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The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
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Abstract: The Institutional Foundation of the Public Debate: On the Critical-Discoursive Model of the Bourgeois Public Sphere. The study focuses on the so far disputed theory of the public sphere, originated in the early writings of the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, especially in his first major work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. The habermasian theoretical model of the institutionalization and degenerative transformation of the liberal public sphere during the last three centuries is a very challenging intellectual journey throughout the multidimensional universe of social, political and cultural history of the European public life. The core of the habermasian critical perspective I focus on here consists in the socio-historical analysis of the structural and agentic conditions related to the bourgeois society of the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, which produced a historically particular kind of democratic institutions of the public discourse, i.e. the so-called liberal public sphere. This ‘new’ communicative space, deeply embedded in the civil domain of the commodities exchange and labor, resided in the bourgeois practices of a critical rational debate regarding the cultural and political matters of the time. The social-evolutionary narrative of the public sphere depicted in the first part of Habermas’ work (examined in this study) tells about the institutionalization phase of the critical public discourse as a structural foundation for citizenship and rule of law. Habermas’ arguments on the social structures, political functions, and ideological background of the bourgeois public sphere are consequently discussed and examined in relation to the emerging theoretical model of the genuine participatory democracy rooted in the liberal project of modernity. |
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