The shaping of a public environmental sphere in late nineteenth-century London

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Jurgen Habermas argues that in the late nineteenth century the most economically advanced European nations underwent a period of radical political and social change. ‘Over and above its normal administrative concerns,’ he writes, ‘[the state now] also took over the provision of services that hitherto had been left to private hands, whether it entrusted private persons with public tasks, coordinated private economic activity…or became active itself as a producer and distributor.’ ¹ From this epoch on, Habermas continues, the classic bourgeois public sphere – which hitherto he supposes to have exercised a restraining surveillance over the activities of the state – was rendered impotent by the emergence of ‘administrative’, ‘social welfare’ bureaucracies. As a consequence party political pressure, ‘wheeling and dealing’ and corporate intrigue replaced open and responsible criticism of public policy.