The bourgeois public sphere’s defining institutions embodied a demand for their own abolition

Evidence

To achieve the complete emancipation of private property from the state, whose functioning had come to depend more and more on contributions from property owners, the latter forced the area of the reproduction of life that they dominated to be seen as a matter that could only be influenced by public decisions made by those concerned. … What served the interests of the private ownership of capitalist property proved at the same time to be an institution in which there was an inherent tendency for domination to be loosened by a non-violent method of determining what was practically necessary in the general interest. … On the basis of the continuing domination of one class over another, the dominant class nevertheless developed political institutions which credibly embodied as their objective meaning the idea of their own abolition: veritas non auctoritas facit legem, the idea of the dissolution of domination into that easy-going constraint that prevailed on no other ground than the compelling insight of public opinion. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 585

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Habermas’s central paradox: the dominant class built institutions whose stated objective meaning was the dissolution of domination itself. This is the load-bearing conceptual move of Structural Transformation and resists compression.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Hall/Essential Essays material on consent-based regulation and to Milgrom/private-order work on how institutions can encode norms that undercut the interests that created them. — connects to: Propertyless strata turned the bourgeoisie’s own journalism and institutions against it — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 585; Bourgeois institutions objectively embodied the idea of their own abolition — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2365; Marx treated the bourgeois public sphere as a mirror for its own unbourgeois realization — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 585 (+1 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Propertyless strata turned the bourgeoisie’s own journalism and institutions against it — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 585; Bourgeois institutions objectively embodied the idea of their own abolition — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2365; Marx treated the bourgeois public sphere as a mirror for its own unbourgeois realization — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 585 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Bourgeois institutions objectively embodied the idea of their own abolition #expands (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2365