The citizen's 'autonomy' as a condition for political publicity

It is always an event when the philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas publishes a new book. The structural change of the public (1962), published in Norwegian with the title Civil public in 1971, was Habermas' first book. It has also proved to be his most popular work, with 30 editions in Germany alone. After 60 years, the then 93-year-old Habermas last year updated his youth work with a book about the public's nye structural change. It has already been translated into French, and a Norwegian edition is just around the corner. At the beginning of May, the book had received 50 reviews, according to www.habermasforum.dk/reviews

Private and public

Habermas now laments the conflation of private and public, the new 'semi-public' in the social media. But he does not mention that this phenomenon was massively present and was criticized before the internet existed, both by himself in Civil public and e.g. by the sociologist Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man (1978, Norwegian, 1992). The intermingling of the public and the private was already central to his own theory of Freedomone's decay in 1962. The point then was that the informed citizen had decayed from active participant to passive client. The manufacture of the age of enlightenment was based on an ideal-typical model à la Max Weber. Habermas oscillated in an unclear way between ideal model and empirical fact. This happened without Weber being discussed. Habermas himself admitted this weakness in a new preface to the German edition from 1990.

The image of the public in the Enlightenment was an ideal image of the enlightened citizene collected into one audience who discussed – or 'deliberated' – to arrive at the best solution. They were rational and did not mix person and cause. But if this was an ideal-typical model and not an empirical description, it was also a short-circuit to talk about an alleged 'decline' with the Enlightenment as a yardstick.

From night watchman state to welfare state

The emergence of 'the bourgeois public' led to a separation between state and society. The citizens could discuss and make draft laws which they then followed, instead of the laws being decided by a sacral body or a king (cf. absolute rule by the grace of God). The basis for this again was citizenship's economic expansion, which gave the rising class new confidence and the power to change old aristocratic privileges. An important prerequisite for it bourgeoise the public was economic autonomy. Therefore, private property was a condition for participation in democracy in both the American and Norwegian constitutions. The majority of the people were excluded from democracy!

In 1962, according to Habermas, the reasons for the structural change were that the state took over tasks that were previously private, e.g. education, health services and care for the elderly.

The contradiction in this system consisted in the fact that the citizens apparently spoke on behalf of all people, while in reality the system only concerned a small privileged elite. With the expansion of voting rights in the last half of the 1800th century, this changed. Subsequently, women also joined the democracy. Habermas spoke of a nationalization of society and a socialization of the state which destroyed the basis of the bourgeois public. In 1962, according to Habermas, the reasons for the structural change were that the state took over tasks that were previously private, e.g. education, health services and care for the elderly. The transformation of the liberalist 'night watchman state' of Wilhelm von Humboldt and John Stuart Mill into the modern one welfare stateone, not many people want to reverse. The sphere of exchange and work was no longer left to private autonomy. The liberal night watchman stateone definitely broke down. State interventionism made previously private law matters public; e.g. contracts between private individuals were standardized by the state.

Habermas wants editorial control of the social media.

The absurdity of this way of thinking from 1962 thus becomes clear: If state intervention is what creates "semi-publicity" in previously private relationships and this causes the public to decline, it leads to an impossible choice between cultural consumption, advertising and person-oriented politics on the one hand and the old liberal night watchman state on the other! But public communication in the Night Watch State was actually not only factual, non-fragmented and deliberative. Thus the young Habermas' construction of the public's history of decay collapses like a house of cards. The decline consisted in the fact that 'deliberation' in the Age of Enlightenment was replaced by manipulation, consumption, advertising and propaganda. But deliberation in the Enlightenment was also rhetorical and the publication of political positions not only argumentative. Already in No. 3 of The Spectator, the newspaper that became the benchmark for hundreds of newspapers and periodicals in Europe during the Enlightenment, Addison published in 1711 a dream or an allegory. He envisioned George of Hanover as the next English king. And the vision became reality: the Whig pretender to the crown was crowned King of England as George I in 1714. The representatives of the bourgeois public promoted politics through a genre of fiction.

