The Public Sphere and Comparative Historical Research: An Introduction

Andreas Koller

Social Science History, Volume 34, Number 3, Fall 2010, pp. 261-290
(Article)
Published by Duke University Press

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Special Section:
History and the Social Sciences:
Taking Stock and Moving Ahead

Andreas Koller

The Public Sphere and Comparative

Historical Research
An Introduction

In state-of-the-field surveys of historical sociology and of historical social science at

large, the study of the public sphere is missing. The rise of historical social science has
not led to an established tradition of comparative historical research on the public sphere.
This article gives an introduction to this topic and to this special issue, seeking to clarify
the definition of the object of study and its stakes and providing an overview of analytic and historical dimensions relevant to the comparative historical study of the public
sphere. The article argues that this search for an integrative framework is a necessary
condition for well-defined comparative historical research, for incorporating the fragmented research from numerous disciplines, and thus for improving our understanding
of the historical formation and the transformations of this central sphere of social life.

This special issue on the comparative historical study of the public sphere
emerged from a Social Science History Association (SSHA) panel on the
Social Science History 34:3 (Fall 2010)
DOI 10.1215/01455532-2010-001
2010 by Social Science History Association

262Social Science History

topic in the fall of 2007 in response to the conference theme History and
the Social Sciences: Taking Stock and Moving Ahead. The rise of historical
social science has not led to an established tradition of comparative historical
research on the public sphere. In state-of-the-field surveys of historical sociology (Skocpol 1984; Delanty and Isin 2003; Adamset al. 2005) and of historical social science more broadly (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003; Revel
2003), the study of the public sphere is a missing chapter. This introduction
and the special issue as a whole cannot take stock of the contributions to
the comparative and historical understanding of the public sphere that are
dispersed over many disciplines and often proceed in multiple disciplinary
terminologies.1 What can be achieved here is limited to taking stock of
analytic dimensions relevant to the comparative historical study of the public
sphere and by virtue of this show directions to move ahead, exemplified by
the articles gathered in this special issue.
Some of the central stakes of the public sphere for modern societies
appear already in Immanuel Kants (1996: 59) well-known notion of the public use of reason: That a public [Publikum] should enlighten itself . . . is
nearly inevitable, if only it is granted freedom, that is, the freedom to make
a public use of ones reason in all matters. . . . The public use of reason must
at all times be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men.
Jrgen Habermas (1973: 35859) expressed these central stakes inherent in
the Enlightenment notion of the public sphere already in 1960, even prior
to his major book from 1962: that the principle of publicness enables the
rationalization of politics and of the activities of the state. In the medium of
public discourse, political authority and coercive power are rationalized and
civilized. This principle of publicness, the liquefaction of politics and state
power by public communication, has been the central motive of Habermass
political theory ever since and explains his initial idealization of the historical
origins of bourgeois democracy in his early work (Habermas 2009: 1415).
Despite its central relevance for the members of modern societies for
determining the course of their own history through reasoned debate and
public choice, the study of the public sphere is not an integrated research
field. Such an integrative approach was already formulated by John Dewey
and C. Wright Mills. But since Habermass work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas 1989 [1962]), there has been no major
attempt for a synthesis. What such an integrative approach means is best
expressed by the later Habermas (1992c: 421), who recalls that the original

Comparative Historical Research263

study emerged from the synthesis of contributions based in several disciplines, whose number even at that time almost exceeded what one author
could hope to master. Such a broad interdisciplinary approach is an enormous but necessary challenge, since the complexity of the object of the
public sphere precludes exclusive reliance on the specialized methods of a
single discipline. . . . When considered within the boundaries of a particular
social-scientific discipline, this object disintegrates (Habermas 1989 [1962]:
xvii). This introduction seeks to provide an overview of analytic and historical dimensions that enables one to decipher a number of discussions that are
spread out over many disciplines and often proceed in multiple disciplinary
terminologies. Such a quest for an integrative framework is a necessary condition for well-defined comparative and historical research.

Definition and Stakes of the Public Sphere

The German term ffentlichkeit has the double meaning of a social (communication) sphere and of a collective. In English this double meaning is
split into the separate terms public sphere and the public (Peters 2008: 134).
The latter refers to a public of speaker(s) and audience that organizes itself
and determines its own future by the force of the better argument, and it
refers to its object, the public good. Nevertheless, despite the existence of
two separate terms, scholarly discussions related to the public sphere often
oscillate between the two meanings or enmesh them, suffering from the lack
of this crucial conceptual distinction. A feasible definition for research has
to distinguish carefully between the public sphere as the physical and virtual
sphere and institutional setting of communication open to strangers, on the
one hand, and its capacity for reasoned public choice, on the other.
Public communication is open to all laypeople. There are no formal
restrictions or formal requirements for active participation in public communication (Peters 2008: 76). The central conceptual feature of the public
sphere is its openness to strangers (Warner 2002: 74; Calhoun 2003a), representing the minimal definition of the public sphere (Calhoun 2003b). As
opposed to private communication, public communication emerges wherever a speaker cannot control the boundaries of his or her audience (Neidhardt 1994: 10). Public communication is communication to an anonymous
audience, potentially engaging everyone. Constituted by an ongoing process
of communication open to strangers, it is not a reified entity.

