Habermas described a new deliberative role which emerged during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a vibrant urban culture of debate and discussion, formed in a new spatial environment of lecture halls, museums, public parks, theaters, meeting houses, opera houses, and cafes. In such social spaces, older hierarchical principles of deference and ascribed social status gave way to public principles of rational discourse. Emergent professional and business groups asserted claims to a more general social and political leadership. In such spaces, patterns of communication emerged that were characterized by norms of inclusivity, the give and take of argument, and a relatively horizontal experience of interaction. Arguments were judged by fit, by considerations of anticipated consequences, by excellence of logic and so forth, not mainly by the social status of the speaker. By the late eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth (depending on the country), a public sphere grounded in civil society “was casting itself loose as a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion” (Habermas [1962] 1989, 25–26).
In the late nineteenth century, Habermas argued, the public sphere atrophied as the public began to break apart into myriad special interests. Technical and instrumental rationality replaced more interactive public dialogue. Technical rationality depends upon a prior assumption of what the ends entail—how problems are defined and what solutions are desirable—and concerns itself instead with the most efficient means to reach them. AfterTransformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas sought to sustain an enclave of “un-coercive interaction on the basis of communication free from domination” in theory and in practice (1971, 58). In this enclave he hoped to “locate a gentle, but obstinate, a never silent although seldom redeemed claim to reason, a claim that must be recognized de facto whenever and where ever there is to be consensual action” (1979, 97). But his map separates citizens from the work of actively building the commonwealth.