Problems in the definition of public sphere: Jürgen Habermas’s definition of Public Sphere.

Henri Matisse Le Rifain assis (Seated Riffian) Late 1912 or early 1913 Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA

Jürgen Habermas argues that the definition of public sphere is a social and historical concept that changes its form depending on the economic, political, and social structure it belongs to. The public sphere is part of civil society defined as realm of commodity exchange and social labor governed by its laws. Habermas’s main concern is to define the bourgeois public sphere that emerges in the eighteenth century in Europe. The bourgeois public sphere is the coming together of private persons as a public to discuss political issues. Habermas asserts that the bourgeois public sphere is entirely detached from the state because their power lies on the market rather than on politics. The independence of the bourgeois public sphere relies on a commercial capitalist economy that emancipates them from political power, state rules and the law. This economic independence leads them to challenge the laws of the state throughout a rational-critical polite discourse. Salons and literary societies are the new institutions of the bourgeois public sphere where the bourgeoisie discusses and challenges the old economic and political order. Habermas contends that the bourgeois society of the eighteenth century undermines its old rulers and takes over them by means of the market and the use of reason. Habermas agrees with Marx and Hegel that the emerging bourgeoisie is conscious of the political role of the public sphere as an ideology to impose their own interest to the whole people. The bourgeoisie will impose their own laws throughout a rational-critical debate, such as the enforcement of property rights and family structure. Eventually, Habermas asserts that the public sphere is the organizational principle of the bourgeoisie.

Habermas studies the changes of the public sphere as a part of civil society over time. He traces the public sphere’s changes following economic, linguistic, and political criteria. He particularly emphasizes the capitalist system and the linguistic use of the categories of both private and public. Habermas’s different forms of public sphere root on the early, conservative capitalist system, mercantilism, commercial capitalism, liberal capitalism, and monopolized capitalism. Habermas’s analysis of the relationship between public and private lead him to conceptualize the different forms of public sphere and allows him to define the bourgeois public sphere of the eighteenth century. The classical conception of public is embedded in the polis. At the same time, the oikos or the household was private. The Middle Ages is a puzzling historical period in which the Roman Law could was quite detached of what actually happened either in fiefs of manorial lands. The public sphere’s name is “res publica”. The most important feature of feudalism was the lack of distinction between public and private. The modern state allows the emergence of a public sphere detached from the state. The modern state conceives the conformation of a bourgeois public sphere whose aim is to impose its own interests by means of universal laws. Therefore, the bourgeoisie needs to convince the political structure to make such changes as if they were for the sake of the people rather than for the bourgeoisie social class’ interests. Habermas studies the decomposition of the bourgeois public sphere at the end of the nineteenth century along with the emergence of a monopolistic capitalism. This new fashion of capitalism gives importance to global companies and leaves aside individual profit-makers. Hence, the political function of the bourgeois public sphere fades away and becomes insignificant. Its social composition changes, the old eighteenth century bourgeois society recognizes and strengthens its ties with the state. Hence, the political function of the public sphere transforms into publicity, consumption, and marketing.


They way he characterizes the definition of bourgeois public sphere is problematic. Two problems arise from his definition. First, Habermas’s accurate definition of bourgeois public sphere is astounding. How can a historical category become so defined and constant? His definition of bourgeois public sphere detaches economics from economics. He assumes that the commercial capitalist system influences on the political structures. However, his transition from economics to politics is as sophisticates so as to use the bourgeois public sphere as a link between both. The problem is that his definition of bourgeois public sphere perpetuates the detachment between economics and politics. He argues that the bourgeois public sphere is detached from politics. However, Habermas takes for granted by what means did the bourgeoisie achieve its economic wealth How could that bourgeoisie emerge without a weakness of the ruling political and economic structures. Habermas argues that the capitalist system is determining the political and the structures of the eighteenth century. Second, Habermas gives a short account of the exclusion of women from the bourgeois public sphere. However, he does not focus on the consequences of their exclusion on the formation of a new public sphere, political structure, and capitalist dynamic. Despite his acknowledging that the bourgeois public sphere was ideological, he does not relate the bourgeois ideology with the rational-polite discourse.