264Social Science History

The public sphere is the front stage, distinguished from the private
and institutional back stage. Accordingly, everyday language distinguishes
between communication in public and communication behind the
scenes. As Habermas (1989 [1962]: 37) mentioned early on, public communication is in principle unclosed. The public sphere is the realm between
the private sphere and the sphere of public authority (ibid.: 3031), that is,
between society and the state. The same is implied in the notion of the public
sphere as an arena or forum (Neidhardt 1994). Accordingly, Habermas
(1996a: 373) later understands the public sphere as a complex network and
intermediary structure. This basic element of the definition of the public
sphere corresponds with the network-theoretical definition of publics that
emerged from network analysts who have theorized publics. In that terminology, the public sphere is an interstitial space (Mische and White 1998).
This minimal definition of the public sphere is also compatible with
Charles Tillys notion of the political public sphere or, as he calls it, public politics: the interactive setting between agents of government, polity
members (constituted political actors enjoying routine access to government agents and resources), challengers (constituted political actors lacking
that routine access), subjects (persons and groups not currently organized
into constituted political actors), and outside political actors. Public politics consists of claim-making interactions among agents, polity members,
challengers, and outside political actors (Tilly 2000: 4). Public politics in
this sense is distinguished from personal interactions among citizens, among
state officials, or between state officials and citizens (Tilly 2007a: 1213).
Conceptually different from the discussed minimal definition of the public sphere is its capacity for reasoned debate and public choice. The stakes of
the notion of the public sphere focus not simply on the general existence of
communication open to strangers but also on its capacity to guide social life
(Calhoun 2003b). These stakes, as expressed by classic figures like Dewey,
Mills, or Habermas, refer to the possibility that the basic character of social
life is more or less consciously chosen and not merely inherited, shaped by
external determination, or dictated by mere necessity. It means that public
communication can be something different than the mirror of mere power
politics, mere expression of personal experience, or mere reproduction of
cultural traditions. While there is no purely domination-free deliberation and
action, there are variations in the extent to which domination affects agreements and actions (Calhoun 1993: 273).

Comparative Historical Research265

The pragmatist formulation of reasoned public choice emphasizes the

consequentialist element. Deweys (1982, 1987, 2000) notion of reasoned
public choice was what he called cooperative intelligence, and its capacity is
indicated by the extent to which indirect, unintended consequences of social
interaction can be identified and tackled. For Dewey (1954: 126), Indirect,
extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting
behavior call a public into existence having a common interest in controlling these consequences. The identification of the indirect, unintended consequences of social interaction is an antecedent condition of any effective
organization of the public (ibid.). By identifying social mechanisms through
cooperative intelligence it is possible to transform the social process.
In striking resemblance to classic American pragmatism, Tillys later
work suggested that if one understands the recurrent causal mechanisms,
one can put things right. Social scientists in particular need to provide
superior stories (as distinct from technical accounts) that capture the
actual mechanisms and processes better than everyday stories (Tilly 2006:
17172). This enhances the quality of public politics. The role of superior
stories introduces a specifically epistemic dimension into Tillys notion of
public politics. In this sense, Tillys view corresponds with Deweys (1954:
126) formulation that the problem of a democratically organized public is
primarily and essentially an intellectual problem.
The stakes of Tillys special kind of public politics lie in its capacity to
shape the social process. This is determined by the extent to which public
politics integrates trust networks, insulates itself from categorical inequality,
and suppresses autonomous coercive power centers (Tilly 2007a)and by
collective intelligence, that is, the impact of superior stories that help detect
and transform these very processes.
For empirical research, the notion of an unlimited capacity for reasoned public choice serves as a methodological fiction to detect variations in
the extent of this capacity. Such an assessment of the capacity of the public
sphere moves from stiff dichotomies to conceptual gradualism. However, the
stakes of the concept of the public sphere do not only consist of the capacity
for reasoned public choice. The public sphere as an ongoing process of communication open to strangers is also a form of and a process for forming solidarity and a sense of belonging (Calhoun 2002: 15869), not only a mechanism for debate and choice.
Without the conceptual distinction between the public sphere as the

266Social Science History

sphere and institutional setting of communication open to strangers, on the

one hand, and its capacity for reasoned public choice in terms of a methodological fiction, on the other, the existence of the public sphere beyond
its minimal definition is empirically often easily challenged. A similar distinction applies to an underspecified usage of the concept of civil society.
If it does not make a similar distinction and simply implies a high capacity
for reasoned public choice (social self-organization), it will run into analogous empirical problems when confronted with certain social movements or
other nonstate actors that evidently seek to decrease reasoned debate and
public choice rather than increase it. As a result of such definitional implications, the distinct term real civil societies has been introduced into the literature (Alexander 1998, 2006). The concepts of the public sphere and of the
capacity for reasoned public choice have the conceptual advantage in that
they treat as an open empirical question to what extent certain actors and settings contribute to social self-organization.
As Tilly observed, a high density of civic associations in itself does not
necessarily promote both trust in government and high levels of political
participation. For example, trust networks that segregate themselves entirely
from public politics may provide their members with comfort and mutual aid,
but they inhibit public voice (Tilly 2007b: 22). Rather, trust in government
and high levels of political participation depend on changes in the structure
of public politics.2 Furthermore, concepts of civil society often focus on the
interpersonal level and much less on the large-scale level of public communication that is of central importance in large-scale societies.
Most of the decline theses or the depictions of the public sphere as a
phantom or utopia indicate a lack of conceptual gradualism, assuming
an either/or rather than a continuum of the capacity of the public sphere for
reasoned debate and public choice. If distinctions such as the one between
rational-critical public debate and the refeudalized public sphere
(Habermas 1989 [1962]: 179, 200) or that between critical publicity and
manipulative publicity (ibid.: 178) turn into dichotomies, they become
reified entities and thus empirically misleading. Instead, the assessment of
the epistemic and self-corrective capacity of the public sphere has to move
from stiff dichotomies to conceptual gradualism.
Drawing on Bernhard Peters, the later Habermas (1996b: 323) moves to
such a conceptual gradualism by formulating the notion of unlimited reasoned public choice as a methodological fiction. This is precisely not uto-

