Public Sphere
Influence
The concept of the public sphere has had an important and lasting influence in virtually every social scientific field, as a brief perusal of the affiliations of the various contributors to Craig Calhoun's Habermas and the Public Sphere (1992) amply demonstrates. However, given the centrality of public opinion and the process of its formation to the legitimacy of modern democratic forms of government, the concept is most influential for debates involving the intersection of modern communications, opinion formation, and democracy. Such debates range over a wide variety of topics. Some fields are dominated by the conversational model; these include theoretical explorations of the concept of civil society (Cohen and Arato) and arguments concerning the value and feasibility of deliberative forms of democracy (Bohman and Rehg). Other fields of inquiry, such as historical examinations of the modern origins of the democratic ethos (Zaret), are more conducive to a mediated concept. Some have sought to apply the concept of the public sphere to different societies and social conditions—for example, in analyses of the public sphere in Chinese history—whereas others have sought to use the concept as an aid in assessing the future impact of the Internet. Every application of the concept of the public sphere involves a tension between sociological description and normative prescription. This productive tension—which spans the gap between actual and potential—is what has rendered the concept so fruitful and useful, and what promises that the concept will continue to provoke both interest and insight for many years to come.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Bohman, James, and William Rehg, eds. Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997.
Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.
Cohen, Jean L., and Andrew Arato. Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press As an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.
——. "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article." Translated by Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox. New German Critique 1, no. 3 (fall 1974): 49–55.
——. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.
——. The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. 2 vols. Boston: Beacon, 1987.
Halasz, Alexandra. The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. The Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Spheres. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Zaret, David. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Thomas F. Murphy III
Additional topics
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Propagation to Quantum electrodynamics (QED)Public Sphere - Controversies, Influence, Bibliography