Why is the bourgeois public sphere important for studying the popularization of science? Science becomes one of the most fashionable and appealing issues within the bourgeois public sphere. One of the main concerns of the eighteenth and, particularly, the nineteenth century is the importance of science upon daily life and the capitalist system. Science becomes an increasingly important topic to leave aside from the bourgeois public sphere. The problem is that the bourgeois mentality influences on scientific conception and data. The ideas of the bourgeois public sphere permeate the data of scientific ideas. Prejudices and biases about gender and public/private affairs will be borrowed as scientific data. The discourses and its variety of forms in salons impose social and historical distinctions between the following opposites: public/ private, and female/male. The problem is that the bourgeois public sphere takes for granted as natural both oppositions. The bourgeoisie denies the social and historical constructions of both oppositions. Thus, the bourgeois public sphere gives predominance of male upon females. Consequently, male activities, duties, public affairs and even opinions become increasingly important. The male behavior and discourse is predominant upon females’. The main distinction is that females take care of the private sphere, particularly the bourgeois family structure while men address public affairs. This division of labor is based on the belief system that public activities are more relevant than private ones. Therefore, the bourgeois public sphere emphasizes the gender difference in a way that females are inferior to men. Women are excluded from public realms, mainly from science. Therefore, women who want to become members of the scientific enterprise will do it by paying a high price: they are the invisible and non-recognized aids of scientists.


Why is the concept of bourgeois public sphere important for studying the role of science in popular science? The emergence of a bourgeois public sphere emphasizes the difference between social classes and its roles and functions within society. One of the main concerns of the bourgeoisie is to distinguish themselves from the working-classes, Thus science becomes a way of distinguishing from the working-classes. The bourgeoisie looks down on the working-classes. The bourgeoisie has to make clear that they own the means of production whereas the proletariat does not. The proletariat is transformed into an object that works for its weekly-wage. Marx and critics of the overtaking of a capitalism system that did not care for social problems, highlight the alienation of the worker under the capitalist system at the end of the nineteenth century. The class distinction leads to a cultural distinction; the science of the bourgeoisie and that of the proletariat. Science is a very important cultural distinction that will increase the gap between the bourgeoisie and the working-classes. The role of science in popular culture looses importance and becomes looked upon before the “scientific” discoveries that lead to progress and the development of society. The role of popular science looses ifs capacity of social mobility, political change, and influencing upon the scientific mainstreams ideas.

Georgetown University

Department of History

4. How does popular science play a role in gender construction?

Henri Matissse Deux fillettes, fond jaune et rouge (Two Girls in a Yellow and Red Interior) 1947 Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA

Londa Schlesinger’s “Nature’s Body” and Cynthia Russet Eagle’s “Sexual Science and the Construction of Victorian Womanhood” are two welcome books that show how both scientific ideas and race constructed a particular idea of womanhood in the nineteenth century. Most of the scientific ideas they analyze do not root on empirical data, but rather than on popular beliefs of what a woman should be. Those popular beliefs are part of popular science. The “scientification” of popular beliefs leads to a “naturalization” of gender. Londa Schiebinger makes an excellent use of the categories of gender and race to analyze a serious of scientific ideas of the nineteenth century. Schiebinger emphasis the importance of the joint study of gender and race because the scientific ideas she analysis aim to show the inferiority of women over men. Schiebinger asserts that the naturalization of gender imposes the construction of gender due to nature rather than to nurture as John Stuart Mill. Thus, women are inferior to men due to nature. John Stuart Mill’s idea of the construction of gender due to nurture gets lost. Eventually, Schiebinger argues that the construction of gender was based on biased “scientific observations’ that were rooted on the chauvinist idea of the inferiority women upon men. These popular beliefs are defined as social and popular beliefs of gender. Russet Eagle argues that a large number of scientific ideas of the Victorian era were based on popular beliefs of the idea of woman and men rather than on empirical data. She asserts that problem was that the “scientific’ “data that those scientists had was interpreted through the lenses of popular beliefs and prejudices. Moreover, Russet Eagle adds an interesting distinction depending on professions. She demonstrates that scientists were had a tendency to emphasize the inferiority of women and the importance of the private activities. Meanwhile, lawyers, writers, and others did not make such a strong distinction between men and women. What is more, the latter supported the suffragist movement of American and Great Britain. The nineteenth century’s scientists were obsessed in studying the differences between women and men in a large variety of both social and scientific disciplines. The bias of most of nineteenth century scientists was to take for granted their misogynistic arguments about gender differences. They transformed their popular beliefs into empirical data. Therefore, their construction of gender was rooted mostly on popular beliefs rather than on empirical data and observations. Through an examination of Darwinism, Darwinism, race, anatomy, physical anthropology, and physics it becomes clear that the construction of gender has been historically been influenced more by popular beliefs than by empirical data.

Darwin’s evolutionary theory demonstrated how in the evolution from apes to men, women were the link between the two. His evolutionary theory postulated the inferiority of men based on brain faculties, such as intelligence and smartness.

Department of History
Georgetown University

3. The Role of Science in Popular Culture

Henri Matisse La leçon de musique (The Music Lesson) 1917
 Barnes Foundation, Merion,

The Role of Science in Popular Culture

Throughout the 20th Century, the elitist approach of history of science shifted to the study of science in popular culture. Elitist analysis of history of science, such as the “Scientific Revolution”, the “Renaissance”, and the “Enlightenment”, studied the popularization and diffusion of science among certain elite groups. Roger Cooter and Steven Pumfrey encouraged the study of science in popular culture in order to understand the meaning of science for ordinary people, middle-classes, and minorities, such as women and marginal members of society. Science in popular culture was interested in cultural resistance, struggle, and appropriation. Robert Darnton, Paolo Rossi, Edgard Siszel, Stephen Pumfrey, Maurice Slawinki, William Eamon, and Sarah Schechner Genuth attempted to understand science in popular culture emphasizing the different roles that science played in the Sixteenth Century. .

