58 | Mass Media and Historical Change
Jürgen Habermas’s model of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’. Even though his-
torians have long criticised and corrected the empirical foundations of this
approach, Habermas still provides a perspective for interlinking communi-
cation and social history (on criticism: Calhoun 1992; Gestrich, in Zimmer-
mann 2006). Habermas conceives the bourgeois public sphere as a ‘sphere
of private people come together as a public’ (Habermas 1989: 86). In the
eighteenth century, this public ostensibly used its own rules to re-form itself
from its familial intimacy into an opinion-forming body that could reason in
public debate and critically monitor the government. The media are of sig-
nificance in Habermas’s model on a number of levels: along with capitalistic
goods traffic and the literary public sphere, he considers them a pivotal pre-
requisite for the development of the bourgeois public sphere; secondly, they
created and shaped spaces in the bourgeois public sphere, such as reading soci-
eties and coffee houses which provided newspapers; thirdly, they facilitated
the formation of a public which transcended national borders; fourthly, the
media stabilised communication among the middle classes; and fifthly, they
contributed to structural change and the deterioration of the bourgeois public
sphere because the rise of commercial mass media and quasi-monopoly media
structures transformed the active public into passive consumers.
The debate on Habermas’s model and the research it triggered deliver
insights into the connection between media development and formative social
processes. Initially, Habermas was criticised for what he marked as the incep-
tion of the bourgeois public sphere. Medievalists, for instance, argued that
the debates on the Investiture Controversy could also be understood as the
formation of a public sphere, because this conflict witnessed a wide-ranging,
partisan and topic-based mode of communication which had ‘ad hoc char-
acter’, verbal and written, beyond an institutionalised form of communi-
cation (Melve 2007: 643–59). By the same token it was argued that there
certainly was an awareness of borders between private and public spaces in the
pre-Modern Era, although these spaces were multifunctional (cf. Tlusty, in
Rau and Schwerhoff 2004). Within the Holy Roman Empire, religiously seg-
mented public spheres can be detected, particularly in the context of the Ref-
ormation. Other authors have placed the formation of the public sphere in the
first half of the seventeenth century with the establishment of newspapers and
the development of the postal system (Behringer 2003: 673–81), or regarded
the eighteenth century as the dawn of a ‘public sphere defined by journalism’,
since journalistic treatment of news and the rational-critical debate had previ-
ously been lacking (see Weber, in Kutsch and Weber 2002: 18).
Several points in fact favour the identification of a public sphere in sev-
enteenth-century Germany no later than the establishment of the newspa-
per market, for a gain in range and reflective quality is evident from around
1700 onwards. After all, newspapers did not refrain from taking a position,