Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2019

Publication Title

The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought

Volume

2

Pages

517 - 544

Publisher Name

Cambridge University Press

Abstract

This chapter examines how European thinkers working from within and without the Frankfurt School of critical theory have understood the public sphere as a distinctive political category. First-generation members of the school rejected institutional democracy and mass politics as ideologies that mask domination. The succeeding generation, whose most important representative is Jürgen Habermas, rejected that diagnosis. Habermas’s more optimistic assessment of the emancipatory potential of the public sphere as a medium of rational learning sought a middle ground between critics and defenders of liberal democracy. This ambivalence provoked strong counter-reactions from systems theorists, such as Niklas Luhmann, and from adherents of theories of agonal democracy descended from Carl Schmitt, on the right, and Hannah Arendt, on the Left. As we shall see, these reactions are amplified by those who seek to extend the public sphere beyond the boundaries of the nation state.

Identifier

9781316160879

Comments

Author Posting. © 2019, Cambridge University Press. This chapter is posted here by permission of Cambridge University Press for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Gordon, Peter E., and Warren Breckman, eds. The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought. Vol. 2. The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316160879

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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