Darnton explains the role of science as a means of both social mobility and political radicalism in the 1780s in France. Due to the popular appeal of science in the late Eighteenth Century a group of bourgeois supported mesmerism so as to improve their social status. These bourgeois lacked “birth” and “title” had been rejected by the elitist scientific institutions of France’s late Eighteenth Century despite their wealthy and education. (Therefore, their strategy was to counterbalance their lack of birth and connection with their education and their wealth). They joined the “Harmonique Sociétés” that adhered to mesmerism. Mesmerism was an alternative system to understand and explain natural phenomena, particularly physical human being’s illnesses. This group of bourgeois moved from a medical circle that embraced mesmerism to a political radicalism that participated actively in the French Revolution. Their political radical emerged once they broke up with Mesmer because these bourgeois did share Mesmer’s purposes. Mesmer attempted to win a place within French leading scientific institutions, however he found he could become wealthy and popular within the upper and middle-classes. The group of bourgeois’s purpose was political rather than social and economic. Thus, the “Harmonique Sociétés” achieved political and social relevance in France’s “campagne”, particularly in the south-east of France, from Strasbourg, Lyon, Grenoble, Nîmes to Montpellier. Darnton argued that the political radicalism based on the “scientific idea” of mesmerism was an alternative and competing system of understanding the world to the “Enlightenment ideas” spread by elitist proponents, such as Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Carit Condorcet, Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Jean Le Rond D’Alambert. Mesmerism’s revolutionary message was to reform institutions by physically regenerating Frenchmen. According to mesmerism, the improvement of bodies would elevate the morality of the Frenchmen, and better morals would produce political effects. The elite’s ideas of “Enlightenment” were rooted on the relationship between physical-moral causality which from Darnton’s point of view would keep the status-quo rather than lead to social and economic change.
Rossi, Pumfrey, Slawinki and Zilsel altered the understanding of the Scientific Revolution. For the first time in history, natural philosophers began to take notice of the activities of the artisan’s workshops, and the methodology of craftsmen provided a model for an entirely new experimental approach to the study of nature that culminated in the philosophy of Francis Bacon. They argued that there were changes in the institution, the role, and the social need of “scientists”.[1] Rossi and Zilsel demonstrated how the scientific activity shifted from universities to princely courts, formal urban academies, and organized scientific societies in the Sixteenth Century. Scientist became courtiers that had to meet the needs and whims of their patron. These authors analyzed were authority lied in the Sixteenth Century and the arguments to legitimate scientific endeavors.
William Eamon embraces Rossi and Zilsel’s argument of how craftsmen were active actors in the construction of scientific knowledge. Eamon argued that the relationship between natural philosophers and craftsmen led to the Baconian method. Eamon also argued that the scientific elite denied the craftsmen’s contribution to their new physical understanding of natural phenomena. They did not want to make explicit that they were engaged in “pseudoscientific” activities and denied that they had appropriated craftsmen’s traditional knowledge. Eamon argued that both the empiricism and experience of the Baconian method have their origins in craftsmen’s traditional way of solving problems. The “Book of Secrets” illustrated how widespread empiricism and experience were among craftsmen. The “Book of Secrets” have nothing to do with magic, the supernatural, or occultism; on the contrary, it is the emergence of a new genre based on a set of “recipes” that tell ordinary people how to solve everyday problems of the Sixteenth Century. The “Book of Secrets” was written by the urban intelligentsia of diverse social status. The intention of the authors was to acquire fame, and to advertise their recipes as a means of redefining their social status by using science and noble features. They did not confront the social or political organization of the Sixteenth Century. Therefore, their range of interests was limited, restricted to those arts which did not come into conflict with aristocratic sensibilities. Because of this, mechanical arts were not among their interests. Their attitude towards arts was that one of “virtuosity”. Their ultimate goal was to construct a new model of nobility that was more appropriate to urban classes that lacked both birth and title, while possessing wealth and education. Therefore, the urban intelligentsia aspired to redefine the urban nobility in terms of virtue and personal merit. The “Book of Secrets” illustrated how widespread and appealing empiricism and experience were among ordinary people. And the bourgeois people capitalized on their large audience in order to elevate their social status. At the very end, the authors did not want to overthrow the social, political, and economic structure of the Sixteenth Century. They merely pursued to find their role within the urban learned elites of the Italian cities of the Sixteenth Century. .
Schechner Genuth argued that ancient folklore, religious ideas, magic and popular beliefs influenced the learned elite’s development of cosmology. She challenges the traditional explanation that Newton and Halley swept away the superstitious beliefs of comets in two ways. First, she argued that neither scientific theories nor philosophical debates were sufficient to dispel the widespread belief in commentary divination. Second, she showed that natural philosophers – such as Newton - retained something of the traditional lore because they never linked comets with changes in the state or the church. The “Scientific Revolution’s” ideas were conservative because they did not challenge the social or political order but rather reinforced important values, behaviors, and beliefs of those structures. Schechner Genuth analyses the meaning of comets in the Seventeenth Century. The roots of those beliefs lied in ancient folklore, which had been appropriated by both early Christians that interpreted folklore as signs of God’s wrath, and the “Reformation.” She explores the interplay between the superstitious dread of comets shared throughout the ages by peoples at all levels of society, and the role of comets in the birth of cosmology. She also highlighted the contradictory meaning of comets in the Seventeenth Century, while Newton gave comets a benign purpose; ordinary people acknowledged the catastrophic consequences to be expected if a comet were to collide with the earth. Nineteenth and Twentieth Century ideas about comets conformed to the naturalistic and uniformitarian principles that governed geology. Meanwhile, popular comet lore retained its own power that was shown by the fear, uncertainty, and vulnerability that learned and non-learned people shared towards the effects of Halley’s Comet in 1910. Schechner Genuth carries on an excellent and knowledgeable historical study of cultural responses to comets from the Antiquity to the present.

