The Configuration of the Spanish Public Sphere

From the Enlightenment to the Indignados

David Jiménez Torres, Leticia Villamediana González, David Jiménez Torres, Leticia Villamediana González

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789202366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Since the explosion of the indignados movement beginning in 2011, there has been a renewed interest in the concept of the "public sphere" in a Spanish context: how it relates to society and to political power, and how it has evolved over the centuries. The Configuration of the Spanish Public Sphere brings together contributions from leading scholars in Hispanic studies, across a wide range of disciplines, to investigate various aspects of these processes, offering a long-term, panoramic view that touches on one of the most urgent issues for contemporary European societies.

Part I

The Eighteenth Century

Chapter 1

Spain and Habermas’ Public Sphere

A Revisionist View

Sally-Ann Kitts

Introduction

Since it was first published in 1962, and especially since it appeared in English translation in 1989, Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has had a huge influence on historians’ understanding of how the gradual increase in public involvement in all aspects of society and politics came about from the late seventeenth century.¹ Habermas’ critical examination of the conditions under which there developed in Western societies rational-critical public discussion of wide-ranging cultural and political subjects, as Jacob (1994: 95) writes, ‘drew attention to the structural transformation toward modernity signalled in the eighteenth century by the increasingly common invocation of “the public”’. It has brought to the fore hitherto underrepresented or neglected voices from early periods of the modern world; we now pay closer attention to a much wider range of cultural sources that reveals to us the ‘lived experience’ of eighteenth-century people, ‘the web of voluntary association and informal sociability found in salons, scientific societies, coffee houses, literary and philosophical societies, theaters’ (Jacob 1994: 96) and, adding to her list specifically for the Spanish case, tertulias (regular social gatherings) and Economic Societies. We have at our disposal a useful heuristic that can account persuasively for and extend our understanding of how individual ideas and voices have been able to play an increasingly important role in the development of modern societies in Europe and the Americas.

In Spain, however, Habermas’ heuristic has been little used and alternative concepts have largely provided the methodology for accounts of the development of public opinion and modern society there.² Pérez-Díaz (1998: 276), for example, offers a confident reading of the nature and development of the public sphere in Spain without any reference to Habermas, based instead on a concept of ‘civil society’ that contrasts Oakeshott’s nomocratic and teleocratic models of statehood, ‘or their equivalents, “civil association” and “enterprise association”’. His conclusion reiterates a very traditional view that sees Spain’s ‘dreams of a vita civile . . . lagging far behind’ those of England. Also without recourse to Habermas, Fernández Sebastián (2015) traces the usage of the phrase ‘public opinion’ by contemporary sources, concluding that the phenomenon itself does not really come into being until the first third of the nineteenth century.

Bolufer Peruga (2006) employs the concept of ‘sociability’ to provide a thoughtful and detailed discussion of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century public sphere in France and Spain, which describes ‘the emergence of many types of sociability’ in eighteenth-century Spain. She briefly describes Habermas’ concept and notes that it has raised a number of critical responses; however, she dismisses it due to what she describes as ‘his restrictive identification of the enlightened public sphere solely with the bourgeois and antiabsolutist model’ (Bolufer Peruga 2006: 126–27). Her argument, based on the critiques of van Horn Melton (2003), Pérez Cantó and de la Nogal (2005), Landes (1988) and Jacob (1994), is that it is unsuited to the reality of the majority of European countries and its colonies, which developed more complex critical relationships between the nobility, the clergy and the middle classes than those described by the Habermasian account. She sees it as idealist and abstract, and argues that it fails to recognise that the new spaces of sociability were restricted, exclusive and far from egalitarian. For Bolufer Peruga then, the Habermasian public sphere is a reference point to be acknowledged, but then rejected as irrelevant to Spain.

Valero (1999), on the other hand, has found Habermas’ theory to be useful in accounting for the development of sociedades patrióticas (Patriotic Societies) in the 1830s. He argues that Spain did not have an authentic public sphere, but rather ‘a simulacrum of publicity in which a constant effort takes place to empty it of political antagonism’ (1999: 197), seeing the interdependence of state and public sphere as a negative factor that limits its development in Spain. He describes the Spanish public sphere as ‘atrophied’ and in a state of ‘permanent limitation and precariousness’ in the eighteenth century, with no real significance until the period of the Liberal Triennium and the rise of Patriotic Societies (1820–23) (Valero 1999: 200, 203).

