must submit.’ The arbitratorproclaims what each has reason to do, and so definesa single, coherent conception of reason. Because, inHobbes’ view, we have authorized the judge (i.e.,sovereign) to define public reason for us, the sovereign’spronouncements constitute a shared publicreason on which there is consensus.2.4 Public Reason qua Political ReasonD’Agostino’s radical view allows the political to shapethe rational. A more modest proposal with which thisradical view is easily confused maintains that thenotion of public reason is a purely political idea, in thesense that it concerns only how we reason togetherabout politics. This understanding of public reasonslies at the heart of what is commonly known as‘political liberalism.’Rawls’s political liberalism is a response to theproblem posed by reasonable pluralism (Sect. 1.4).For Rawls the crucial problem is that citizens indemocratic societies entertain a plurality of what hecalls reasonable ‘comprehensive doctrines’—overallphilosophies of life centered on religious, philosophical,or moral beliefs. This pluralism seems a permanent

feature of modern societies. ‘Political liberalism assumesthat, for political purposes, a plurality ofreasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrinesis the normal result of the exercise of human reasonwithin the framework of free institutions of a constitutionalregime’ (Rawls 1993, p. xvi). The reasonablepluralism of comprehensive views renders suchviews unacceptable as bases for the justification ofpolitical power. Rawls endorses the ‘liberal principleof legitimacy,’ i.e., that ‘our exercise of political poweris fully proper only when it is exercised in accordancewith a constitution the essentials of which all citizensas free and equal may be reasonably expected toendorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptableto their common human reason’ (p. 137). Thus,because there exists a reasonable plurality of comprehensivedoctrines, basing the justification of politicalpower on any of them violates the liberalprinciple of legitimacy. This leads Rawls to seek apolitical conception that ‘all affirm’ and that is ‘sharedby everyone.’ Such a conception would be supportedby the diverse reasonable comprehensive doctrinesthat characterize our democratic societies. It wouldgenerate public reasons that would fit into our manyreasonable, but irreconcilable, comprehensive views.Some version of the principle of political legitimacy

motivates the search for public reasons in contemporaryliberal political philosophy: if the exercise ofcoercive political power relies on nonpublic reasoning,it is oppressive and illegitimate in relation to thosewho do not share those reasons.Rawls’s core argument—and so his entire politicalliberalism—apparently depends on the contrast betweencomprehensive views and the shared, political,conception. Whereas comprehensive conceptions producediverse reasons that conflict, the political point ofview provides public reasons—reasons that all reasonablecomprehensive views can endorse.Habermas (1995) suggests that Rawls posits an ‘apriori’ distinction between the political and nonpoliticalspheres. At least at times Rawls seems tosuggest that the political point of view can be conceptuallydistinguished from moral, religious, andphilosophical matters; whereas the former identifies acommon point of view that can be affirmed by all,when human reason is applied to moral, religious, andphilosophical issues it leads to reasonable disagreement.It is difficult, however, to accept the claim thatsome single conception of the political is shared by allreasonable persons in modern democratic societies.Political theorists have often pointed to the ‘political’

as an ‘essentially contested’ concept—one that is opento divergent, reasonable, interpretations (Connolly1983, Chap. 1). If citizens of modern democraticsocieties disagree about the concept of the political, itcannot serve the function of identifying public reasonsthat overcome reasonable pluralism. Like the moraland philosophical, the nature of the political itselfseems a matter of reasonable disagreement.An alternative interpretation of Rawls’ view is totake the political conception as constructed out of thatwhich is shared. On this reading the nonpolitical is, bydefinition, those matters on which the free use ofreason by citizens in democratic societies leads todifferent, reasonable conclusions. It is, by its verynature, the realm of reasonable pluralism. In contrast,one might define the political as those matters onwhich reason converges in democratic societies, and sonecessarily generates constitutional principles thatsatisfy the principle of liberal legitimacy. The politicalis thus characterized as the overlapping consensus ofthose diverse comprehensive views characterizingmodern societies. The problem for this interpretationis that Rawls himself indicates that the free use ofhuman reason leads us to reasonable disagreementabout conceptions of justice and constitutional essentials.The ‘political’ qua ‘shared perspective’ is limited

to the abstract concept of a ‘liberal political order’(Rawls 1993, p. 241). ‘By this [Rawls says] I meanthree things: first, it specifies certain basic rights,liberties, and opportunities (of the kind familiar fromconstitutional democratic regimes); second, it assignsa special priority to these rights, liberties and opportunities,especially with respect to claims of the generalgood and of perfectionist values; and third, it affirmsmeasures assuring all citizens’ adequate all-purposemeans to make effective use of their basic liberties andopportunities’ (p. 223). Thus stated, the content ofpublic reason seems sparse indeed. Unfortunately, if amore detailed articulation of this idea is provided,Rawls indicates that the use of human reason againleads to disagreement. Apparently modern democraticsocieties agree on only the most abstract of public—political—reasons.3. Conclusion: Reasoning in a Plural SocietyPuzzles about the possibility of shared, public rationalityand reasons derive from a variety of sources:social science, the philosophy of science, and the moralpluralism of modern societies. Although developmentsin all these fields serve to cast doubt on the Enlightenment’sideal of a common universal reason, they posedifferent challenges. The findings of anthropology callinto question universal norms of rationality; psychology

questions whether so-called universalnorms are actually employed in human reasoning.Kuhnian philosophy of science suggests an irremediableindeterminancy of the application of our generalstandards, even in science itself. Worries about reasonablepluralism focus on the possibility of shared moraland political norms in societies that disagree deeply onquestions of value and the nature of the good life.Just as the challenges arise from multiple sources, sodo theories of public reason. Epistemic theories disputethat modern social science casts serious doubt on thenecessity of shared norms of rationality in the interpretationof other cultures and in individual deliberation.Although some divergence in justifiednorms of reasoning no doubt occurs—and can bemade sense of—radical divergence is implausible.Consensus theories of public reason maintain that tomake sense to each other we must think alike—wemust employ common rules of thought. The applicationof such common rules, say neo-Wittgensteinians,only makes sense in the context of sharedsocial practices. Reason arises out of shared social life;reason is inherently public because it is necessarily aproduct of social consensus. Finally, political liberalismseeks to establish that, amid the diversity of

moral and philosophical views that characterize modernsocieties, a common political point of view cangenerate shared public reasons to regulate coercion.The ideal of public reason, then, is as diverse as thesources of our doubts about the possibility of sharedways of reasoning in contemporary societies. In all itsmanifestations, however, the ideal of public reasonseeks to maintain the heritage of the Enlightenment—the free use of human reason will lead us toconverge on the best justified beliefs.See also: Bioethics: Examples from the Life Sciences;Economics and Ethics; Ethics and Values; Prisoner’sDilemma, One-shot and Iterated; Utilitarian SocialThought, History of; Utilitarianism: ContemporaryApplications; Welfare

G. F. Gaus

Public Sphere and the MediaTo analyze the media from the perspective of thepublic sphere is to focus upon the media’s relationshipwith democracy. The concept of the public sphere hasbeen used to describe both the historical developmentof modern, post-Enlightenment forms of representativedemocracy and the role of the media and publicopinion within them, and has also served as a normativeconcept with which to pass judgement on the

current performance of the media from the perspectiveof the creation and maintenance of democracy.In recent years, the public sphere perspective hasbecome dominant in thinking about the media andtheir political role, by providing, in a return to thecentral questions of enlightenment political thought, abridge between Marxist theories of ideology and theliberal ‘free press’ tradition. It provides a critique ofMarxist theories of ideology by revalidating thespecificity of the political, by giving due weight to theemancipatory potential of liberal bourgeois conceptsof free assembly and debate, and by shifting attentionfrom worker to citizen. On the other hand, it providesa critique of an abstract, property-based ‘free press’model by stressing both the systemic social barriers toentry and the manipulative distortions to which itsdiscourse is subject.This return has focused on concepts of the publicsphere, civil society, citizenship, and identity. It has inparticular pitted those, such as Habermas, who see theemancipatory project of the enlightenment as unfinishedbusiness and wish, in a movement of immanentcritique, to hold liberalism to its emancipatory ideals,against a range of communitarians and postmoderns.The latter, in the name of various versions of identity

