Structural Change Of The Public Sphere Analysis

Throughout The Structural Change of the Public Sphere, Habermas talks about how the bourgeois public sphere transformed. He defines the public sphere as a virtual or imaginary community which does not necessarily exist in any recognizable space. In its ideal form, the public sphere is "made up of private people gathered together as a public and expressing the needs of society with the state. Throughout the book Habermas asserts that the bourgeois public sphere is premised on the incorrect identification between human being and bourgeois. The problem is that being a bourgeois is an economic standing, which, Habermas argues, could not be shared collectively by everyone because of tendencies innate in the expansion of capitalism. The economy …show more content…
The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people as a pubic; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above the public authorities themselves to engage them in s debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publically relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.
Habermas is asserting that at the beginning of the public sphere, it was made up of private individuals getting together. The private individuals consisted of people who owned property. The private individuals or the bourgeois would get together to discuss the laws that governed the society the lived in. They would often engage in the debates in coffee houses or Salons. Habermas contends “While the bourgeoisie, for all practical purposes excluded from leadership in the state and the church, in time completely took over all key positions in the economy, and while autocracy compensated for its material inferiority with royal privileges and an ever more rigorous stress upon hierarchy in social intercourse, in the salons, nobility” Habermas is asserting that it was primarily private individuals who gathered in the public to disuses the concerns that they had. After asserting that the two spheres were separate Habermas asserts given the structural interdependence …show more content…
Habermas states, “At the time, when private people were conscious of their double role as bourgeois and homme and simultaneity asserted the essential identity of property and “human being”, they owed this self-image to the fact that a public sphere evolved from the very heart of the private sphere itself”. Habermas is contending that there is a problem with how people identify themselves as human beings in the public sphere. When the word homme was used, people thought about an intimate sphere. When the word bourgeois was used, people thought about an owner of commodities. Since the bourgeoisies primarily consisted of people who owned property, only property owners can participate in the public sphere. Habermas also stated that people were considered human beings when they owned property and when they were considered bourgeois. He is also saying that what was considered the private sphere developed into the public sphere which consisted of people in the private sphere who owned property. The problem that needs to be addressed per Habermas is, the false identification of a human being and a bourgeois. This is one of the components of the transformation of the public sphere that was negative. One reason why property owners were only considered to be a part of the public sphere is “If everyone, as it might appear, had the chance to become a "citizen," then only