Department of History

Georgetown University

[1] The use of scientist for the eighteenth is an anachronysm that Rossi and Silzel should pay attention to by redefining his concept of scientist.

2. Popularization of Science: Its Categories

Henri Matisse La Musique 1939 Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Popularization of science. Categories to analyze popularization of science.

Throughout the Twentieth Century, the definition of science has changed while the perception of the role of science has transformed its place in culture. For historians of the 1940s and 1950s, science was a product of the learned elite. Science was reproduced exclusively for and within those elite, detached from the broader culture and society. Those scholars believed that science could influence social and political structures. For example, the “Scientific Revolution’s” impact on industrialization. As an attempt to incorporate lower strata in the construction of scientific knowledge, science can also be perceived as the consumption of learned products by the lower strata. However, this approach denies agency to the lower classes because they are given no role in the production of science.

Steven Shapin and Simon Shaeffer analyze science as part of the public sphere by bringing the middle-classes into science studies. They study the ways in which audiences are constructed and transformed in changing historical contexts. Science is perceived as “science as culture”, strongly related to social values, perceptions, and attitudes. Shapin and Schaeffer study the impact of science on middle-classes. They focus on how educated classes use science because of its relationships with social values, status, and morality. Bruno Latour introduces the anthropological approach to the study of science, studying behaviors and power-relationships of scientists within laboratories. Nevertheless, Latour’s approach is still elitist because the production of science belongs to learned and privileged elite. Moreover, that science has no connections to middle-class men, ordinary people, or even people outside the laboratory. There is also a historical trend that focuses on micro-histories. Micro-histories in science also pay attention to elites, such as Mario Biagioli’s study of Galileo as a courtier. Biagioli opens the game of science to the courts, the academies, and the universities. However, he extends science to women because they happen to be strong patrons.

William Eaman, Paolo Rossi, Steven Pumfrey, and Robert Darnton provide a different approach to eradicate eliticism in the studies of science. They suggest that the so called “scientific revolution” was an outcome of the interaction between the learned and the craftsmen’s knowledge. Rossi and Edgar Zilsel altered the understanding of the “Scientific Revolution.” They argue that for the first time in history, natural philosophers began to take notice of the activities of the artisan’s workshops and discovered that the methodology of craftsmen provided a model for an entirely new experimental approach to the study of nature that culminated in the philosophy of Francis Bacon. In Darnton’s attempt to analyze science popularization in the last half of the Eighteenth Century France, he argues that middle-class men used science as a vehicle for social mobility. Darnton highlights that those middle-class bourgeois appealed to ordinary people with the use of science because it was one of the main concerns and attractions of ordinary people. However, Darnton relates science to the radicalism of middle-class men in France and takes for granted ordinary people’s appeal to “science”.

Roger Cooter and Steven Pumfrey encourage the study of culture in popular culture as an alternative to science popularization. Science in culture’s goal is to understand the mechanism of how the lower strata influenced the construction of scientific ideas. Cooter, and Pumfrey suggest the main categories to study science in popular culture. Those categories are the following: mediators, audiences, diffusion of knowledge, modes of production and reproduction of knowledge and science, transmission of knowledge of science, the press, texts, museums, the impact of science on both men and women, the commercial and ideological impact of science, science as an entertainment, as social mobility, or as education, the relationship between the learned elite and its audience, the hegemonic functions of science, and the resistance of science popularization.

Department of History

Georgetown University