politics, see liberal, rights-based political theories asinherently repressive and their emancipatory anduniversalizing tendencies as bogus (Gray 1995).The public sphere approach has provided, againstthe background of the turn away from Marxismassociated with the collapse of ‘actual existing socialism,’an alternative to theories of dominant ideologyor hegemony as an explanation for the coincidence,within what used to be called ‘bourgeois democracies,’of growing social inequality and political apathy onthe one hand with the relative stability and increasinglyconsensual, nonideological nature of representativeparty politics on the other. Its emphasis on discursivepractices and on communicative action as central todemocratic practice and legitimization fitted well withthe wider ‘linguistic turn’ in the human and socialsciences. At the same time, its use of the spatialmetaphor of sphere, and its stress on the necessaryinstitutional foundations for the realization of thosecitizen rights to free expression and debate central todemocratic theory, addressed the questions arisingfrom both the perceived empirical reality in the maturedemocracies of an increasingly media-saturated,image-driven, public relations-oriented politics andthe task of constructing democracy in both state andcivil society in newly democratized countries with littleor no historical traditions of democracy to call upon.The concept of the public sphere was introduced

into media analysis by Jurgen Habermas (1989) in TheStructural Transformation of the Public Sphere. InHabermas’s original formulation, the term wasdesigned to describe a historical process whereby inthe shift from premodern feudal, absolutist rule toforms of modern representative democracy publicopinion, based upon publicly available informationand debate, developed as both a check on, and as asource for the legitimacy of, government.The public sphere was both a set of institutionalspaces—newspapers, lecture halls, coffee houses,etc.—and a set of discursive rules. Drawing upon aKantian heritage that links freedom to a personalautonomy grounded in the exercise of public reason,Habermas and his followers have stressed the role ofthe public sphere as a site within which the formationof public opinion, and the political will stemming fromand legitimized by such opinion, is subject to thedisciplines of a discourse, or communicative ethics, bywhich all views are subjected to the critical reasoningof others. At the same time, a democratically legitimatepublic sphere requires that access to it is open to bothall citizens and all views equally, provided only that allparticipants are governed by the search for generalagreement. This general model is then applied as anormative test against which the performance ofcontemporary media, in terms of political effects and

democratic potential, can be judged in terms of eitherthe critical rationality of their discourse or in terms ofthe range of views or speakers granted access.The public sphere is added as a fourth sphere toHegel’s tripartite division of society into family, civilsociety, and state. The public sphere is distinguishedfrom the family, the sphere of intimate privacy,although it is the creation of this sphere, particularlyunder the influence of the literary public sphere thatcreates both the norms of noncoercive, literate, interpersonaldiscussion and the associated subjectivitiesthat form the foundation of the public sphere. Thepublic sphere is distinguished from civil society, andespecially the market, where, following Hegel, citizenspursue their private interests, since although theprivate economy provided the resources for the publicsphere, and citizens participated in the public sphere asprivate persons (i.e., access was not governed bysocially conferred status or the possession of publicoffice), the purpose of debate within the public spherewas common agreement on matters of general interest.On the other hand, it is distinguished from the statesince it was there that citizens held the state to accountand guided its actions.Habermas then argued, following in part the generalFrankfurt School argument of the Dialectic of Enlightenment,

that there was a pervasive crisis ofdemocratic legitimacy in the modern world becausepublic spheres had been squeezed almost out ofexistence by both market and state. On the one hand,the market had increasingly come to dominate theinstitutions and practices of public communicationthrough the commodification of information andopinion for sale on a mass consumer market andthrough the associated manipulative use of advertising.On the other hand, the state, ironically inresponse to political pressures from below, had becomeincreasingly both economically interventionistand manipulative of public opinion. The result was apublic opinion and related politics increasingly dominatedby advertising and public relations, whatHabermas termed the refeudalization of the publicsphere—a shift back from a politics of rational,participatory debate to a politics of display.The public sphere approach has been criticized onthree main grounds. First that its procedural rules aretoo rationalist—that the persuasive use of rhetoric cannever, and indeed should never, be excluded frompolitical communication—and that to impose suchdiscursive norms in practice excludes from the publicsphere as illegitimate not just a range of culturallyspecific discursive forms but those who do not possessthe cultural capital required to mobilize those discursiveforms. Here we find the criticism that the

model of procedural rationality being deployed is infact a model of a certain intellectual practice and thusexcludes, in a movement of symbolic violence, thosewho are not members of the social group who are thecarriers of that practice, whether conceived as intellectualsor as the white male bourgeoisie, and that itleads to a privileging of certain genres of media. Theserationalist assumptions may take news and overtpolitical coverage to be ‘serious’ while takingentertainment-oriented programs to be a sign of‘dumbing down’ or ‘refeudalization.’ This neglects therole that entertainment plays in the formation ofpublics and as a site for the development of anunderstanding of issues of public importance.Second, the public sphere model of proceduralrationality is criticized for drawing the distinctionbetween public and private in such a way as to excludeboth key groups of citizens, e.g., women, or keymatters of potential public political concern, e.g., theregulation of domestic, intrafamilial, or sexualrelations. It is in this sense that the famous slogan ‘thepersonal is political’ mounts a challenge to the way inwhich public sphere theory has drawn the distinctionbetween the private and public spheres. And this inturn will affect the ways in which we think about theethical issues relating to invasions of ‘privacy’ by the

media and to what is or is not an appropriate matterfor public discussion in the media.Third, it is criticized on the grounds that it hasvalued general agreement around a set of universalvalues or norms, however rationally discursivelyarrived at, which, its critics argue, derive in turn froma liberal model of proceduralism, abstract individualrights, and ethical neutrality which prioritizes the justover the good and thus denies difference and thus theinevitability of perpetual normative conflict withinmodern societies. This in its turn, so critics argue, leadsto an overcentralized model of the public sphereincompatible with the politics of identity in multiculturalsocieties, whereas what is needed is adecentralized model of multiple public spheres expressiveof each distinct collective identity, culture orform of life.This debate concerning the proper relationshipbetween social communication and politics can betraced back to the Enlightenment and the basicparadox that modernity posed; the paradox of whatKant called the ‘unsocial sociability’ of human beings.We might think of this as the inherent tension betweenliberty and fraternity. In essence, modern democracyis about how we handle the relationship betweenindividual freedom and moral agency on the one hand

and the necessary and unavoidable social norms andstructures within which alone such freedom can beexercised on the other. As Rousseau put it in TheSocial Contract, ‘the problem is to find a form ofassociation … in which each, while uniting himselfwith all, may still obey himself alone, and remain asfree as before.’The political problem to which the public spheretradition of analysis addresses itself is then two-sidedand much of the problems with current uses of theterm public sphere, and criticisms of it, derive from aconfusion about which of the two sides of the dilemmaare being addressed.Here we are brought back to the Hegelian concernfor Sittlichkeit and to critiques of Habermas’s publicsphere approach from a communitarian and neo-Aristotelian perspective. Here the debate over thepublic sphere has to be seen as part of the wider debatebetween advocates and defenders of the theory andpractice of rights-based liberalism and the variousproponents of communitarianism and identity politics(Benhabib 1992, Guttman 1994).The communitarian critique leads to the oppositesolution to that of social contract theory and theliberalism based upon it. Now political values aresocial before they are individual. Politics is embeddedin, and ideally expresses, a set of pre-existing socialvalues, or a way of life, and the role and legitimacy ofthe state, or the public realm, is then to foster and

uphold those communal values and defend that way oflife. The citizens find their identity in, and give theirloyalty to, not a set of abstract rights, but to a way oflife, an ethos, that embodies a set of moral values.From this perspective liberalism, and the particularforms of democracy that it supports, is but one way oflife among many possible alternatives. From thisperspective, the role of the media is then to foster anddefend this shared way of life, sometimes described, inthe nationalist model of communitarianism, asnational identity or culture, rather than to serve as avalue neutral space for the critical rational debate overvalues.The communitarian position on the public_privatedivide, and the approaches to both politics and themedia that stem from it, is in a sense contradictory.The core of identity politics is the call for therecognition in the public realm of values hithertodeemed private, both in the sense of being excludedfrom the public gaze and from public debate, but alsoin the sense of stemming from private group interestsand identities rather than from a generally sharedinterest and identity, and thus for the acquisition ofrights that recognition of these values as public entails,while at the same time drawing for its evaluativearguments upon a range of sources which must exclude

