Oscar Aponte

Seminar: Histories of the Public Sphere in Latin America

Spring 2019

Newspapers and Journalists: A Comparative Approach of Habermas’ Public Sphere

and Rama’s Lettered City

Periodical publications such as newspapers, pamphlets or magazines have frequently been

used as basic sources for historians dealing with politics, economics, or culture. As they are

published on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis, these publications render available crucial

information for historical scholarship. However, besides being taken as archival sources, scholars

like Jürgen Habermas and Ángel Rama have considered periodical publications as objects of

historical inquiry in and on its own. In this review essay, I shall explore Habermas’ notion of the

public sphere and Rama’s notion of the lettered city, focusing on how they address the study of

newspapers and journalists. I argue that both Habermas and Rama develop theoretical models that

besides explaining major historical changes in Europe and Latin America respectively inform the

history of journalism and the press. On the one hand, in explaining the structural transformation

of the bourgeois public sphere in Europe, Habermas proposes a historical account of the

development of the press based on its political and economic characteristics. On the other hand, in

explaining the articulation of letrados, cities, and power, Rama traces the history of journalists as

members of an emerging intellectual class in Latin America and the tensions between the press

and power in the region. By combining the two, I consider historians gain an understanding of

newspapers not only as institutions of economic, intellectual, and political life but also as crucial

actors in the making of power relations.

Originally published in German in 1962, Jürgen Habermas’ Structural Transformation of

the Public Sphere established the public sphere as a new field of research in relation with but

distinct from the study of the state, the civil society, and the communicative systems. As Pablo

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Oscar Aponte
Seminar: Histories of the Public Sphere in Latin America
Spring 2019

Piccato argues, since then the history of the public sphere as a field of historical scholarship has

brought together scholars that share an interest in republican modernization, state formation and

the emergence of civil societies.1 In Habermas’ pioneering research about the bourgeois public

sphere in Europe, it is defined as the place where private people come together as a public based

on reason as the only premise.2 For it refers to an unfinished historical transformation rather than

to a stable structure, as Piccato asserts, the public sphere is the outcome of two historical

processes.3 In the first place, the emergence of finance trade and commercial capitalism. As

formerly private economic activity reoriented toward a commodity market and expanded under

public direction and supervision, the market replaced the household as the foundation of modern

economics. In the second place, the emergence of spaces of social life as civil society came into

existence as the corollary of a depersonalized state authority. In that new context, activities

previously relegated to the private realm emerged into the public sphere.4 This early commercial

system created the place for the public sphere’s most preeminent institution: the press. Since the

early seventeenth century, journals appeared in Europe on a daily basis responding to the need of

commercial networking. As commodity circulation increased, the traffic of news accelerated

thanks to merchants, who were in charge of bringing news from their trips abroad.5

For the press, in particular, Habermas proposes a compelling interpretation of the shifting

balance between newspapers’ business and commercial goals and ideological and political ones

over the years. In the early seventeenth century, Habermas argues, for the press developed out of

1
Pablo Piccato, “Public Sphere in Latin America: A Map of the Historiography,” Social History 35, no. 2 (2010): 165.
2
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 27.
3
Piccato, “Public Sphere in Latin America,” 167–68.
4
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 19–20.
5
Habermas, 20–25.

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Oscar Aponte
Seminar: Histories of the Public Sphere in Latin America
Spring 2019

the system of private correspondence, newspapers were organized in the form of small handicraft

business. Accordingly, the publisher was interested in his enterprise mainly as a business and his

activity was confined to the organization of the flow of news and the collection of news itself. In

the turn of the nineteenth century, when the press developed from a business in pure news reporting

to one involving ideologies and viewpoints, the commercial purpose formerly predominant

receded almost entirely to the background and a political element came to the front. Newspapers

owners turned from merchants of news to dealers of public opinion. Although usually the same

person was the author, the editor, the publisher, and the printer at the same time, the editorial

function appeared and changed the internal organization of newspapers. In this second phase,

newspapers were no longer a mere vehicle for the transportation of information but not yet a

medium for culture as an object of consumption.6

Finally, Habermas continues, from the late nineteenth century on, a transition takes place

from a press that took ideological sides to one that was primarily a business—namely, the modern

commercial press. Far from being the forum of rational-critical debate it used to be, the press was

released from the pressure of taking sides ideologically and abandoned its polemical stances in

order to concentrate on the profit opportunities for a commercial business—profit mostly coming

from the advertising business. Although once again newspapers had the unequivocal character of

a private commercial enterprise, in contrast to the business of the old publishers, this time it was

organized on the level of the big business of advanced capitalism. In consequence, the press

became an institution of certain participants in the public sphere in their capacity as private

individuals, that is to say, the institution for private individuals to invade the public sphere.7

