Public Sphere

The public sphere describes a space of reasoned debate about politics and the state. The public sphere is the arena of political participation in which ideas, alternatives, opinions, and other forms of discourse take shape. We can recall the ideas of John Stuart Mill in On Liberty to think of the public sphere as the space in which persons come to join a contest over true, partially true, and wrong ideas about how the state and politics should address the major issues of the day. Along with debate, the public sphere also encompasses the arena of political action, by both individuals and groups. In modern democracy, the public sphere is, in particular, the arena of social movement activity, as collective action seeks to bring issues to the fore that have hitherto been excluded from, or at least marginalized in, the important political debates of the day. As a space of collective action, the public sphere encompasses both narrative and textual discourse (which includes speech, journalism, letters, articles, broadsheets, songs, popular theater, etc.) and performative actions that communicate about politics (which includes all the forms of contentious demonstration or protest that remain civil, even if civil disobedience, and peaceful).

The contemporary theory of the public sphere is rooted in the work of the Frankfurt School and critical theory. Jürgen Habermas's 1962 dissertation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, provided a clear history of the development of public debate about politics in various European settings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Great Britain was the case in which the public sphere developed earliest and most fully, and Habermas traces the emergence of debate in salons, letter writing, and other venues. He identifies the public sphere as a space opened up by private citizens who took control of political debate from the state. Habermas identifies a free public sphere open to the participation of all comers as a prerequisite of democracy; indeed democracy is staked on the equality of entry and participation in the public sphere. Yet, by the 1950s, Habermas concluded that the mechanisms of communication in the public sphere were increasingly controlled by a few, small corporate concerns. The advent of big media threatened (in the late 1950s) a privatization of the public sphere, privileging the concerns of big media and corporate power. Public debate and with it liberal democracy, Habermas concluded, were under grave threat.

Habermas's work was well ahead of its time. These are the debates that emerged in the Anglo-American world only after the 1970s. Habermas's dissertation was not translated into English until 1989, and discussion of the public sphere in the Anglo-American world remained somewhat muted until then. Meanwhile, Habermas continued to develop his interest in the communicative politics of public interaction; moreover, he was searching for ways to understand the potential for public politics and social transformation in the contemporary era. Through the 1970s and 1980s, he developed the theory of communicative action, as a way of understanding how public politics could proceed to empower ordinary people even in a situation where the mass media really reflected the views of a small corporate oligarchy and sought to control and constrain public debate (the opposite of the public sphere's origins in free, equal, and reasoned debate).

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