A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics by Jürgen Habermas

Author:Jürgen Habermas [Habermas, Jürgen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as Jürgen Habermas, ‘Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere’, Theory, Culture & Society 39/4 (2022): 145–71.

2 Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani (eds.), Ein erneuter Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit? (Leviathan, Special Issue 37) (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2021). See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); originally published as: Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962).

3 Bernhard Peters, Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), and Peters, ‘On Public Deliberation and Public Culture: Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Hartmut Wessler (ed.), Public Deliberation and Public Culture: The Writings of Bernhard Peters, 1993–2005 (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 134–59; from this perspective, see also Hartmut Wessler, Habermas and the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2018).

4 On the relationship between the political and literary public spheres, see my sidelong glance in Habermas, ‘Warum nicht lesen?’, in Katharina Raabe and Frank Wagner (eds.), Warum Lesen – mindestens 24 Gründe (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020), pp. 99–123.

5 The chapter on the role of civil society and the political public sphere in Between Facts and Norms – Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 329–87 – takes up the reflections in the concluding chapter of Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and especially in the introduction to the new 1990 edition of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Habermas, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 421–61. For more recent reflections on the topic, see Habermas, ‘Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Have an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research’, in Europe: The Faltering Project, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), pp. 138–83.

6 Usually, however, sociological theories choose a basic conceptual approach that leaves the cognitive meaning of this dimension of validity out of account and attributes the binding effect of ought-validity [Sollgeltung] to the threat of sanctions.

7 The text of the French Constitution of September 1791 opens with a catalogue that distinguishes between droits naturels and droits civils. In this way, it took into account the temporal discrepancy between the current domain of validity of the general civil rights and the as yet unrealized claim to validity, which extends far beyond the territorial boundaries of the French state, of the ‘natural’ rights to which all persons have an equal claim in virtue of their humanity. Paradoxically, however, the human and civil rights enshrined as basic rights preserve the meaning of universal rights within national borders as well. In this way, they remind the present and future generations, if not of a self-obligation to actively propagate these rights, then at least of the peculiar character of the context-transcending normative content of universal human rights beyond the provisionality of their at present territorially restricted implementation.

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