the very concept of the public, and its liberal valuationof rights and the recognition and equal treatmentof the diversity of private interests, that they aredemanding.Following Benhabib, we can distinguish betweenthe integrationist and participatory versions of communitarianism.The integrationist strand seeksSittlichkeit in an attempted return to the moralcertainties and social unities of traditional societies.Here everything is in a sense public; the values thatmotivate people and give them their social anchorageare derived from and shape a whole shared way of life.In a theocracy there is no room for the individual orthe private. Indeed, this strand in communitarianismcriticizes the liberal tradition precisely for creating,and philosophically justifying as the highest good,social arrangements that separate political or publicspheres of action and value on the one hand fromprivate spheres of action and value on the other, to theimpoverishment, in their view, of both (Macintyre1998).Onthe other hand, the participationist strand wishesto build its way out of the alienation and formalism ofliberalism by both accepting the conditions of modernitywhich are liberalism’s starting point—namelyposttraditional societies and reflexive individuals—while at the same time arguing for a refounding ofpolitical communities on the universalization of thediscourse ethic and its practices. The more postmodern

end of communitarianism, which links to so-callednew social movements and the politics of identity,makes this attempt by, in effect, advocating thefragmentation of societies into small-scale or specializedcommunities of interest or identity, each with itsown public sphere. They tend to see more universalisticand unified definitions of the public sphere as repressiveof difference and thus antidemocratic. What isat issue here is both whether within a polity we shouldbe looking at one or multiple public spheres and howwe think of the relation between public and private.An integrationist communitarianism and the politicsof recognition that stems from it demand a unified publicsphere and place continuous pressure on the existenceof a meaningful private sphere. Its aim is a oneto-one fit between a unitary set of values, a singlepublic sphere (if this term any longer has meaninghere) and a single polity. If diverse communities existwithin a single territory or polity, the aim becomesone of political and cultural fragmentation, not coexistenceand the toleration of diversity. It isclearly incompatible with the exercise of publicreason in the Kantian sense and with media practicesand institutional forms in harmony with such anideal.The case of participatory communitarianism and

the identity politics that stems from it is more complex.Here the problem arises from the ambivalence of theliberal value of tolerance vis-a_ -vis the public_privatedivide. On the one hand toleration can be taken tomean the acceptance by public authorities of a rangeof practices and beliefs by defining them as private andoutside the realm of public regulation, e.g., religiousobservance. Such toleration rests, as the communitariancritics rightly point out, on a prior judgementthat the practice or belief in question is not in anysense a threat to the public weal or interest. This formof toleration can be rejected by certain advocates ofthe politics of recognition because, it is argued, itimplicitly downgrades, and thus in some sense failsto recognize fully, the importance or centrality of thepractice or beliefs in question. On the other hand, wecan also understand toleration as giving public recognitionto and bringing into the public realm people,practices, or beliefs to which by so doing we signal thatwe give equal value to those already so recognized andwith which we are prepared to live and argue within ashared culture and polity. Thus we need to distinguish

between two kinds of demands for recognition and formultiple public spheres. One set of demands seeks toextend the private, so that their group identities remainunthreatened by the risk of corrosion that participationin the critical discourse and compromise ofthe public sphere carries.The second set demands a widening of the definitionof what is public to let them into what remains acommon arena for critical public debate and decisionmaking with the acceptance of the duties and risks thatsuch entry carries with it. In the former case, what isbeing demanded in the name of difference is thedissolution of any shared culture, polity, and set ofrights and associated obligations. Here the question ishow much of such private fragmentation can anysociety or polity sustain while remaining viable, andwhether in fact we will only regard such demands asdemocratically legitimate where the group identityclaimed is itself subject to the disciplines of thediscourse ethic. In the latter case, the liberal polity isbeing asked, rightly, to live up to its ideals and toaccept that those values that it considers central to itsway of life must always be held provisionally and besubject to the review of critical discourse. Here weneed to distinguish between a truly private realm, theirreducible site of individual autonomy, and themultiple public spheres within which we necessarily

live and have our being, defined by Benhabib as anyoccasion or situation where people share views onmatters of common interest, multiple public spheresthat all contribute to the formation of our identitiesand which may be more or less democratic in the senseof meeting the requirements of the discourse ethic. Themedia, ranging from the small-scale, special-interestmedia of magazines, newsletters, Internet bulletinboards up to the space for public debate and exposureof views offered by the mainstream mass media, areintegral to these multiple public spheres and should bejudged in each case on the basis of the identities andpractices that they foster. However, these multiplepublic spheres then need to be distinguished from thepolitical public sphere where discussion is necessarilyaimed at the common agreement necessary for concertedaction within a unified polity. Research anddebate within and around the public sphere perspectivenow focuses on three issues. The first is theinstitutional question of the relationship betweenthe political public sphere and the nation-state. Boththe actual institutional development of the modernmass media, the public sphere, and representativedemocracy, and thinking about them, have takenplace within a nation-state framework. It is arguedthat current globalizing trends, both within society atlarge and within the media, are undermining this

nation-state foundation of both democratic politicsand its associated political public sphere. The questionthen is whether this is a process of cultural anddiscursive emancipation and the beginnings of theconstruction of a global public sphere or, on thecontrary, is a further tightening of the screw ofrefeudalization which places the key centers of poweroutside the structures of democratic accountabilityand rational critical debate. On the one hand, thetrends towards globalization within the media can beexaggerated. For reasons of audience taste and interest,most media output, and the organizations thatprovide it, remain obstinately linked to local, oftennational, markets, cultures, languages, and politicalstructures. There are few examples of successfultransnational newspapers or broadcasting news services.Even in the field of entertainment their spread islimited. This is itself, as the example of the EuropeanUnion shows, a major barrier to the construction of atransnational public sphere. On the other hand, it canbe argued that current developments on the WorldWide Web, particularly its use for mobilization,debate, and advocacy by NGOs, are a welcome start inthe construction of a global public sphere. Thequestion here is how representative and how publicthese new Net-based interest groups and associateddebates are. What certainly is the case is that thedevelopment of global media has begun to createa situation where nation-states, both within their

own borders and in their inter-State relations, arehaving increasingly to take account of global publicopinion (e.g., the cases of Tienanmen Square or theBalkans).Second is the discursive question of how we canboth analyze and normatively judge from the perspectiveof democracy the wide range of rhetoricalforms used and identities appealed to within the rangeof modern media. Here the debate around the publicsphere reprises an older debate about mass culture.The question at issue is whether current developmentsin media forms, genres, and their associated audiences_publics is a liberatory process of demassificationand cultural pluralism on a global scale or, on thecontrary, whether it is a process of ‘dumbing down’which, in its appeals to irrationality and social fragmentation,undermines the rational_universalisticnorms upon which citizenship, and thus democracy,rest. In the press, attention is focused on tabloidization,i.e., the stress on the scandalous and thesensational and the coverage of politics according tothe norms of show business; in broadcasting on theshift in the balance of the programming mix in favor ofentertainment at the expense of news, current affairs,and political coverage and debate, a shift associated,at least in Europe, with the retreat of public servicebroadcasting in the face of increasingly intense commercial

competition for audiences and revenues.Analysis and debate have focused in particular on thespread of audience participation shows of the JerrySpringer type, of ‘docu-soaps’ and of a general soundbitecoverage of politics and public issues. In thisdebate there are no easy answers. First, empirically thetrends are by no means as clear cut as many criticsclaim. It is as easy to argue for a rise in standards.Second, it is all too easy to fall into familiar elitist orpopulist stances, neither of which take due account ofthe complexity, both actual and historical, of theconstruction of the identity of citizens or of therhetorical problems of communicating with the generalityof such citizens. There is also often a danger ofstretching beyond breaking point the proper andnecessary boundaries of politics and the publicsphere.Third, there is the question of the role of themediators. Public sphere theory finds it difficult tobreak free from a participatory model of directdemocracy. Representation always introduces a potentiallydistorting element into the communicationprocess between the private citizen and political whole.The public sphere is conceived as a structure for theaggregation of the opinions of individual privatecitizens through a public debate to which all haveequal access. The ideal model is the Athenian agora.The scale, social complexity, and specialization of themodern world make such a model unrealistic. It has

clearly never fitted the actual forms and practices ofthe mass media. It therefore leads to unrealisticdemands being made upon them and to an excessivelydismissive critique when these demands are not met. Ithas in particular led to exaggerated claims being madefor the democratic potential of the Internet on thegrounds precisely that cyberspace is a new agorawithout mediators or mediation. The challenge, therefore,is to think of a legitimate role for mediatorswithin the public sphere—for journalists, TV producers,bulletin board moderators, etc.—which isneither one of pure transparent ‘objective’ mediationnor one of the mere pursuit of instrumental professional or economic self-interest. This in its turnlinks to the wider question of the social and politicalrole of intellectuals and experts within modern democraticpolities.See also: Critical Theory: Contemporary; CriticalTheory: Frankfurt School; Legal Issues: Public Opinion;Mass Communication: Normative Frameworks;Mass Media: Introduction and Schools of Thought;Mass Media, Political Economy of; Mass Society:History of the Concept; Public Opinion: MicrosociologicalAspects; Public Opinion: Political Aspects

