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CHAPTER 2. THE PUBLIC SPHERE 26
between private people. To be sure, the individuated satisfaction of needs
might be achieved in a public fashion, namely, in the company of many others;
but a public sphere itself did not emerge from such a situation. When
the laws of the market governing the sphere of commodity exchange and of
social labor also pervaded the sphere reserved for private people as a public,
rational-critical debated had a tendency to be replaced by consumption,
and the web of public communication unraveled into acts of individuated
reception, however uniform in mode (Habermas 1989, 160-161).
2.3 The Liberal Public Sphere
In contrast to the idealized public sphere, the liberal public sphere denies the existence
of a public interest, and seeks not to enable citizens to discover what they
have in common, but to regulate their conflicts in a fair and equitable manner. In
addition, the liberal public sphere provides legitimacy to both state and private
market actions which seek to allocate resources within society.
A liberal public sphere is consistent with a vision of democratic society that suggests
the role of citizen participation is primarily to protect the citizen from actions
by the government that would undermine the “universal interest.” To protect the
people, universal suffrage, secret ballots and frequent elections are required. Citizen
electors must assume the responsibility of choosing representatives to represent
their interests in parliaments. Electors are responsible for making wellinformed
choices in elections; elections are intended to provide policy guidance
to the representatives. Following Pateman’s (1970) discussion, this exploration of
democratic theories which emphasize the protective function of political participation
uses as a point of departure the concepts put forward by in the classical works
of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, and the more modern works of Schumpeter
(1942) and Dahl (1961).
Under this view, citizens are not expected to make decisions absent information
from each other or even the government. Citizens ought to be interested in politics
because it was in their best interest to be so (Pateman 1970). Citizens’ interest in
politics ought to be maintained and satisfied through the exchange of information
about each other’s views, as well as the opinions of representatives. Bentham laid
great stress on public opinion and the need for the individual to take account of
it and he pointed out one advantage of an elector in a democracy, that “into no