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Jürgen Habermas'

Jürgen Habermas

  • German philosopher, sociologist, and critical theorist
  • Focus on analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy
  • Work considered foundation of public sphere concepts

The Public Sphere

  • The public sphere mediates between private sphere and the public sphere of authority
  • The private sphere is civil society, the market, the office, the factory

  • The sphere of public authority is the police, the courts

  • The public sphere spans these areas

  • Through public opinion it puts the state in touch with society

Historically Constructed

  • Medieval Absolutist Monarchy

  • The “prince and the estates of the realm still “‘are’ the land, instead of functioning as deputies for it…they represent their power ‘before’ the people, instead of for the people.” (74)

18th Century

  • Broken down as religion became a private choice following the Reformation

  • Noble coffers divided between public and private budgets

  • Birth of autonomous merchant class
  • A private realm of power

  • “Society, now a private realm occupying a position in opposition to the state, stood on the one hand as in clear contrast to the state.”

  • “On the other hand, that society had become a concern of public interest to the degree that the production of life in the wake of the developing market economy had grown beyond the bounds of private domestic authority.” (75)

Institutions

Newspapers

  • Advancement from news sheets, which were “mere compilations of notices” (76)

  • Editorial staff – concept of professionalism “insured the newspapers a commercial basis, yet without commercializing them as such.” (76)

Constitutions

  • “[I]nsured the existence of a realm of private individuals assembled into a public body who…transmit the needs of bourgeois society to the state…to transform political into ‘rational’ authority…” (76)

  • The general interest – the measure of rationality

“Until the permanent legalization of a politically functional public sphere, the appearance of a political newspaper meant joining the struggle for freedom and public opinion, and thus for the public sphere as a principle. Only with the establishment of the bourgeois constitutional state was the intellectual press relieved of the pressure of its convictions.” (76)

The Death of the Public Sphere

  • Drive toward profit led the public sphere to expand beyond the bourgeoisie

  • Loss of coherence

  • Social organizations that deal with the state operate within the public sphere of authority

  • Laws arising from “pressure of the street” driven by private interest (77)

Blurring of boundaries between social, political

Questions?

The problematic definition of "general interest"

  • "there are no naturally given, a priori boundaries" between matters that are generally conceived as private, and ones we typically label as of the general public interest

Identity in public sphere and identity in private sphere can become dissonant and lead to what he calls dual consciousness

  • Colonized subjects are forced to publicly adopt a foreign culture while privately maintaining their identity as defined by their original culture.

The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article

  • Conceptually distinct from the state and the market

  • Site for production and circulation of discourses that can be critical of the state

  • Not an arena of market relations but discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling

A presesentation by Joshua Comer

These distinctions between state apparatuses and democratic associations are essential to democratic society

Nancy Fraser

Frantz Fanon

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