Comparative Historical Research267

pian in the narrower sense but a methodological translation of Kants notion

of the regulative idea. The methodological fiction detects empirical variations: the extent to which public communication and the direction of the
social process can differ from the mirror of mere power politics, mere expression of personal experience, or mere reproduction of cultural traditions. The
later Habermas (1992a: 479; 2006a) also calls this self-correctiveness or
epistemic dimension of the public sphere.
This methodological fiction is a matter of approximation. Not a matter
of approximation and thus conceptually different and again a separate analytic dimension are the pragmatic presuppositions of the as if practices
that come along with the practice of reasoned debate and public choice. As
presuppositions, they are facts in themselves and can be a force in the process of democratization. In the limited space available here, Millss formulation must suffice to hint at this separate analytic dimension: by acting as if
we were in a fully democratic society we are attempting to remove the as if.
These communicative practices with the presupposition of the as if can,
according to Mills, help build a democratic polity (Koller 2009). A potential
way to integrate this insight into social-scientific terminology would be to
reconstruct the institutionalized forms of these as if practices in legislative
and legal procedures in the language of causal mechanisms.

Conceptual History and Intellectual History

Significant conceptual histories of the German term ffentlichkeit and the
related English terms were written, for example, by Lucian Hlscher (1979),
tracing the changed meanings of the adjective ffentlich (public) back to their
Greek and Roman roots, and by Peter Uwe Hohendahl (2000). While the
adjective public has such a long trajectory, public opinion as a political concept is an invention of the eighteenth century (Peters 1995: 4). Neither the
term ffentlichkeit nor the sphere it denotes existed before the eighteenth
century (Hlscher 1979: 9). Those terms cannot simply be applied retroactively to medieval or ancient history. In contemporary Western societies, it
is hard to imagine how public life was conceptually captured at times when
those terms were not yet available (ibid.: 37).
Sociologically, that is to say by reference to institutional criteria, a public sphere in the sense of a separate realm distinguished from the private
sphere cannot be shown to have existed in the feudal society of the High

268Social Science History

Middle Ages. The publicity of feudal power representation was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like
a status attribute (Habermas 1989 [1962]: 7). Historically, the public sphere
as a realm between society and the state emerged in the national contexts of
the European Enlightenment and the founding era of the United States. The
emerging public sphere in the eighteenth century as a common space represents a mutation of the social imaginary, one crucial to the development
of modern society (Taylor 2004: 85).
The broader reception of Habermass early work on the public sphere
began in the United States only in 1989, when the first English translation of
his work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas 1989
[1962]) appeared. Since then Habermas has been the dominant point of reference for American scholarship on the public sphere. However, American
thought and research have had their own engagements with public sphere
analysis. These traditions have been largely forgotten in intellectual history.
Dewey and Mills in particular provided earlier formulations of what came to
be known as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Also, Hannah
Arendts (1968, 1998) contributions to public sphere analysis (see also Benhabib 1992) were underrecognized on both sides of the Atlantic until the
1990s (Calhoun and McGowan 1997).
Only in his later work does Habermas realize that Deweys Public and
Its Problems from 1927 (Dewey 1954) could have been an important source
for his early work on the public sphere. Deweys book itself emerged as an
answer to what he took as a challenge set up by Walter Lippmann (1960,
1993), in particular Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), and
by other elite-centered democratic theorists.
However, Deweys contribution, triggered by Lippmann, was by no
means the only one. Other American contributions to public sphere analysis preceded the first English translation of Habermass early book in 1989 or
even the original German publication in 1962. The latter applies to American pragmatism more generally and to the work of Mills (2000) in addition
to Deweys work. All these and other contributions have yet to be fully rediscovered, revealing multiple traditions of public sphere analysis in intellectual
history.

Comparative Historical Research269

Analytic Dimensions
The study of the public sphere is not an integrated research field. The following section provides an overview of analytic dimensions. Their investigation and discussion are spread out over many disciplines and often proceed in
multiple disciplinary terminologies. The quest for an integrative framework
is a necessary condition for well-defined comparative historical research.
The study of the first analytic dimensions, the external boundaries and
the internal divisions (differentiations) of the public sphere, allows inferences
on the capacity for reasoned public choice. The recent literature on citizenship (Kivisto and Faist 2007; Somers 2008) speaks to some dimensions of
the external boundaries and internal divisions of the public sphere discussed
below. However, citizenship studies often focus on the rights and obligations
of citizens rather than on the public sphere processes at large.