N. Garnham

Public Sphere: Eighteenth-century HistoryAny reflection trying to understand how the notion ofpublic sphere was constructed in the eighteenth centuryis necessarily referred to the classical bookpublished by Jürgen Habermas in 1962 (Habermas1962). According to Habermas, the ‘political publicsphere’ was construed in the eighteenth century (insome places sooner, in others later) as a space fordiscussion and exchange removed from the control ofthe state. The new ‘public sphere in the politicalrealm,’ founded on the exercise of public criticism wasthus opposed to the ‘sphere of public authority’identified with the exercise of state power. ForHabermas, this new intellectual and political ‘space’was distinct from the court, which belonged within thedomain of state power, and from the commonopinions of the people who had no access to enlightenedcritical debates. This is why it is possible for himto qualify it as ‘bourgeois.’1. Definitions of the PublicThere were different ways of conceiving the constructionof the new political public sphere of theeighteenth century. Was it issued from the literarycontroversies of the seventeenth century and renderedpossible by the diffusion of new forms of intellectualsociability? Or was it the extension of the modalities of

print communication proper to the Republic of Lettersto a greater number of individuals which madepossible the transformation of dispersed private personsinto a unified public community?1.1 Habermas’s Political Public SphereFor Habermas such a ‘public’ supposed, on the onehand, that the various participants were not acting asagents or subjects of the ruler and, on the other hand,that they were considered as equal. The political publicsphere thus ignored both the obedience required bythe exercise of state power and the distinctions of‘orders’ and ‘estates’ imposed by the traditional socialhierarchies.No limit could subject the critical exercise of reason,and no domain was to be forbidden to it. Overcomingthe division instituted by the cartesian methodicaldoubt between opinions which could legitimately besubmitted to examination and obligatory credencesand obediences, the members of the new public sphereconsidered that no domain of thought, including thepolitical and religious ones, was to be removed fromcritical and reasonable judgement.This judgment was exercised within the differentforms of sociability which had been previously erectedas a tribunal of aesthetic criticism: the salons, thecafe_s, the clubs. In the seventeenth century, this newpublic challenged the traditional monopoly of the

court, the official academies, or the connoisseurs insuch matters. It was enlarged during the eighteenthcentury thanks to the multiplication and diffusion ofthe periodicals, and the success of new forms ofassociation: the book clubs, the reading societies, themasonic lodges. But it supposed also the exclusion ofall those who lacked the competence which madepossible the participation into a critical communitywelcoming only the persons who had sufficient wealthand culture.1.2 Kant’s Public Use of ReasonHabermas’s perspective was based on one of the mostfamous text of the eighteenth century, Kant’s What IsEnlightenment? published as an article in the periodicalBerlinische Monatsschrift in 1784. But it also distortedit. In his text Kant proposed a new way of conceptualizingthe relation of the public to the private. Heequated the public exercise of reason with judgmentproduced and communicated by private individualsacting ‘as scholars before the reading public’ and hedefined the public as the sphere of the universal inopposition to the private considered as the domain ofparticular and domestic interests (which may even bethose of an army, a church, or a state).He inverted, thus, the accepted meanings of the twoterms by associating the private use of reason with the

exercise of an office or with the duties toward the stateand by locating the public use of reason within acommunity without limitations or boundaries. If theprivate use of reason can be restrained legitimately inthe name of public ends without prejudice to theprogress of enlightenment, the liberty of the public useof the reason was absolute and has to be respected bythe prince himself.In this same text, Kant shifted the way in which thelegitimate limits put on critical judgment should beconceived. Such limits were no longer defined bydomains forbidden to methodical doubt; they laid inthe position of the subject who exercises his reason. Hecould be constrained legitimately when he was executingthe duties of his charge or of his status, but he wasnecessarily free when he acted as a member of the‘society of world citizens.’That universal society was unified by the circulationof written works that authorized the communicationand discussion of thoughts without the necessity ofphysical presence of the different interlocutors. Kantsystematically associated the public use of reason withthe production or reading of written matter by privateindividuals. The public was not construed on the basisof new forms of intellectual sociability such as clubs,cafe_s, literary societies, or lodges, because thoseassociations were modalities of particular, circumscribed,

and domestic entities. For him, only writtencommunication was admissible as a figure for theuniversal.Kant’s conception of the public use of reason wasdrawn for the notion of the Republic of Letters as itwas constructed through correspondence and thecirculation of manuscript or printed texts from the lateseventeenth century onwards (see Goldgar 1995).Founded on the free engagement of its members, onequality among its interlocutors, and on reciprocityand disinterestedness, the Republic of Letters whichunited the learned and the scholars provided a modeland a support for thinking of the new public sphere.At the same time, it showed the distance separating theuniversality of the ‘society of world citizens’ and therestricted social composition of the ‘reading public.’ InKant’s time, this reading public was not the whole ofsociety by any means, and those capable of writingwere even less numerous. It is only when everyone willbe able to exercise critically one’s reason that humanitywill experience ‘an enlightened age.’1.3 The French Philosophers: Public Opinion _s.Popular OpinionsKant held the distinction between the public and thepeople to be temporary, transitory, and characteristicof a century which was a ‘age of enlightenment’ butnot yet an ‘enlightened age.’ But for many thinkers of

the eighteenth century, particularly within the frameworkof the French Enlightenment, the two notionsconstituted an irreconcilable dichotomy (see Ozouf1989, pp. 21–35). Public opinion was defined preciselyin contrast to the opinions of the multitude. Publicopinion, set up as a sovereign authority and a finalarbiter, was necessarily stable, unified, and foundedon reason. The universality of its judgments and theconstraining self-evidence of its decrees derived fromthat unvarying and dispassionate constancy. On theother hand, popular opinions were multiple, versatile,and inhabited by prejudice and passion. Such aqualification reveals a strong persistence of olderrepresentations of the people considered as subject toextremes, inconstant, and foolish.When the concept of public opinion did emerge inFrance around 1750 as the superior authority to whichall particular opinions must bow, the distinctionbetween the public and the popular became essential.A new political culture thus took shape which transferredthe seat of authority from the will of the kingalone, who decided without appeal and in secret, to thejudgment of an abstract entity embodied in noinstitution, which debated publicly and was moresovereign than the sovereign who was obliged to seekto win its approval and support.This gave acuity and urgency to a fundamental

question: how could the people, eliminated from theexercise of critical judgment by their lack of competence,be ‘represented’ in the new political space?A first answer to this question assigned this functionto one or another of the theories of political representationconfronted after the mid-eighteenth century.Following Keith Baker, three of the theories werefundamental: the absolutist theory, which made theperson of the king the only possible representative of akingdom divided into orders, estates, and bodies; thejudiciary theory which instituted the Parliaments asinterpreters of the consent or remonstrances of thenation; and the administrative theory, which attributedthe rational representation of social intereststo muncipal or provincial assemblies founded not onprivilege but on property (see Baker 1990).An alternative model of representation that removedthe notion institutional setting—monarchical,parliamentary, or administrative—was offered by thecategory of public opinion. Substituting the self-evidence of unanimity to the uncertainties of particularand popular opinions, detached from any form ofexercise of governmental and state authority, theconcept delegated the representation of the wholenation to those who were able to express its reasonabledecrees: the men of letters.2. Public Opinion: Voice or Tribunal?

