
Contents
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In Search of the ‘Shadowy Phantom’ In Search of the ‘Shadowy Phantom’
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The ‘Public Sphere’ in the Seventeenth Century The ‘Public Sphere’ in the Seventeenth Century
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A New Public Sphere? A New Public Sphere?
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Conclusion Conclusion
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Notes Notes
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Bibliography Bibliography
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24 The Public Sphere
Get accessThomas E. Kaiser is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. The author of more than twenty-five articles on the political culture of the Old Regime and the French Revolution, he is also the co-author of Europe, 1648–1815: From the Old Regime to the Age of Revolution (2004), and co-editor of Conspiracy in the French Revolution (2007) and From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution (2011). Currently he is working on a study of the interaction of French diplomacy and domestic politics, provisionally titled Marie Antoinette and the Austrian Plot, 1748–1794.
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Published:18 September 2012
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Abstract
According to Habermas, there were two incarnations of the “public,” or as the English translation renders it “public sphere,” under the Ancien Régime. The first arose during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the royal state gradually absorbed powers and rights previously exercised by semi-public corporations, localities, and individuals. This institutional reshuffling, in Habermas's view, entailed a fresh division between the “public” and “private” realms. “Public,” according to Habermas, came to mean state-related and denoted the sphere occupied by a “bureaucratic apparatus with regulated spheres of jurisdiction” that exerted “a monopoly over the legitimate use of coercion.” “Private,” by contrast, denoted the sphere occupied by those who held no office and were for that reason “excluded from any share in public authority.” Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Habermas argued, a second “public sphere” took shape “within the tension-charged field between state and society” According to Habermas, the social nature of this new “bourgeois public sphere” allowed for the public articulation of previously private bourgeois family values in public settings.
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