Boundaries of the Public Sphere

The external boundaries refer to the other of the public sphere: processes
closed to strangers. The boundaries around the public sphere are not clearcut but somewhat diffuse. There is a broad transition zone (Peters 2008: 77)
between communication in private settings and communication in informal public settings (communication with colleagues or distant acquaintances, encounters at social events or with strangers in public places) as well
as between plenary meetings of certain organizations or membership-based
associational life (internal public sphere) and public events. The adjectives
semiprivate and semipublic are indicative of this transition zone from the
intermediary public sphere to the private sphere, on the one hand, and to
restricted institutional settings, on the other, between publicity and intimacy,
visibility and secrecy.
The external boundaries of the intermediary public sphere are demarcated by the realm of secrecy and the private sphere. The realm of secrecy
is constituted by the back rooms of power of public authority: interpersonal
power networks and legal restrictions through censorship and repression.
Even though Millss underlying historical framework of the decline of the
capacity of the public sphere and the correlative rise of arcane power networks cannot be supported by the current state of comparative historical
research, his book The Power Elite (1956) (Mills 2000), beside Floyd Hunters

270Social Science History

Community Power Structure (1953) (see also Hunter 1959), fostered a line of
research that takes into account the power networks of the arcane sphere,
the back rooms of power. However concentrated, or rather dispersed and
therefore plurally structured, these networks are supposed to be, these interconnections of key actors, operating in the sphere of secrecy, are of central
importance (for an overview of this research field since Mills and Hunter,
see Domhoff 2006). Other approaches to detect interpersonal power networks are Pierre Bourdieus (1996) study of the rule of the state nobility
or the tradition of network analysis that has tracked down interpersonal connections and demonstrated that their configurations are indeed power networks, significantly affecting the operations of societal organizations and
institutions, though it is always hard to reconstruct the full set of connections
(for a selection of this research tradition, see Tilly 2005: 45). The literature
on investigative journalism deals with the question of uncovering such interpersonal power networks.
Also constitutive for the realm of secrecy are legal restrictions through
censorship and repression of public communication. Like Robert A. Dahls
(1971: 4) definition of democracy in terms of granting public contestation,
the public sphere relies on freedom of speech (Peters 2005), freedom of association (Gutmann 1998), and freedom of the press (Splichal 2003) and on the
ongoing accountability pressure on political representatives and institutions.
High-level legal restriction of public communication through censorship and
repression refers to the simulated, acclamatory public sphere (Ludes 1993;
Taylor 1999: 169) in authoritarian or totalitarian settings (Arendt 1973) or to
periods of actual or quasi-emergency government (Stone 2005), characterized by the shamming of communicative relations (Habermas 1987: 386).
The external boundaries of the public sphere are further demarcated by
the private sphere: the sphere of family and intimacy and the private economy, that is, the boundaries of the state and the public good and the categorical inequality that seals off those boundaries between the private and the
public. The boundaries between the public sphere and the private sphere are
not fixed but, as the later Habermas (1996a: 366) points out, defined relationally in terms of the different conditions of communication, that is, the conditions of intimacy and the conditions of publicity:
The threshold separating the private sphere from the public is not
marked by a fixed set of issues or relationships but by different condi-

Comparative Historical Research271

tions of communication. Certainly these conditions lead to differences in

the accessibility of the two spheres, safeguarding the intimacy of the one
sphere and the publicity of the other. However, they do not seal off the
private from the public but only channel the flow of topics from the one
sphere into the other.
Studies of the history of the private sphere (Aries 1989; Chartier 1989)
and its relationship to the public sphere raise two sets of boundary issues:
that of blurred boundaries (privacy issues) and that of sealed boundaries,
underpinned by categorical inequality. Categorical inequalities, including
gender and race, can reify the boundaries between the private sphere and
the public sphere. There is an extended literature in particular on the longstanding gendered nature of the public sphere (Pateman 1988; Fraser 1992;
Young 2000). These discussions helped establish a core distinction in the literature dealing with the public sphere: the relationship and empirical tensions between deliberation and inclusion. This fraught relationship between
epistemic processes and democratic participation has also become central in
discussions about the legitimacy of international organizations. Despite all
its limitations, national democracy has been the only effective institutionalization of democracy, precisely because it managed to couple inclusion and
deliberation to a considerable extent (Habermas 2007: 435).
The external boundaries of the public sphere are further marked by the
private economy. Recent literature focuses on major shifts of the sphere of
influence of the private economy, that is, shifts in economic policy and politics that have redrawn the boundaries of public institutions, including the
state and the public good. This includes boundary shifts like the formation
of neoliberalism as well as the rise of business and financial news coverage,
shifts from seeking government regulation of corporations or via organized
labor to directly targeting corporations through public contention, and tendencies to a moralization of markets.

Public Institutions and the Public Good

The state of public institutions and the public good is addressed by the variegated literature on the reach of the public sector, studies of private action
for the public good, and dispositional accounts of the common good. The
literature on the public sector includes assessments of transformations in

272Social Science History

public administration and public service, public universities and public education, public health, the welfare state and the privatization of risk (Calhoun
2006), and intellectual property rights (Boyle 2008). The literature on private
action for the public good includes studies of the nonprofit sector (Powell
and Clemens 1998; Powell and Steinberg 2006), including philanthropy, as
well as studies of professionalism. The contribution of professionalism to the
public good is seen as a result of the institutionalized inherent logics of professionalism and professional education (law, engineering, clergy, medicine,
nursing, etc.). Finally, there is a strand of literature featuring dispositional
accounts of the common good, public interest, and social capital, as opposed
to dispositions toward self-interest and the private good (e.g., Putnam 2000).

