Women, the Bourgeoisie, and the Public Sphere: Response to Daniel Gordon and David Bell

Abstract

Over the course of the last few years, scholars in many disciplines in the humanities have been drawn to the ideas of Jurgen Habermas for at least two, seemingly contradictory, reasons. On the one hand, Habermas's preoccupation with communication and the media appeals to current postmodern interests in the making of images and texts; yet, paradoxically, the German philosopher's sturdy belief in action, in a political ideal of rational consensus, also seems to many to offer a haven from the perceived dangers of postmodern relativism.' One of the fields of inquiry that has most benefited from the current interest in Habermas's work is that which concerns the French Enlightenment, or more broadly, the culture of prerevolutionary France. Scholars in this field have drawn new insights principally from Habermas's early historical work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (first published in 1962), which has the merit of placing the Enlightenment in a broad historical context and of defining it less as a set of ideas than as a series of expanding communicative processes-the commercialization of cultural products, the development of networks of writers and readers, the growth of institutions (salons, coffee houses, reading rooms) that fostered intellectual sociability.2 Interest in Habermas's approach to the Enlightenment was also sparked by