Public Sphere

Theoretical Background

The public sphere is a key concept in Western democratic theory. Citizens meaningfully participate in the political process by the extent to which they engage in rational-critical public debate. Through their participation, they construct public opinion (also referred to as critical publicity) on social and political issues. Public opinion influences democratic politics in three ways: it provides a counterbalance to state authority, governments are called to account for the legitimacy of their actions, and citizens generate pressure for political reform. The public sphere is therefore a mediating institution between the interests of citizens in a society and the interests of the state authority. As a concept in democratic theory, it has a long and controversial history. Contemporary social science debates on the public sphere are, however, predominantly concerned with the work of Habermas.

Habermas is the key theorist of the public sphere, with dedicated volumes debating his ideas (Calhoun 1992; Crossley & Roberts 2004) and notable attempts to critically rework his theory of the public [Page 1178]sphere (Negt & Kluge 1972) and its relationship to civil society (Cohen & Arato 1992). As a student of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer at the Institute for Social Research in Germany, Habermas formed a second generation of the Frankfurt school. His influential text, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1989), was the culmination of Habermas's PhD work, and it was not translated into English until 1989 after his other major theoretical contribution, The Theory of Communicative Action (published in two volumes 1984, 1987). The themes of both works converge in presenting Habermas's theory of modernity and, in particular, his arguments regarding the pathologies and potential of the modern age. In viewing modernity as ridden with both problems and potentials, Habermas breaks with the pessimism attached to his Frankfurt school predecessors. He argued that despite the undemocratic tendencies of modern societies, represented, for example, by the growth of bureaucracy and consumer culture, the Enlightenment promise of emancipation could nevertheless be realized within modernity itself. Modern societies have developed with two processes of rationalization, not one. While instrumental rationality may have grown (and created the “iron cage” talked about by Max Weber or the “totally administered society” referred to by the early Frankfurt school), so too had communicative rationality.

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