Differentiation of the Public Sphere

The internal divisions of the public sphere can be analyzed along three
dimensions of differentiation: the production structures, the social segmentation, and the stratification associated with public communication. The first
refers to the form and extent to which certain societal fields are involved in
the production structures of public communication and how they, as a result
of their interconnections, coproduce public communication. The second
and third dimensions refer to the social segmentation and stratification that
underpin public communication. When the term public is used in the plural,
this often refers to some internal differentiations of the public sphere in one
or more of these dimensions. Counterpublics are excluded by the dominant
public sphere. Their insular status can be measured in those three dimensions of differentiation.
The production structures of the public sphere are analyzed in the literature in two dimensions: as the result of the interplay of institutional fields
and on a center-periphery axis of political-administrative and economic
power. Using Max Webers (1958) widely deployed distinction of spheres,
complemented by the media field, the public sphere appears as an intermediary sphere among the various institutional fields of society: the political field,
including the state; the economic field; the media field; the academic field;
the religious field; and the art field. As the later Habermas (1996a: 373) put it,
The public sphere consists of an intermediary structure between the political system, on the one hand, and the private sectors of the lifeworld and functional systems, on the other hand.

Comparative Historical Research273

Many of these relationshipsthe form and extent to which certain institutional fields are involved in the production structures of public communicationare understudied. Among the better-studied relationships are the
overlap of the media field with the political field (party press), on the one
hand, and with the economic field (commercialization), on the other, and
how this affects the production of public communication. The broad literature on agenda setting is a response to these issues. Some literature discusses the effects of the decoupling of the media field from the political field
under the heading of mediatization, though this term is also used in a second, very different sense, indicating a scale shift from face-to-face to mediamediated public communication.
However, a detailed historical periodization of the changing relationships
among the media field, the political field, and the economic field (Schudson
1998; Hallin and Mancini 2004; Hallin 2008) and of the changing face of
public affairs media is rare in the literature. In an attempt to achieve relative
field autonomy, public broadcasting (Scannell 1990), not to be confused with
state broadcasting, represents an approximate model of equidistance of the
media field from other institutional fields.
Synthesizing studies with long-term historical perspectives on the
relationship of the arts field (literary public sphere, poetry, architecture,
performing arts, visual arts) to the public sphere are largely absent. Most
recently, there has been a certain increase of work on religion and the public
sphere (Habermas 2006b) and some new work on the relationship between
academe and the public sphere, as evident in the discussions about public
social science or public sociology (Burawoy 2005) and about the changed
importance of public intellectuals (Fleck et al. 2009).
The second dimension in which some of the literature analyzes the production structures of the public sphere is the circulation of power between
the center and the periphery of political-administrative and economic power
(Habermas 2006a; Peters 2008: 20), assessing the openness of the production of public communication and policy outcomes to the periphery. Among
the significant literature speaking to the production structure of the public
sphere on the center-periphery axis is the literature on civil society (Anheier
2004), if defined in an unambiguous way, referring to the actors at the periphery, distant from political-administrative and economic power; the literature
on the role of experts in relationship to laypeople, that is, the broader public (Turner 2003); and the literature on the direct policy outcomes of social

274Social Science History

movements (Giugni et al. 1999). Less studied is the relationship between

social movements or nongovernmental organizations and established actors
like major political parties and interest groups (Goldstone 2003). This relationship indicates the more indirect influence of nonestablished actors on
policy outcomes, transmitted through actors closer to the center of politicaladministrative and economic power.
A well-established distinction for analyzing the circulation of power on
the center-periphery axis is that between weak publics and strong publics
(Fraser 1992: 134; Habermas 1996b: 307; Brunkhorst 2002), which builds
on Talcott Parsonss (1967a, 1967b) distinction between influence and
power. A weak public has moral influence but no legally regulated, direct
access to political-administrative power. It has communicative power but
lacks political-administrative power, while a strong public has both.
The influence of weak publics is limited to the informal, relatively
wild or anarchic public sphere of the media, as Habermas (2006b) called
it in his recent work on religion and the public sphere. Strong publics, however, reach into the formal, largely face-to-face public sphere of representative institutions (like the parliament) regulated by legal procedures.
Among the concepts used in the literature to grasp the segmentation of
the public sphere is the distinction between issue publics, which are bound
together by single issues, and camps. The latter refers to deep party-political
cleavages with respect to whole sets of issues and opinions. In the cases of the
deepest cleavages between the traditional political milieus in western Europe,
this segmentation has also been studied under the heading of pillarization.
The literature on political machines and polarization as well as political
realignment speaks to these fragmentations as well. A special form of segmentation is expressed by the existence of diaspora public spheres, divided
from the main domestic public sphere by (among other things) the language in which public communication is conducted, often including foreignlanguage media. The segmentation of the public sphere indicates the different networks of social solidarity and belonging within a given public sphere.
Segmentary divisions may or may not overlap with stratificatory divisions.
Literature on the stratification of the public sphere assesses how the
process of public communication is affected by differences in education,
including phenomena like the literacy divide or digital divide, and by political inequalities and other hierarchical differences, including the division

