Rationalist or Nationalist? The Eighteenth Century Public Sphere

2011

The main purpose of this paper is to examine Habermas's account of the transformation of the public sphere in modern society. More specifically, the study aims to demonstrate that, whilst Habermas's approach succeeds in offering useful insights into the structural transformation of the public sphere in the early modern period, it does not provide an adequate theoretical framework for understanding the structural transformation of public spheres in late modern societies. To the extent that the gradual differentiation of social life manifests itself in the proliferation of multiple public spheres, a critical theory of public normativity needs to confront the challenges posed by the material and ideological complexity of late modernity in order to account for the polycentric nature of advanced societies. With the aim of showing this, the paper is divided into three sections. The first section elucidates the sociological meaning of the public/private dichotomy. The second section scrutinizes the key features of Habermas's theory of the public sphere by reflecting on (i) the concept of the public sphere, (ii) the normative specificity of the bourgeois public sphere, and (iii) the structural transformation of the public sphere in modern society. The third section explores the most substantial shortcomings of Habermas's theory of the public sphere, particularly its inability to explain the historical emergence and political function of differentiated public spheres in advanced societies.

Telos, 2014

History of European Ideas, 1995

Art & the Public Sphere

Jürgen Habermas' famous description of the public sphere, and its central place in liberal democracy, has unfortunately become a normative model, both within arts and politics. However, as this article argues, Habermas' proposition is not only historical, but was retrograde from the outset, and now functions more a blacking of political action than an enabler, and must be contested in terms of counterpublic formations and experiences, as well as criticized from its insistence on rationality and negotiation in an era of post-political consensus within the former public sphere.

2012

A year ago Eric Hobsbawm published a collection of his political essays over the last decade called Politics For a Rational Left. Reading them, I never doubted that they served the cause of leftist rationality. No one has looked at British politics with a clearer eye. In his critique of Thatcherism, his opposition to the "hard left," his refusal of Labourite sentimentality, his sensible strategic proposals, Hobsbawm has provided a model of intellectual engagement. But rational leftists have always had trouble with nationalism, and this new book is a catalog of Hobsbawm's troubles.

2017

Generally, the issue of modernity is associated with the fate of reason in modern European history. Specifically modernity is related to how reason was conceived as a critical and emancipatory guide towards the ontological, social, political, technical and overall development of humanity. As Lawrence Cahoone, in his, From Modernism to Postmodernism, Abstract This essay tries to critique the concept of modernity through a discussion of Jürgen Habermas's communicative rationality and modernity as an unfinished project. Habermas tried to defend modernity conceived as communicative rationality by strengthening everyday communicative action against the instrumental rationality of the economy and the state. After considering the insights of transmodernist, African, feminist and intercultural thinkers on modernity, I will try to show how the conventional understanding of modernity as progressive and reflective fails to fully address issues of otherness and domination.

The main purpose of this paper is to assess the validity of the contention that, over the past few decades, the public sphere has undergone a new structural transformation. To this end, the analysis focuses on Habermas's recent inquiry into the causes and consequences of an allegedly 'new' or 'further' [erneuten] structural transformation of the political public sphere. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part considers the central arguments in support of the 'new structural transformation of the public sphere' thesis, shedding light on its historical, political, economic, technological, and sociological aspects. The second part offers some reflections on the most important limitations and shortcomings of Habermas's account, especially with regard to key social developments in the early twenty-first century. The paper concludes by positing that, although the constitution of the contemporary public sphere is marked by major-and, in several respects, unprecedented-structural transformations, their significance should not be overstated, not least due to the enduring role of critical capacity in highly differentiated societies.

HISTOREIN, 2006