Although everyone recognized the existence of publicopinion and postulated its unity, there was no unanimousconsent on two issues: first, who were its truespokesmen and, second, how was one to evaluate theself-evidence of its judgments? In eighteenth-centuryFrance, the answers to such questions were expressedthrough the metaphors used to designate this newentity: public opinion as a voice to be heard; publicopinion as a tribunal which had to be persuaded.2.1 From Theater to TribunalIn 1775, in his discours de re_ception before theAcade_mie franc_aise, Malesherbes forcefully expressesthe idea, by then commonly accepted, that publicopinion was to be considered a court of justice moreimperious than any other. It is a tribunal ‘independentof all powers and that all powers respect,’ composedby the men of letters who are ‘amid the publicdispersed, what the orators of Rome and Athens werein the middle of the public assembled.’There are several arguments contained in thiscomparison. First, it invested the new ‘judges’ with anauthority that ordinary judges did not have. Theircompetence knew no bounds and their jurisdiction nolimits; their freedom of judgment was guaranteedbecause they were in no way dependent upon thepower of the ruler; their decrees had the force of selfevident

propositions. With such a definition of publicopinion, the men of letters were invested with thejudiciary legitimacy of all traditional powers and withveritable public office.Reference to this dispersed judiciary function hadanother meaning, however. It aimed at establishing aconnection between the universality of judgments andthe dispersal of persons, and at constructing a uniformopinion which, unlike that of the ancients, had nophysical location in which it could construe andexperience its unity. As for Kant later, it was thecirculation of written matter and particularly theprinted one which made it possible to envisage theconstitution of a unified public in a nation in whichpeople were necessarily separated from each other andformed their ideas individually. By associating thepublic nature of the written word, vastly increased bythe invention of the printing press, with the supremeauthority of the judgments pronounced in the newpolitical sphere, Malesherbes (as many others) convertedthe plurality of reflections and criticisms thatemerged from solitary reading into a collective andanonymous conceptual entity.From the seventeenth century to the eighteenthcentury there had been a radical shift in the manner ofconceiving the public. In the age of baroque politicsthe traits that defined the public were the same as those

which characterized theatrical audiences: heterogeneous,hierarchized, and formed into a public only by thespectacle in which the most powerful effects wereproduced by hidden machines and secret maneuvers.When the concept of public opinion did emerge, iteffected a dual rupture. It opposed the art of dissimulationand secrecy by appealing to transparency.Before the tribunal of opinion all causes were to beargued without duplicity. But all citizens were not (ornot yet) adept at joining together to form enlightenedopinion. If the audience which mingled in the theaterspotentially was composed of men and women from allsocial levels, the public which served as the tribunal tojudge literary merits, religious matters, or politicalissues was more selected and homogeneous. Whenopinion was thought of more as actor than as actedupon, it became public, and by that token it excludedmany people who lacked the competence to establishthe decrees which it proclaimed.2.2 From Audience to PublicConstituting the public as an entity the decrees ofwhich had more force than those of the establishedauthorities supposed several operations. They can beexemplified by the memoirs published in great numberby both French lawyers and litigants from 1770

onward. They took the judicial comparison literallyand exposed before opinion affairs which were examinedby a court of justice. The cases subjected to thesecret procedures of justice were thus transformed intopublic debates, shifting the place in which judgmenthad to be pronounced (see Maza 1993).The most fundamental strategy required by such anoperation consisted in endowing particular cause withgeneral and exemplary value. The debt that a courtnoble refused to pay to his bourgeois creditors becamean ideal occasion for denouncing unjust privilege, justas the arbitrary imprisonment of a young gentlemanwas an opportunity to criticize the lettre de cachet. Toachieve such goals supposed, first, that the secrecy ofjudicial procedure had to be broken by the circulationof printed memoirs on the largest possible scale, and,second, that a dramatic style or a first-person narrativehad to replace the customary legal prose. Universalizingthe particular, making public what had been secret,and ‘fictionalizing’ discourse were the techniques thatlawyers used to appeal to opinion and, in doing so, toproclaim themselves the authorized and legitimateinterpreters of that opinion.The traditional, discrete, and exclusive relationship

that bound individuals to the king, the guarantor andguardian of domestic secrets, gave way to a totallydifferent situation in the public exposition of privateconflicts. From that point of view, judicial memoirsare the exact inverse of the lettres de cachet accordedby the sovereign in response to requests from familiesinterested in concealing familial disorders which sulliedtheir honor. The memoirs displayed what thelettres concealed; they expected from the judgment ofopinion what the lettres hoped to gain from theomnipotence of the monarch; they converted intopublic issues the scandals that the lettres were chargedwith burying.It is in this sense that the new public space was builton conflicts proper to the private sphere, assigningpolitical significance to simple familial or conjugalstrife. In a parallel manner, the clandestine pamphletsstigmatized the aristocracy, the courtiers, the queen,and finally the king by revealing their corrupt mores.People became accustomed to seeing individual affairstransformed into general causes. This procedure wasnot restricted to pamphlet literature but also laybehind the lawsuits instituted by rural communitiesagainst theirs landlords or by journeymen workersagainst their masters. It was the process of ‘privatization’

in which individuals conquered autonomy andfreedom removed from state authority which permittedthe very existence of a new public sphere.Even if, or because, it was defined as a conceptualentity, and not in sociological terms, the notion ofpublic opinion which invaded the discourse of allsegments of society—political, administrative, judicial—in the second half of the eighteenth centuryoperated as a powerful instrument for social divisionand legitimization. The mobilization of the categoryfounded the authority of all who, by affirming thatthey recognized its decrees alone, set themselves up asmandated to pronounce its judgments. Universal in itsphilosophical essence, the unified, enlightened, andsovereign public was far from universal in its socialcomposition. The public sphere, emancipated fromthe domain in which the ruler held sway, thus hadnothing in common with the shifting opinions andblind emotions of the multitude. Between the peopleand the public there was a fundamental difference.3. Prohibited Books, Sub_ersi_e WordsAccording to Darnton, this new public was detachedfrom the traditional authorities by a wider and widerdissemination of philosophical ideas. In this processthe role played by the great classics of the Enlightenmentwas perhaps less important than the texts thatthe eighteenth-century book trade called ‘philosophicalbooks’: critical pamphlets, scandalmongeringchronicles, anticlerical satires, pornographic works.The circulation of this clandestine and seditiousliterature, which depicted the despotic corruption of

the monarchy or the depraved mores of the court,engendered a change in thought and in collectiverepresentations, henceforth detached the subjects fromtheir old loyalties: ‘Sedition was hatching. It wasinstilled in people’s minds […] We know for certainthat it was communicated by a formidable instrument:the book’ (see Darnton 1991, 1995).But other historians like Farge have challenged thisinterpretation which sees the increase in seditiouswritings in the last two or three decades of the ancienre_gime as the matrix of a desacralization of themonarchy. She affirms: ‘Popular opinion did notemerge from the cumulative reading of pamphlets andplacards; it was not unilinear and did not basearguments on the sum of what is read’ (see Farge 1994,p. 35).Statements of disapproval or hatred of the sovereign,attacks on his acts, and expressions of a desireto kill him did not arise from the flourishing clandestineliterature. Nor did they start with Damiens’sattempt to assassinate Louis XV, which, rather thanunleashing a proliferation of regicide discourse, persuadedthe authorities of the reality of Jansenist andJesuit plots and set them in pursuit of such literature.For Farge, ‘the failed murder of Louis XV had aready-made public opinion; it tells us more about the

monarchy’s reactions than about any new and originalturn of popular thought’ (p. 174).The symbolic and affective disinvestment whichtransformed relations with authority when it wasdeprived of all transcendence was manifested but notcaused by the wide diffusion of ‘philosophical books.’The erosion of founding myths of the monarchy, thedesacralization of royal symbols, and the distancing ofthe person of the king formed a body of representationswhich was ‘already there,’ ‘ready-made’ whenthe public sphere arose conceptually and sociologically.4. Women and the Public SphereWhat was the role played by women in this new publicsphere? Joan Landes’ thesis opposes radically the‘symbolic politics of the emerging bourgeois publicsphere (which) was framed from the outset by masculinistinterests and assumptions’ with the forms ofsociability dominated by women in the ancien re_gime,for example, the salon society conceived as ‘analternative sphere of cultural production inside absolutism’(Landes 1988, p. 40). This is the reason whythe exclusion of women from political rights duringthe French Revolution is inscribed by Landes withinthe logics of the enlightened condemnation of the rolethat women played within the absolutist public sphere:

‘the structures of modern republican politics can beconstrued as part of an elaborate defense againstwomen’s power and public presence’ (p. 203).Against such a perspective Goodman argues thatwomen played a central role both in the collectiveproject of the Enlightenment and in the constructionof a new political and critical public space. For her,‘the French Enlightenment was grounded in a femalecenteredmixed-gender sociability that genderedFrench culture, the Enlightenment, and civilizationitself as feminine’ (Goodman 1994, p. 6). In thisperspective the salon society did not belong to the oldregime absolutist public sphere but had a fundamentalrole in shaping a ‘discursive space’ opened to publicand political criticism. Between 1750 and 1775 womenwere essential in the government of such societybecause they kept within the limits of civility andpoliteness the tensions which necessarily arose fromthe free confrontations of opinions and the competitionsfor intellectual leadership: ‘Enlightenmentsalons were places where male egos were brought intoharmony through the agency of female selflessness’(p. 104).According to Goodman (1994, p. 280), it is duringthe 1770s that women began to be excluded from thenew public sphere. On the one hand, the harmony ofRepublic of Letters was then destroyed by a series aferocious discords starting with controversies aboutPhysiocracy. On the other hand, new forms of association

(among them, literary societies called lyce_esor muse_es and masonic lodges) either excluded womenor gave them a subordinate position. The return to‘masculine self-governance’ prepared women’s expulsionfrom the revolutionary political space: ‘When theliterary public sphere was transformed into the politicalpublic sphere in 1789, it had already becomemasculine; the ‘democratic’ republic of 1792 wouldreflect the limitations and exclusions of the Republicof Letters of the 1780s.’It is possible to discuss such an interpretation. TheFreemasonry did not ignore women’s presence andgave them an important role in the ‘lodges of adoption.’In these lodges many women were involved inthe new values coined by the late Enlightenment: thephilanthropic activities, the interest for political issues,the friendship between men and women (Burke andJacob 1996, pp. 513–49). Besides that, it is clear thateven between 1750 and 1775, the salon society wasalways very minoritary and limited to a restrictednumber of participants. They cannot be considered asthe center of the Republic of Letters.The collective construction of the new public spherecannot be reduced either to a unique process or to asole place. It arose from the intertwining betweenconceptual novelties and social practices, the alliancebetween speech and print, and the common (butdissimilar) participation of men and women.

See also: Absolutism, History of; Civil Society, Conceptand History of; Enlightenment; Intellectual History;Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804); Public Sphere:Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century History; Spaceand Social Theory in Geography

R. Chartier

Public Sphere: Nineteenth- and TwentiethcenturyHistoryThe closely related concepts of public sphere andpublic space are rooted in ancient Greek distinctionsof public and private and developed in early modernEurope through changing ideas of citizenship, civilsociety, and republican virtue (see Civil Society_PublicSphere, History of the Concept). They refer first andforemost to settings for political discussion amongcitizens about the order of their lives together, andsecondarily to a much wider range of public cultureincluding art, literature, and popular discourse on ahost of subjects.New ideas about public discourse were complementedby development of new communicationsmedia, especially those dependent on print; risingliteracy and education levels; growth of the state; andexpansion of popular political participation. In thisprocess, the distinction of public and private took onnew importance and complexity. On the one hand, therealm of public interaction expanded; cities were the

primary setting for this, especially cosmopolitan tradingand capital cities. Public spaces appeared literallywith coffee houses, parks, theaters, and other placeswhere people who were not bound by private relationsgathered and communicated. They also grew metaphoricallywith printed sermons, pamphlets, newspapers,books in vernacular languages, journals thatreviewed them, and other media of public communication.On the other hand, the state also expanded andwith it the range of res publica, public things whichincluded property held in common and matters ofconcern to the whole polity. Publicness took on a dualsense, referring both to openness of access andinteraction and to collective affairs as managed by thestate. The public referred both to the collective subjectof democracy—the people organized as a discursiveand decision-making public—and as its object—thepublic good.The two dimensions were linked in the notion thatpolitical debate among responsible citizens was a wayto arrive at sound understanding of common affairs.This depended on notions of participation in debatethat developed in the realms of science and religion(Ezrahi 1990, Zaret 1999) and literature (Habermas1962, Hohendahl 1982) as well as politics. Processes ofrational-critical debate were held to form educated

public opinion as distinct from other forms such as the‘representative publicity’ of monarchs appearing beforetheir subjects or the ‘mere opinion’ of uneducatedmasses. Interest in such public opinion grew alongsidecivil society as a self-organizing realm of socialrelations, and especially with the rise of democracy.Complementing the growth of the public realm werenew senses of the private. The ‘privacy’ of the familywas more sharply affirmed. Women and children wereincreasingly sequestered in private homes, especiallyamong the bourgoisie; the modern idea of the individualincluded the notion of nurturance and maturationin private as preparation for action in public,but this applied in the first instance to men. At thesame time, economic activity was increasingly movedout of the household. In one sense, then, going to workmeant going out into public, being exposed to thepublic gaze. In another sense, however, propertyrelations continued to be understood as private in thesense that they were to be managed by individualpersons and not the state. The eventual rise of businesscorporations further complicated the distinction, sincethese held property as artificial private persons butoperated as collective, public actors, especially when

shares of ownership were openly available on themarket rather than closely held within families.As the example of corporations and private propertysuggests, the distinction of public and private wassometimes difficult to sustain. This undermined theclassical notion of the public sphere: ‘The model of thebourgeois public sphere presupposed strict separationof the public from the private realm in such a way thatthe public sphere, made up of private people gatheredtogether as a public and articulating the needs ofsociety with the state, was itself considered part of theprivate realm’ (Habermas 1962, pp. 175–6). As corporationsbecame public actors while still claiming thestatus of private property, states began to interveneever more into civil society and even intimate life.These trends joined with the rise of mass media, andespecially professions and institutions devoted to themanipulation of public opinion through mass media(advertising, public relations) to undermine the conditionsfor the effective operation of the public sphereas a source for educated public opinion.For many later analysts, the eighteenth century was asort of ‘golden age’ of modern public life (see PublicSphere: Eighteenth-century History). Hannah Arendt(1958) theorized ‘public’ in terms of creative action,the making of a world shared among citizens, and saw

the founding of the USA as a crucial example. Ju_ rgenHabermas (1962) idealized eighteenth century Englishparliamentarianism, newspapers, and coffee houseconversation. He presented the public sphere as arealm of civil society in which private citizens couldcommunicate openly about matters of public concern,transcending their particular statuses and addressingthe state without becoming part of it. Others havefocused on Parisian clubs in the Revolution of 1789(Amann 1975) or the literary journalism of theGerman Enlightenment (Hohendahl 1982).Idealization of the eighteenth and sometimes theearly nineteenth century public sphere underwritesexplicit or implicit narratives of decline. In Habermas’sclassic Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,for example, nineteenth and twentieth century publicdiscourse is analyzed in terms of the loss of rationalcriticalcapacity attendant on expansion of scale andthe rise of public relations management that incorporatedthe public into the realm of administeredsociety (see also Horkheimer and Adorno 1944). Suchaccounts reveal that the notion of public is not onlybasic to democracy, but linked to an apparent contradictionin democratic ideals. At least in its mostprominent modern, liberal forms, democracy seems to