Comparative Historical Research275

between speaker and audience roles or active versus passive participation in

large-scale public spheres.
The concept of counterpublics was formulated by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1993 [1972]) and later by Nancy Fraser (1992) in response to the
idealization of the bourgeois public sphere in Habermass early work, which
underestimated the exclusion built into it. Counterpublics can be understood as dissident networks of communication excluded by the dominant
public sphere and its hegemonic discourse. Their insular status is indicated
by their segmentary and/or stratificatory differentiation from the dominant
public sphere as well as by their highly separate production structure, as, for
example, discussed in the literature on so-called alternative media (Pajnik
and Downing 2008). In comparative perspective, counterpublics vary by
the extent to which reasoned debate and collective choice also operate as a
mechanism for their internal organization. Some of the literature reserves
the term counterpublics for the upper part of that scale, using different or
more general terms (like movement, protest group, etc.) for dissident networks
of communication with a low internal capacity for reasoned collective choice.
Further important analytic dimensions of the public sphere include the
effects of technological innovation, the scale of public communication, the
political scale of the public sphere (national vs. transnational public spheres
and local public spheres), and the analysis of public deliberation and public
culture at large. It is a recurrent phenomenon that whenever a major technological innovation takes place (e.g., broadcasting, the Internet), a considerable literature emerges, inferring either a decline or an improvement of the
epistemic and self-corrective capacity of the public sphere. Such diagnoses
are often empirically weak, since they often neglect or underestimate some
of the relevant external boundaries or internal divisions of the public sphere.
To the extent that they underestimate these relevant processes, they argue
according to what is called technological determinism.
Constituted by communication open to strangers, public sphere processes proceed on three different scales: the level of the media-mediated
public sphere and two levels of face-to-face public sphere, encounters
and organized gatherings (Gerhards and Neidhardt 1991). The distinction
between encounters and organized gatherings, however, is not a dichotomy
but a continuum of the extent of organization and the relative randomness
or spontaneity. The micro level of the public sphere consists of more or less

276Social Science History

accidental encounters (Goffman 1961) of strangers, that is, communication

on the sidewalk, on the train, while standing in line, and so on. The meso
level consists of organized gatherings and the macro level of media-mediated
communication. Network theorists developed an analog threefold distinction (Mische and White 1998; Ikegami 2000: 99798), calling the ephemeral
micropublic Goffman public as well. Another approach grasps the level of
face-to-face public communication as tiny publics (Fine and Harrington
2004).
The literature studying these scales of public communication in particular deals with the question of a scale shift from the face-to-face level to
the media-mediated level (Thompson 2005) and the related question of an
increasing division between speaker and audience roles or active versus passive participation in the public sphere. Some literature discusses this scale
shift under the heading of mediatization, a usage of the term that differs
from mediatization as the effects of the decoupling of the media field from
the political field, as discussed earlier.
The political scale of the public sphere distinguishes national public spheres from transnational public spheres as well as from local public
spheres. The question of transnational public spheres has become an issue as
a result of the relative shift of political and economic power to transnational
institutions. In particular, there is an extensive literature about the (largely
missing) European public sphere (Wessler et al. 2008). A central focus is on
the obstacles to the formation of transnational public spheres, with Europe
as a paradigmatic case. That literature diagnoses the lack of a shared transnational identity or transnational social imaginary.
Although internationalized issue publics have been emerging, an international public realm comparable in any way with those in nation-states
does not exist, even in the European Union. This would require the presence of a common agenda and shared key terms of reference, symbols, and
meanings in public culture; a collective identity that linked its members to
common public action and institutions (Peters 2008: 193); and an ongoing
mutual reference of the media. On the subnational political scales, the role
and transformations of urban public spheres has been a long-standing issue
(Park et al. 1925; Jacobs 1961: 7296; Thernstrom and Sennett 1969; Sennett 1977, 2000). More recently, there has been research on how local public
spheres have been affected by corporate ownership and control of local media
(Klinenberg 2007).

Comparative Historical Research277

Public Deliberation and Public Culture at Large

A large body of literature studies deliberation (Fishkin 1991; Fishkin and
Laslett 2003). Several criticisms have emerged with respect to this research
tradition. First, there is a potential empirical tension between deliberation
and inclusion. If underpinned by highly unequal access to education, deliberation can serve as a mask for domination. If a high complexity of discourse
in the public sphere coincides with a high educational divide, the discourse
will temporarily have exclusionary effects, even if its potential is inclusive.
This contradiction is at the root of studies (Polletta and Lee 2006) that look
into questions of whether the allegedly low-quality expressive storytelling in
the public sphere can under certain conditions improve deliberation because
it increases accessibility and thus inclusion.
Second, if not conceptualized appropriately, the focus on deliberation
alone misses the question of its outcome, its actual translation into public choice. That is why the term reasoned public choice captures the stakes
better. It better grasps the stakes of who makes history and the role that reason plays in human affairs, as Mills formulated it. Third, many deliberation
studies focus mainly on the decision process regarding immediate political
questions and the deliberative difference (Schneiderhan and Khan 2008)
during this short-term process. Fourth, the design of deliberation studies in
that sense tends to be quite ahistorical.
The stakes of reasoned public choice, however, have a much larger
meaning. It is not just about people making up their minds on topics on
the public agenda, using available information and opinions. It is not merely
about debating immediate political questions and not merely about decisions.
Rather, the stakes of reasoned public choice also include the identification of
problems in the first place and the public search for new solutions (Peters
2008: 237). In this sense, the identification of the public good is a social and
cultural project (Calhoun 1998).
This requires studying public culture at large, capturing both the processes of cultural reproduction and innovation and learning processes. Key
examples of such long-term transformations of public culture include the
various national discussions about coming to terms with the past (e.g.,
Germany with its Nazi past or the United States with its past of slavery and
legally sanctioned racial segregation).
This broad focus on public culture at large allows us to capture cultural
changes that are not easily reducible to advances or setbacks in the capacity

278Social Science History

for reasoned public choice but are relevant for understanding the public
sphere as a mechanism for social solidarity and belonging. Public culture
spans all key terms of reference (Williams 1958, 1983), symbols, and meanings that circulate publicly or are publicly accessible, relevant to a society at
large while not necessarily shared in the sense of commonly accepted (Peters
2008: 69). The realm in which this circulation takes place is the public sphere,
constituted by communication open to strangers. The analysis of public narratives (Somers 1994: 619) and of symbolic power is of central importance for
the comparative historical study of the public sphere.