6
Habermas, 181–85.
7
Habermas, 185–87.

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Oscar Aponte
Seminar: Histories of the Public Sphere in Latin America
Spring 2019

While Habermas focuses on some European countries in the transition to democratic and

modern nation-states, Rama addresses the making and convergence of cities and letrados in Latin

America from the Spanish conquest trough the wars of independence to the twentieth century. As

Piccato argues, Rama’s Lettered City presents a paradigmatic account of the intellectuals and the

spatial evolution of cities in Latin America.8 According to Rama, the Spanish Crown knew well

that in order to facilitate the concentration and hierarchical differentiation of power, the cities of

Latin America required a specialized social group. Therefore, at the center of each colonial city,

they nestled a lettered city to attend to the mechanisms and needs of political power. An initial

group to fit these needs were the Jesuits, who constituted a small but not inconsequential part in

the articulation of power in the colonies.9

During and after the wars of independence and the making of modern republican states in

Latin America, the lettered city at the core of the real city changed but did not disappear. As Rama

argues, the group of intellectuals mostly formed by ecclesiastic personnel in the colonial period

was replaced by civil and professional intellectuals such as administrators, educators, lawyers,

notaries, among others.10 The fact that the place and role of the lettered city was transformed but

did not disappear facing challenges such as the wars of independence in the early nineteenth

century and the modernization attempts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, points

out to a particular configuration of the relationship between intellectuals, cities and power relations

in Latin America. According to Rama, a number of factors accounted for the supremacy of the

lettered city. In the first place, their strict concentration in urban centers, which provided them

8
Piccato, “Public Sphere in Latin America,” 179.
9
Ángel Rama, The Lettered City (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 16–18.
10
Rama, 18.

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Oscar Aponte
Seminar: Histories of the Public Sphere in Latin America
Spring 2019

with a kind of power that only other groups of society since the colonial times had, such as it was

the case of large-scale merchants also based in the cities. In the second place, their services in the

manipulation of symbolic languages and the intermediation in systems of social communication.

Finally, and stressed by Rama as the principal explanation for the ascendency of letrados, their

ability to manipulate writing in largely illiterate societies.11 The ascendency of the letrados

strengthened as the lettered city became the city of protocols and this group of intellectuals

provided the power with the documents necessary for it to be exerted—laws, regulations,

proclamations, certificates, propaganda, among others.12

Out of all the different professionals that were part of the intellectuals analyzed by Rama,

journalists, and in general all the public men writing for newspapers, had a crucial role. According

to Rama, unlike the letrados involved in education and diplomacy, journalists enjoyed certain

levels of independence from the government. Although Rama recognizes that the most broadly

circulated newspapers, dailies, and magazines in Latin America were business-oriented by the

early twentieth century, he also stresses that most periodical publications remained predominantly

politically-oriented and as such were a fundamental place for public debates. Furthermore, the

expansion of literacy and public education propelled by late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-

century modernizers had a direct influence in the enlargement of the reading public. 13 In short,

summarizes Rama, journalism had a privileged place in the lettered city as long as it offered

intellectuals considerable autonomy in many Latin American countries, creating even the space

for political opposition to appear.14

11
Rama, 22–24.
12
Rama, 29.
13
Rama, 50–52.
14
Rama, 88.

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Oscar Aponte
Seminar: Histories of the Public Sphere in Latin America
Spring 2019

In conclusion, both Habermas and Rama propose a model of historical change that take to

the forefront the role of written, published culture, public debates, and cultural objects in

explaining state formation and republican democracies. While Habermas focuses on the

institutional role of the press as well as the economic and political characteristics attached to it,

Rama tells a spatial and symbolic story where journalists, as members of the letrados group, came

in close relation to power, exerted it and even opposed to it. By combining these two insights into

the history of the press, I consider that the study of newspapers in twentieth-century Latin America

can be greatly benefited. Habermas’ model of the evolution of the press, although not

corresponding to the situation in Latin America, provides a fruitful insight to analyze how

periodical publications in Latin American countries moved from politically-oriented papers in the

nineteenth century to commercially-oriented ones in the twentieth century. However, given the

persistence of the political component in newspapers and the prevailing power of the written letter

in Latin America, Habermas’ explanation falls short. In fact, Habermas’ model must be

complemented with Rama’s, for newspapers remained predominately political at the same time

that they became successful private businesses because, as Rama argues, dominance over writing

was an incomparable source of power in countries where literacy rates remained low.