promise both a politics based on reason rather thanpower, and the inclusion of all adults in the politicalprocess. The latter, the classic accounts of the publicsphere suggest, undermines the former. The nineteenthand twentieth century history of democratic politics istaken to demonstrate this. Public opinion is increasingly‘managed’ on the basis of research andmanipulation rather than developed in open, rationalcriticaldiscourse.12595Public Sphere: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century History2. History as DeclineFor many later analysts, the eighteenth century was asort of ‘golden age’ of modern public life (see PublicSphere: Eighteenth-century History). Hannah Arendt(1958) theorized ‘public’ in terms of creative action,the making of a world shared among citizens, and sawthe founding of the USA as a crucial example. Ju_ rgenHabermas (1962) idealized eighteenth century Englishparliamentarianism, newspapers, and coffee houseconversation. He presented the public sphere as arealm of civil society in which private citizens couldcommunicate openly about matters of public concern,transcending their particular statuses and addressingthe state without becoming part of it. Others have

focused on Parisian clubs in the Revolution of 1789(Amann 1975) or the literary journalism of theGerman Enlightenment (Hohendahl 1982).Idealization of the eighteenth and sometimes theearly nineteenth century public sphere underwritesexplicit or implicit narratives of decline. In Habermas’sclassic Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,for example, nineteenth and twentieth century publicdiscourse is analyzed in terms of the loss of rationalcriticalcapacity attendant on expansion of scale andthe rise of public relations management that incorporatedthe public into the realm of administeredsociety (see also Horkheimer and Adorno 1944). Suchaccounts reveal that the notion of public is not onlybasic to democracy, but linked to an apparent contradictionin democratic ideals. At least in its mostprominent modern, liberal forms, democracy seems topromise both a politics based on reason rather thanpower, and the inclusion of all adults in the politicalprocess. The latter, the classic accounts of the publicsphere suggest, undermines the former. The nineteenthand twentieth century history of democratic politics istaken to demonstrate this. Public opinion is increasingly‘managed’ on the basis of research and

manipulation rather than developed in open, rationalcriticaldiscourse.Already in the nineteenth century itself, politicaltheory of many persuasions emphasized the fragilityand limitations of the liberal democratic conception ofthe public. Tocqueville, most famously, argued asearly as the 1830s that the democratization of societytended to eliminate the intermediary public bodieswhich had traditionally refined opinion and furnishedthe individual a collective social identity outside thestate. Engaged, politicized publics composed of distinctviews and interests could be reshaped over timeinto mass publics—passive, conformist, and atomizedbefore the state. Tocqueville’s fear of the unmediatedstate would resonate with generations of critics ofmass society.Central to the analyses of historical decline in thepublic sphere is the idea that as its scope expanded, itwas unable to sustain a high level of rational-criticaldebate. This happened with the rise of various sorts ofopinion managers, from pollsters to public relationsspecialists, and with the institutionalization of politicalparties as products of negotiations among interestgroups rather than arenas for debate about the publicgood in general.Akey phase in this, accordingly to thecritics, was the institutionalization of class politics

during the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies. Habermas treated this in terms of negotiationamong interests, as distinct from reasoneddebate about the public good. Negt and Kluge ([1964]1993), however, famously emphasized the existence ofa proletarian public sphere, rooted in distinctiveexperiences, and productive of reasoned internaldiscourse. Indeed, the German Social DemocraticParty, like successful workers organizations elsewhere,created a parallel public sphere to that dominated bythe bourgeoisie (Eley 1992, see also Katznelson andZolberg 1987). This faltered principally because of anationalization of popular politics, not class politicsper se (Mosse 1975, 1987). Such nationalization wasoften accompanied by mass spectacle and reliance onmass media. Both did frequently collapse the distinctionof public and private, especially in emotiveappeals to national unity. Equally important was therise of two-party electoral systems. Rather than beingable to participate activity in public life, late twentiethcentury citizens of democratic societies were reducedto being invited to respond to plebiscites (Lowi 1985,Ginsburg 1986).Historical research on the public sphere hasquestioned both the accuracy of the late eighteenth

century ideal and the narrative of subsequent decline.Schudson (1998), for example, has argued that activeparticipation of citizens in public discourse and politicshas ebbed and flowed without linear trend. The idealof the good citizen as an active participant in thepublic sphere has long been contrasted with the failingsof actual citizens. A substantial line of research on‘civic culture’ shifted the emphasis away from theproblematic of public debate and towards a moregeneral idea of participation and incorporation intocivic life, for example, in voluntary associations (see,in particular, Almond and Verba 1966 and criticalanalysis in Somers 1993, 1995). This, most researchersargued, grew through the nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies. More recently, however, critics of latetwentieth and early twenty-first century democracieshave emphasized a decline in civic participation (e.g.,Putnam 2000).3. Participation and ExclusionAlthough openness was basic to the ideology andtheory of the public sphere, various forms of exclusionwere basic to actually existing publics in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries. Women, for example, hadbeen prominent in late eighteenth century salon societyand elite public spheres, but were widely excluded

from nineteenth and twentieth century public space;this was mirrored by a commensurate bias in politicalthought (Landes 1988, Elshtain 1993). Feminist strugglesmade gender a basic political issue in new ways(Ryan 1990, 1992). In addition, women were prominentin other movements, such as abolitionism in theUSA, and may have figured less in subsequent historicalaccounts than in actual nineteenth centurysocial movements. This may be partly because ofdifferent styles of address in the public sphere, includinga greater emphasis on narrative and less onargumentation (Lara 1999). Similarly, Blacks werelargely excluded from the US public sphere, even afterabolition. This encouraged a similar duality: strugglesfor inclusion and development of parallel publicdiscourse marked by distinctive communicative styles(Diawara 1995).This has occasioned more general inquiry into‘counterpublics’ which contest the apparently neutraldominance of more mainstream publics (Fraser 1992,Warner 2001). This argument is rooted in Negt andKluge’s ([1964] 1993) account of the proletarian publicsphere. Members of religious communities, ethnicgroups, and the women’s movement have been among

the many who have constructed counterpublics. Duringthe classic heyday of the late eighteenth and earlynineteenth century British public sphere, thus, manyartisans and workers were denied participation in thepublic sphere. They were not simply and unambivalentlymembers of a proletarian public sphere, thoughthey did develop their own media and organizationsand to some extent constitute a counterpublic(Gilmartin 1999). They claimed the right to participatein the dominant, unmarked public sphere and challengedthose who introduced restrictive measures tomake it a specifically ‘bourgeois’ (or more generally,propertied) public sphere (Jones 1983). The samepeople who excluded those with less wealth from thepublic sphere nonetheless claimed it in unmarked formas simply the British public.Accounts of the public sphere by both contemporariesand historians have been tacitly linked to theidea of nation, since nation defined the range ofcitizens entitled to participate in public affairs and thebasis for legitimacy of modern, especially democratic,states (Calhoun 1997). In liberalism’s triumphant earlyphase, experiments in republicanism and constitutionalismplaced these issues squarely on the table. Theyasked how new political structures were to acquire

legitimacy and how, within those structures, theplurality of opinion was to be represented. Defenses offree speech and the press, too, signaled an appreciationof the importance of venues in which views could bewidely and, in principle, freely circulated. At the sametime, the rhetoric of nationalism typically presentedthe nation not as creature of public discourse but aspre-existing unity, commonly on ethnic or culturalgrounds. This is true even, if ironically, in the USA,the nation quintessentially created through the publicaction of its citizens. A tension running throughAmerican history has pitted the capacity for creationof a new political order exemplified by the foundersagainst claims that the defining national essence isalready in place and needs only defense from the loyal.Notions of a vital republican public sphere havebeen influential especially in American historicalstudies, visible in the work of J. G. A. Pocock, BernardBailyn, Gordon Wood, and more recently, MichaelWarner. Here the focus, in Hannah Arendt’s terms, ison the capacity of action in public not only to defineindividual identity but to create the world citizensshare in common. Republicanism, implied severalthings: (a) a concerted effort to reach agreement aboutthe public good, as distinct from the attempt to findthe net balance of private, individual goods—theessence of utilitarianism; (b) a sense of politics as awork in progress regarding the appropriate structures

and limits of the political, as opposed to a hallowed setof procedures for achieving particular ends—such asthe cult of the constitution; and (c) a belief that individualityand identity are only fully expressed andenjoyed through engagement in public life, rather thanconstituted beforehand in the private realm. Thesewriters emphasize the ephemeral nature of republicanismand the rapid emergence in the nineteenthcentury of a variously liberal, national and representative(rather than participatory) model of the publicsphere. In American Studies, as in Frankfurt Schoolcritical theory, this decline is commonly associatedwith the rise of mass culture—and the blurring ofdivisions between reasoned political discourse andother social processes of opinion formation.Transformations of public life were also shaped by theways in which communications media and the physicalpublic spaces of cities changed through the nineteenthFall of Public Man, for example, contrasts a vibrantand highly varied eighteenth and nineteenth centuryurban life (especially among the bourgeoisie) to areduction in both the occasions for interaction acrosslines of difference and the psychological ability tomanage open relations with strangers well. Citizensretreated, Sennett suggests, into both privacy and theconformity of mass culture.