History of the Public Sphere

All the analytic dimensions laid out above are relevant to the comparative historical study of the public sphere. Among the historical processes addressed
by the literature are the formation and transformation of the public sphere,
the role of the public sphere in periods of social and economic crisis and
with respect to political geography (non-Western public spheres). In addition, some studies provide insights into premodern settings of deliberation in
medieval contexts (Symes 2007) and in particular in city-states (Ober 2008).

Formation and Transformation of the Public Sphere

In 1962 Habermas published the historically and comparatively most comprehensive study, covering several analytic dimensions formulated above and
comparing France, England, and Germany. The discussion and criticism of
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas 1989 [1962])
have focused on the formation of the Enlightenment public sphere from the
representative publicity of the ancien rgime, on the one hand, and on the
decline framework of its structural transformation, on the other. This wide
discussion and criticism, synthesized in a conference volume edited by Calhoun (1992), has prompted Habermas to make a wide range of revisions,
acknowledging many elements of criticism and largely discarding the former
framework of decline (Habermas 1992c).
There has been a considerable amount of new work since Habermass
original study about the formation of the public sphere in the eighteenth
century in Western societies. More recently, there has also been increased
research on the transnationalization of public spheres. In contrast, there has

Comparative Historical Research279

been little new synthesizing work on the transformation of the public sphere
on the level of nation-states. In the early 1980s Habermas (1992b: 12930)
intended to conduct a new study on the structural transformation of the public sphere, providing a new synthesis of the fragmented literature. However,
he did not realize his intention. Perhaps such a new study with deepened
historical specifications would have led him to a periodization of the structural transformation of the public sphere in terms of multiple transformations rather than in terms of a single process. In the field of media and communication studies in particular, media history has been largely neglected
or narrowly focused on the media organizations as such, leaving out their
embeddedness in the wider society (Curran 1991, 2006).

Periods of Social and Economic Crisis

Significant changes of public communication in periods of social and economic crisis, characterized by the dissemination of increased uncertainty
about the future, have been pointed out by several authors. American pragmatism already captured this with the doubt-belief cycle (Peirce 1986), disseminated through public communication (Cooley 1966: 37881; 1983:
12134). In a different political context, Milton Friedman (2002 [1982]: xiv)
put in a nutshell how it matters what kind of ideas are lying around in the
public sphere in a time of crisis: Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces
real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the
ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop
alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the
politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. However, there is little
systematic and comparative research on the crisis-induced changes of public
communication (Imhof et al. 199399). Nevertheless, literature dealing with
the contested nature of the public sphere gives insights into this central phenomenon in the social process. Some of the literature on contentious politics and social movements, scandals, construction of social problems, moral
entrepreneurs, crisis communication, and risk sheds light on the significant
shifts in public communication in times of social and economic crisis.
Key issues here are the role of unanticipated consequences of collective action (Merton 1936), previously unidentified by public communication
due to its limitations by historically conditioned taken-for-granted assumptions (or doxa, in Bourdieus sense), the role of aggregate disappointment

280Social Science History

experiences as a driving force in human affairs (Hirschman 1982: 1424),

and the relationship between economic crisis and a crisis of orientation. The
latter refers to increased uncertainty and contingency in the face of multiple future horizons. This leads to the question of patterns of social change
(Imhof 2006). A key pattern discussed in the literature is the oscillation
between periods of intense private interest and concern about private welfare
goals and periods of intense public action and concern about the public good
(Hirschman 1982: 38; Schlesinger 1999) related to the oscillation between
relatively stable periods and periods of crisis.

Political Geography of the History of the Public

Sphere: Non-Western Public Spheres
A key issue in the study of the history of the public sphere is the variations
with respect to political geography. The classic figures focused on the historical formation and transformation of the public sphere in Western societies. A growing body of literature addresses emergent public spheres in
non-Western societies (Eisenstadt 2002), including the question of emerging
transnational public spheres in such non-Western contexts (Lynch 2006).

Democratization and Social

Boundaries and Solidarities
After this overview of analytic and historical dimensions for the study of the
public sphere, we return to the stakes of the public sphere with which this
introduction started. On the one hand, its stakes lie in its capacity to shape
social life through reasoned debate and public choice. That is, it matters for
the process of democratization or de-democratization. On the other hand,
the public sphere is at the same time also a form of and process for forming
social solidarity.
The classic authors like Dewey, Mills, and Habermas measure democratization and de-democratization precisely in terms of variations in the
capacity for reasoned public choice. Although democratic majority rule is
seen as a legitimate way to come to decisions under pressures of time for
addressing a certain social problem, the ultimate measurement of democracy
rests on how a majority became a majority. The focus is on the deliberative
processes preceding elections and votes and on how those decisions shape