Plenty more examples could be added to these, many offering illuminating research on the development of the public sphere without recourse to Habermas, some specifically rejecting his theories as not applicable to Spain, and others using aspects of them to conclude that the public sphere in Spain was inferior when compared to its apparently more progressive and enlightened northern neighbours.³ So how relevant is Habermas’ theory to our understanding of the social, cultural, intellectual and political life of eighteenth-century Spain? Is there anything of positive value to be had in using Habermas’ ideas as an heuristic to help us to explain and understand the Spanish case? My contention is that there definitely is and I approach his text as Landes does: while rightly critical of a number of its features, she nonetheless describes it as ‘a gifted historical-sociological account’, ‘a narrative of modernity’:

a tale of the rise of the public sphere (against great political obstacles posed by censorship and other forms of political despotism practiced by the absolutist state); its triumph (in the vibrant institutions of a free press, clubs, philosophical societies, and the cultural life of early liberal society, and through the revolutionary establishment of parliamentary and democratic regimes). (Landes 1995: 92–93)

Likewise, I believe Habermas’ account can be used productively to help us understand the early development of the Spanish public sphere as neither a failure nor a pale imitation of others, but rather as an integral part of the European and pan-American Enlightenment. In the same way as Astigarraga’s recent volume seeks to reconsider Spain’s place in Western historiography, rejecting marginalised and distorted evaluations of the Spanish Enlightenment as ‘“imported from abroad, mainly neighbouring France, or [as] “inexistent”, “insufficient”, “limited” or “weak”’ (2015: 4), it is vital that we review Habermas’ suggestive and influential account of the public sphere. We need to consider both how it might help to illuminate the complex period of the Spanish Enlightenment and the problems that can arise through unchallenged or prescriptive readings of Habermas based on its pervasive influence and domination. It is important that we actively reject what Martí-López has referred to as the continued othering and marginalisation of Spain, the ‘geographic, political, and cultural eccentricity’ with which it is ‘perceived and constructed by the bourgeois “northern Europe”’ by bringing the Spanish perspective to bear on such a central theory (Martí-López 2002: 45). We can do this by reflecting on how it applies to Spain while at the same time critically engaging with the concept itself from a Spanish perspective and thereby contributing to its continued refinement and adaptation.

This is the aim of the present chapter. After a brief account of the key aspects of Habermas’ theory of the origins of the public sphere, it will consider its application to the Spanish case, indicating Spain’s common beginnings and similarities to other European countries before examining aspects of difference. Using the notion of the Kuhnian paradigm as a methodology (Kuhn 2012), it will explore how an understanding of the particularities of the Spanish case can further the development and refinement of Habermas’ theory as an heuristic to show how increasing numbers of ordinary educated Spanish people, in spite of many obstacles, came together and expressed themselves in ways and in discourses characteristic of modernity from the late seventeenth century onwards.

The Habermasian Public Sphere

Habermas’ account of the development of the bourgeois public sphere has been incisively described as ‘an historically saturated discourse theory of society’ (Landes 1995: 93). He seeks to understand the processes by which modern forms of government, involving a critical relationship between public and state, developed from the absolutist regimes of the early modern period to involve, by the nineteenth century, a wide range of individuals from the educated upper and middle classes. His focus is on the crucial role that is played in this by rational language in the form of communications of very varied types. While he defines this ‘new domain of a public sphere’ as one ‘whose decisive mark was the published word’, he describes it through a multiplicity of formal and informal social institutions, gatherings and activities as well as publishing houses, lending libraries, journals and the periodical press (Habermas 1989: 16). He explores how these forms, and the nature of the opinions expressed within them, changed and developed between the seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, using examples from the different national experiences of Britain, France and Germany to illustrate and exemplify his ideas.

While noting that these many different institutions varied greatly in terms of such specifics as their composition, their proceedings and their subject matter, Habermas argues that they all shared certain key characteristics: first, the sole arbiter was reason, with the better argument and not the status of the individual concerned being the deciding factor; second, they opened up new areas for debate, with no subject deemed to be unacceptable; and, third, they were in principle inclusive and open to all members of the bourgeoisie:

However exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people, persons who – insofar as they were propertied and educated – as readers, listeners, and spectators could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion. (Habermas 1989: 37)

It is important to note here the blend of both the historical and the ideal in Habermas’ argument. These are ideal universal principles not specific historically verifiable descriptions, as he makes clear: ‘Not that this idea of the public was actually realized in earnest in the coffee-houses, the salons, and the societies; but as an idea it had become institutionalized and thereby stated as an objective claim. If not realized, it was at least consequential’ (Habermas 1989: 36). He recognises that in practice, they did not generally take these forms and the key notion that we should draw from this is the idea of a new mentality, a new sense of the possibilities of the individual and the nature of his or her associations with others that altered that individual’s own perspective.

