What Is The Public sphere?

I’ve been musing about 40 years of experience with two careers that necessarily intertwine and overlap. The first is my career as a media professional. The second is my career as a person with a disability. You could think of one as the day job and the other as my second gig, but the experiences cannot be separated into such neatly distinct categories. If anything unifies my work in both areas, it is the concept of public sphere. Here is how Wikipedia currently defines it:

The public sphere is an area in social life where people can get together and freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is “a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment.”^[1] The public sphere can be seen as “a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk”^[2] and “a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed”.^[3]

The public sphere mediates between the “private sphere” and the “Sphere of Public Authority”,^[4] “The private sphere comprised civil society in the narrower sense, that is to say, the realm of commodity exchange and of social labor.”^[5] Whereas the “Sphere of Public Authority” dealt with the State, or realm of the police, and the ruling class,^[5] the public sphere crossed over both these realms and “Through the vehicle of public opinion it put the state in touch with the needs of society.”^[6] “This area is conceptually distinct from the state: it [is] a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state.”^[7] The public sphere ‘is also distinct from the official economy; it is not an arena of market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling.”^[7] These distinctions between “state apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic associations…are essential to democratic theory.”^[8] The people themselves came to see the public sphere as a regulatory institution against the authority of the state.^[9] The study of the public sphere centers on the idea of participatory democracy, and how public opinion becomes political action.

The basic belief in public sphere theory is that political action is steered by the public sphere, and that the only legitimate governments are those that listen to the public sphere.^[10] “Democratic governance rests on the capacity of and opportunity for citizens to engage in enlightened debate”.^[11] Much of the debate over the public sphere involves what is the basic theoretical structure of the public sphere, how information is deliberated in the public sphere, and what influence the public sphere has over society.

The concept of public sphere is grounded in the work of Jürgen Habermas, who wrote the book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962). I plan to undertake a systematic close reading of the book, which I will document here in the Fair Use Lab. The first step will be rendering the text in a format accessible to me.

Other Internet sources:

• Public Sphere Guide A Research Guide, Teaching Guide and Resource for the Renewal of the Public Sphere
• Transformations of the Public Sphere Essay Forum
• Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,” New German Critique 3 (1974)
• Spark summary of Habermas’ public sphere book