Urban public spaces anchor face-to-face interaction,which was basic to the classical image of thepublic sphere, conceived of largely in terms of directinteraction. This is important for a sense of serendipitouscontact among people of diverse backgrounds.Parks, cafes, and theaters all inform this. Many ofEurope’s cities, especially older ones, were distinctivein their pedestrian character and their scale. From themid-nineteenth century, however, this began to shift.Hausmann’s post-1848 construction of the Parisboulevards and destruction of some of the localquartiers is taken as emblematic (e.g., by Harvey1985). Both suburbanization and less pedestrianfriendly,larger-scale designs for newer cities havechanged the character of public interaction in Europe,largely in ways familiar earlier in the US Commentatorsthroughout the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies have been concerned for the implications ofthis for democracy. As Mumford (1938, p. 483) wrote,‘One of the difficulties in the way of political associationis that we have not provided it with thenecessary physical organs of existence: we have failedto provide the necessary sites, the necessary buildings,the necessary halls, rooms, meeting places … ’

This has been linked to a huge increase in scale. Onecrucial result is that directly interpersonal relationsorganize proportionately less of public life; mediationsof various kinds have become increasingly important(Calhoun 1988, Garnham 1992, Keane 1991,Thompson 1995). This is partly a matter of communicationsmedia per se; it is also a matter of growingimportance for bureaucracies and other formalorganizations. The eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury public sphere was closely tied to the spread ofprint media. The nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies were the heyday of great urban newspapers;after this, media that transcended locality becameincreasingly important. First radio and then televisionfundamentally altered the public sphere. They contributedto a shift in what was publicly visible as well asin how public discourse was organized (Meyrowitz1985, Thompson 1995). New media shared bothinformation and emotionally powerful images widely.Broadcast media are often charged with furthering thedebasement of reason by substituting powerful imagesfor sustained analysis, by appealing to a lowestcommon denominator in audiences, by blurring thelines between entertainment and critical discourse,and by centralizing control over messages in the hands

of a few corporations. Some caution is in order about12597Public Sphere: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century History4. Cities and MediaTransformations of public life were also shaped by theways in which communications media and the physicalpublic spaces of cities changed through the nineteenthand twentieth centuries. Richard Sennets (1977) TheFall of Public Man, for example, contrasts a vibrantand highly varied eighteenth and nineteenth centuryurban life (especially among the bourgeoisie) to areduction in both the occasions for interaction acrosslines of difference and the psychological ability tomanage open relations with strangers well. Citizensretreated, Sennett suggests, into both privacy and theconformity of mass culture.Urban public spaces anchor face-to-face interaction,which was basic to the classical image of thepublic sphere, conceived of largely in terms of directinteraction. This is important for a sense of serendipitouscontact among people of diverse backgrounds.Parks, cafes, and theaters all inform this. Many ofEurope’s cities, especially older ones, were distinctivein their pedestrian character and their scale. From themid-nineteenth century, however, this began to shift.

Hausmann’s post-1848 construction of the Parisboulevards and destruction of some of the localquartiers is taken as emblematic (e.g., by Harvey1985). Both suburbanization and less pedestrianfriendly,larger-scale designs for newer cities havechanged the character of public interaction in Europe,largely in ways familiar earlier in the US Commentatorsthroughout the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies have been concerned for the implications ofthis for democracy. As Mumford (1938, p. 483) wrote,‘One of the difficulties in the way of political associationis that we have not provided it with thenecessary physical organs of existence: we have failedto provide the necessary sites, the necessary buildings,the necessary halls, rooms, meeting places … ’This has been linked to a huge increase in scale. Onecrucial result is that directly interpersonal relationsorganize proportionately less of public life; mediationsof various kinds have become increasingly important(Calhoun 1988, Garnham 1992, Keane 1991,Thompson 1995). This is partly a matter of communicationsmedia per se; it is also a matter of growingimportance for bureaucracies and other formalorganizations. The eighteenth and early nineteenth

century public sphere was closely tied to the spread ofprint media. The nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies were the heyday of great urban newspapers;after this, media that transcended locality becameincreasingly important. First radio and then televisionfundamentally altered the public sphere. They contributedto a shift in what was publicly visible as well asin how public discourse was organized (Meyrowitz1985, Thompson 1995). New media shared bothinformation and emotionally powerful images widely.Broadcast media are often charged with furthering thedebasement of reason by substituting powerful imagesfor sustained analysis, by appealing to a lowestcommon denominator in audiences, by blurring thelines between entertainment and critical discourse,and by centralizing control over messages in the handsof a few corporations. Some caution is in order aboutgeneralizations from medium, though, as newspapersproduced their own mass forms, with broadly similarif perhaps less extreme effects.Crucially, the changes in scale and media forms ofthe twentieth century challenge the classical eighteenthcentury model of the public sphere, which wasgrounded in readership on the one hand and directlyinterpersonal discourse on the other. Any account ofcontemporary public life must deal with a dramatic

increase in indirect, mediated relationships. Transformationsof media continue, of course, and theimplications of the Internet and computer-mediatedcommunication are important topics of contemporaryinvestigation (Rasmussen 2000). Relatedly, the dominantapproaches to the public sphere have emphasizeddomestic politics within nation-states. Especially duringthe last years of the twentieth century, however,communications media and the rise of transnationalorganizations have facilitated growth of an internationalpublic sphere (Thompson 1995, Held 1995,opinion can steer global society directly, and to whatextent only through the agency of state structures,remains a crucial question.Finally,thoughthis article concentratesonthe publicsphere in Western European and American history, itis important to note that the nineteenth and twentiethcentury also saw dramatic and transformative growthin public discourses elsewhere. In late Imperial andearly Republican China, for example, the category of‘public’ became influential and both directly interpersonaland mediated public spheres were created(Wakeman 1993, Rankin 1993). This was basic todevelopment of the idea of citizen, as distinct fromsubject, to constitution of notions of public welfare,and to cultural transformations such as the introduction

of new vernacular writing. It also contributedto the growth of both nationalist and class politics inthe twentieth century. Further transformations followed,attendant on changes in media, politics, andculture, and creating important linkages within theAn unusually vital print-mediated public spheredeveloped in India. The early history of this is closelyinterwoven with the history of British colonialism andopposition to it. The history of Indian public life hasbeen an important setting for examining the role ofboth international power relations and issues ofdomestic diversity. Not least, questions like the claimsof nonreaders in a public sphere dominated by printmedia have surfaced and shaped not only Indian butinternational discussions. Broadcast media haveplayed an important role recently in the constitutionof a new Hindu nationalism (Rajogopal 2001). Inmany settings, including in the European countriesand the USA as well as both India and China, thedevelopment of a public sphere has been closely relatedto the development of national consciousness, identity,and political contestation.5. ConclusionGrowth and transformation of public spheres hasbeen a major theme in nineteenth and twentiethcentury history. It is crucial to the history ofdemocratic politics, including not only electoral andparliamentary regimes, but also broader struggles incivil society and beyond national borders. A dominanthistorical theme is the inclusion of a broader

range of participants in public discourse. This hasbeen coupled with analyses of the implications ofgrowing scale, including mismatch between local—especially urban—public spaces and enlarged rangeof potential participants, dynamics of inclusion andexclusion, and changing roles of media. A prominentline of analysis suggests a concomitant decline in therational-critical capacity of public discourse. This ischallenged by both research on the limits of earlierpublic spheres and the strengths of later counterpublics.The importance of the public sphere is in anycase not limited to argumentation but includes alsothe formation and spread of culture, as in thedevelopment of national identity.

C. Calhoun