A further ideal was the increasing separation of state and society, which Habermas sees as emerging as the nature of the relationship between the state and the public changed and developed, and as the bourgeois public sphere came into being. He sees ‘the emergence of society as a realm distinct from the state’ as a corollary of the early modern rise of the nation-state, as van Horn Melton (2003: 4–5) explains: ‘The modern state, with its monopoly of force and violence, would become the sphere of public power, while society came to be understood as a realm of private interest and activity.’ Previously during the Middle Ages, Habermas argues, such a distinction did not exist as power was largely distributed in a much more local and devolved way and thus the political and social were intimately connected. With the consolidation of power in the authority of an absolute monarch, which characterised the development of the nation-state, ‘civil society came into existence as the corollary of a depersonalized state authority’ (Habermas 1989: 19). What changed, then, as the bourgeois public sphere came into existence was the relationship between the state and the public. It was initially one that Habermas (1989: 5, 10) calls ‘representative publicness’ or ‘publicity of representation’, whereby the absolute ruler (continuing in and expanding upon the personal displays of power of the feudal lord) demonstrated his authority through ceremonial and public displays of the court that his subjects passively witnessed. However, because this public representation of authority depended on the presence of an audience to witness it, this audience was thereby constituted as private, in the sense of not holding an official position or public office and ‘for the first time private and public spheres became separate in a specifically modern sense’ (Habermas 1989: 11). As van Horn Melton (2003: 5) explains: ‘It was within this private social realm, the embryo form of modern “civil” society, that the bourgeois public sphere would emerge.’

It was the rise of early capitalism that Habermas (1989: 15) argues led to the eventual dissolution of this power structure through the rise of the bourgeois public sphere. The key factors of ‘the traffic in commodities and news’ led to the development of what Ettinghausen (2015: 11–12) terms ‘the pre-periodical press’ and characterises as ‘a pan-European phenomenon’. In fact, this traffic was transoceanic as Borreguero Beltrán’s fascinating account (2010) of the communications network established by Philip II has shown. The growing need and desire for information saw the early irregular communications turn, by the middle of the seventeenth century, into publications with a regular weekly and then daily periodicity. This form quickly became of interest and use to the state authorities, leading to a new form of representativeness for a new form of public and the creation of the first ‘public sphere’. As this new commodity of the periodical developed, it took on new forms and engaged with increasing commodification of culture, leading to the learned article that informed the public about other new publications, and the moral weeklies that sought to raise new topics of interest and to educate its members. This was the stage in the development of what Habermas (1989: 23) labels the ‘literary public sphere’ and marked the moment at which ‘the public concern regarding the private sphere of civil society was no longer confined to the authorities but was considered by the subjects as one that was properly theirs’. It was the time that saw the development, in parallel and in conjunction with the press, of the other institutions and activities described above. It is important to note the transformation in attitudes about the self that this development reveals to be taking place; Crossley and Roberts (2004: 3) argue that it was as a result of a ‘new concept and experience of individuality and privacy’ that people came to understand their relationship to the state and to each other in new ways that would eventually lead them to seek to take personal control over them. Habermas (1989: 29) calls it ‘the training ground for a critical public reflection still preoccupied with itself – a process of self-clarification of private people focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel privateness’. The other important thing to note is its rational quality, the recognition by increasing numbers of people that they could make critical use of their own reason to discover themselves and the world they inhabited.

The final stage of the development of Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere saw it take on political dimensions in terms of a shift in focus from the literary and cultural world to the overtly political. What he means by ‘political’ in this context is an important question. While he writes at one stage that ‘[t]he political task of the bourgeois public sphere was the regulation of civil society’, a broad definition that was very much the concern of the ‘moral weeklies’ that he locates at the heart of the literary (i.e. prepolitical) public sphere, he later goes on to explain it in more specifically conflictive terms:

A political consciousness developed in the public sphere of civil society which, in opposition to absolute sovereignty, articulated the concept of and demand for general and abstract laws and which ultimately came to assert itself (i.e. public opinion) as the only legitimate source of this law. (Habermas 1989: 52, 54)

This notion of the political has several important particular features and implications. The first is that it involved the idea of a clear split between state authority and the public sphere such that they were ‘in opposition’ to each other. The second is that it was characterised by what Bauman (1987: 74) has described as features of ‘enlightened radicalism . . . the drive to legis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: A Spanish Public Sphere?
• Part I: The Eighteenth Century
• Part II: The Nineteenth Century
• Part III: The Twentieth Century
• Part IV: The Twenty-First Century
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
• Index