Comparative Historical Research281

social life. The empirically difficult relationship between deliberation and

inclusion has been most effectively coupled on the level of national democracies (Habermas 2007: 435).
More specifically, for the classic authors, the extent of reasoned debate
and collective choice, that is, the extent of democratization, depends on
the historically specific structural setting of the public sphere. Or in Tillys
(2000: 2) formulation, Democratization is a special condition of public
politics. Strictly speaking, then, democratization is not a consequence of
changes in public politics but a special kind of alteration of public politics
(ibid.: 5). Democratization means increasingly high levels of protected consultation (ibid.), that is, the collective power of a regimes population to determine to some degree its own fate (Tilly 2007a: 6). Like the emphasis of the
classic authors on public sphere processes, Tillys process-oriented conception of democratization also criticizes procedural definitions of democracy,
since they work with an extremely thin conception of the political processes
involved (ibid.: 8). Thus the brokerage between the so-called public sphere
literature and the process-oriented democratization literature is promising.
However, the public sphere is at the same time a process for forming
and maintaining social solidarityor, as Tilly called it, social boundaries.
Nationalism played a major role both in the formation of the Enlightenment
public sphere and in its subsequent structural transformation in terms of the
massive extension of the public (Deutsch 1966; Anderson 1991; Eley 1992).
These stakes were less emphasized by Dewey and Mills and by Habermas in
his early work on the historical formation and the transformation of the public sphere. The public sphere as an ongoing process of communication open
to strangers is not only a mechanism for debate and choice but also a form of
and a process for forming solidarity and a sense of belonging (Calhoun 2002:
15869), including affective investments (Berlant 2008). Public sphere processes are key to social boundary processes. The literature on social imaginaries (Taylor 2004) emphasizes this issue as well. More recently, this has
also helped explain why transnational public spheres have remained weak.
Taking stock of the analytic and historical dimensions above has
highlighted the fragmentation of the study of the public sphere. All dimensions discussed above require increased attention and comparative historical
research. In many of the discussed areas, moving ahead in the comparative historical study of the public sphere is possible to a considerable extent
through synthetic empirical discussions of the fragmented research litera-

282Social Science History

ture from various disciplines. The overview of analytic dimensions can show
the direction to a framework for well-defined comparative historical research
of the public sphere, the framework for what Tilly (2007a: 55) once called
measurement in a broad sense of the word: not so much precise numbers
as careful placement of cases on analytically relevant continua. The careful
placement of cases of the public sphere on analytically relevant continua
can reveal in depth how this central sphere of social life matters for both
democratization and social boundary making.

Moving Ahead: Brief Overview

of the Articles
The articles gathered in this special issue move ahead in many of the analytic and historical dimensions laid out in this introduction. Charles Tilly
(19292008) investigates the historical formation of the public sphere in
the form of the rise of the public meeting in Great Britain between 1758
and 1834. The profound changes in frequency and character, the enormous
increase of public meetings, and the sharp decline in the relative frequency
of violent gatherings serve as indicators of the expansion of the public sphere
and its capacity to shape the social process. Tilly had already finished his
paper several months before the SSHA panel. He had planned to revise it
and extend it considerably for this special issue. Sadly, his death prevented
him from doing so.
Like Tillys article, Craig Calhouns also focuses on Great Britain in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, investigating how the early
bourgeois public sphere was structured precisely by exclusion. However,
celebrating counterpublics is not a solution to this problem, according to
Calhoun, since it evades the question of how diverse publics can contribute
to the more general formation of public opinion on a scale sufficient to influence the state or other social institutions. To come to a better understanding
of this, Calhoun situates the public sphere within the larger field of power.
While Tilly and Calhoun investigate the historical formation of the public sphere (in Great Britain), Andrew Abbott studies an important period in
the transformation of the public sphere (in the United States), identifying a
profound shift in the relationship between academe and the public sphere.
By focusing on the most publicly visible of the prewar Chicago sociologists,
Charles Richmond Henderson, Abbott uncovers a profound transformation

Comparative Historical Research283

from the prewar to the postwar sociological generation: the emergence of a

sharp separation between advocacy and expertise. Abbotts article portrays
Henderson as one of the last great American sociologists to inhabit a public
sphere that ranged across the boundaries that seem to us absolute, moving
seamlessly from expertise to advocacy and back. In this sense, the discussion
about public sociology in recent years can be understood as an attempt to
rediscover the world Henderson and his peers inhabited as a matter of course.
Finally, Elisabeth S. Clemens discusses the articles by Tilly, Calhoun,
and Abbott and investigates the relationship and tension between inclusion
and deliberation in the history of the public sphere. Even though the concurrent progress of increasingly inclusive democratic participation and the
increasing quality of public deliberation is often absent in particular settings
at particular times, Clemens points out that it is crucial for historical analysis
to study how and why it sometimes happens that inclusion and public deliberation progress in tandem.

Notes
The initial encouragement for organizing an SSHA panel titled The Public Sphere and
Comparative Historical Research came from Julia Adams after a talk with the same title
that I gave at Phil Gorskis invitation to the Comparative Research Workshop at Yale University. I thank both Adams and Gorski as well as the panel participants, the contributors
to this special issue, and the editors of Social Science History.
1 A more comprehensive attempt to take stock of the compartmentalized literature
is the growing Public Sphere Guide, an online guide provided at publicsphere.ssrc
.org/guide by the Social Science Research Council, cosponsored by New York Universitys Institute for Public Knowledge. See also the related online essay forum at
publicsphere.ssrc.org.
2 Such an elusive, underspecified usage of civil society (see also Tilly 2000: 14) also
seems to have been Tillys underlying concern in the early 1990s, when he said that
the concepts of civil society and the public sphere were morally admirable but analytically useless (see Emirbayer and Sheller 1999: 145). In addition, Tilly started to
theorize his own notion of public politics in detail only later in the 1990s.

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