From decay to regression

It is therefore not without reason that in the new book Habermas renounces a historical representation of the relationship between private and public. He is content to give a situational description of the public's decline with new justification. Now it is the digital media that ensure the mixing of public and private. But this was allegedly the reason for the decline of the public already 60 years ago!

While the decay hypothesis stood strong in the book from 1962, Habermas now strangely talks about regression, but without specifying what he means by the term. In 1962, Habermas also used this word once, and then with reference to his teacher Theodor W. Adorno's essay on "The fetish character of music and the regression of listening" from 1938: "The regressive listeners behave like children. They always stubbornly demand the one dish that has been served to them once." According to Adorno, the listeners were fed a form of musical children's language. He got excited over the song "A tisket a tasket" with Chick Webb's orchestra and Ella Fitzgerald as vocalist. It was recorded in May 1938, and the text is based on a well-known children's rule.

Deliberative democracy

The citizen's 'autonomy' as a condition for political publicity was more strongly present in 1962, but then the term was explained. Now is assumed autonomous as a compliment. Where in 1962 Habermas believed that the modern welfare state crushed the subject's autonomy and created decay and cultural consumption, it is now, paradoxically, the welfare state that becomes the guarantor of autonomy: Politics must "tame the capitalist system's tendency to create inequalities so that all citizens have the same chances to lead a self-determined life". Politics is nourished by the interaction between private interests and the common good. The prerequisite for this is the ideal that the citizens' individual wishes are reflected in the general will.

In 1962, state interventionism led to decay and the mixing of private and public. Now intervention and distribution are needed to keep the inequalities in and thus right- and left-wing populism in check. In this way, the regression can be counteracted.

The echo chambers on Social Media is blamed for a lack of autonomy. Habermas posits rational argumentation as the yardstick without going into the impact of social and mass psychology on politics. Can one not accept herd mentality, imitation and emotions as an anthropological fact without regarding this as irrationality and political regression? Like it or not, we actually do not act only rationally, neither when we try to manage society nor when we try to manage our own lives.

Habermas wants editorial control of the social media. This is a good suggestion and can certainly raise the level and counteract the worst degenerations. Habermas does not really discuss the problem of the homogeneity of the public when it comes to the much-discussed splitting of the participants into various echo chambers. Haven't there always been partial publics? Can they not stand in a productive relationship with the general public?

The decline consisted in the fact that 'deliberation' in the Age of Enlightenment was replaced by manipulation, consumption, advertising and propaganda.

The deliberativee democracy must be based on arguments and rationality, without Habermas now taking the trouble to explain what this entails. Attitudes, habits and unconscious influence were mentioned in Civil public. These were the "regressive" levels, phenomena that did not belong in politics. However, a large part of the voters' experiences are of this type. In our attitudes and preferences, there is much that is not defined and can be discussed as verifiable positions. You can win the debate and lose the election. This does not mean that deliberation and argumentation are not important in politics. Rather, it is about understanding the framework and status of rationality differently. It is not an either or, and therefore Habermas becomes too rational.

Literary and political public

In 1962, Habermas perceived the literary public as an important 'pre-form' for the political. In 2022, Habermas has cut it out of the presentation. How does the literary public stand today in relation to the political public? In some cases, it does manage to put problems under debate, as Georg Brandes urged in 1871. So distinctly is it that literature expresses society-created pathology as a reaction to empty ideals of growth and the pursuit of success. Descriptions of early hair loss, premature ejaculation and simulated disability become therapy texts for the endless frustration of living in one of the world's supposedly richest and best countries.

But not all regression needs to be evil: the psychoanalyst Ernst Kris spoke of a "regression in the service of the self". When the ecstasy of communication has turned to burnout and people come home from their offline therapy, new things can arise. Then the convalescents may be open to Habermas' description of social media:
"According to previous standards, they can only be understood as neither public nor private, but primarily as a sphere of communication that was previously reserved for private correspondence that has blown up to the public."