· 2014· Book chapter
Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy
- 5,506citations
- 2014year
Short summary
This paper critiques the concept of the public sphere, arguing that the civic republican model, which emphasizes collective deliberation towards a common good, is often undermined by the rhetoric of domestic privacy. This rhetoric personalizes or familiarizes issues, excluding them from public debate.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- The public sphere's boundaries are a site of contestation.
- Civic republicanism posits politics as collective reasoning towards a common good.
- The rhetoric of domestic privacy personalizes issues to exclude them from public debate.
- The public sphere is an informal, non-governmental opinion body, distinct from the state.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
One important object of interpublic contestation is the appropriate boundaries of the public sphere. The civic republican model stresses a view of politics as people reasoning together to promote a common good that transcends the mere sum of individual preferences. The idea is that through deliberation the members of the public can come to discover or create such a common good. In the process of their deliberations, participants are transformed from a collection of self-seeking, private individuals into a public-spirited collectivity, capable of acting together in the common interest. The rhetoric of domestic privacy seeks to exclude some issues and interests from public debate by personalizing and/or familiarizing them; it casts these as private-domestic or personal-familial matters in contradistinction to public, political matters. The public sphere, in short, is not the state; it is rather the informally mobilized body of nongovernmental discursive opinion that can serve as a counterweight to the state.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2014 · DOI ↗
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Field: Communication
CommunicationSocial Sciences