Part 1: What is the Public Sphere and what has happened to it?

Week 1

Introduction:

When Barack Obama called for the building of a ‘More Perfect Union’ in the modern world, he was appealing to an ideal that was already laid down in the American Constitution. What does he mean? Seemingly not a solidarity that would try and suppress difference but one that is constructed around the effort that is required to understand other points of view and interests. Obama and others point to the need to redeem the embattled expectation that we can build democratic solidarities. This is a ‘digging where we stand’ that tries to recover the unrealized potentials of the great ideals of liberal democratic histories. We turn first to a great attempt to systematically diagnose the possibilities and the frailties of modern democracy as it took shape 19^th America. Our journey begins with Alexis de Tocqueville.

Week 2

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1858): Democratic Solidarity - Democracy as a Sociological Issue

Written in the first part of the 19th century, de Tocqueville’s great work on the future of a democratic way of life is very relevant to our attempt to understand and appreciate modern democratic solidarities.  Coming from French aristocratic lineage, he regarded the democratic culture and institutions taking shape in early 19th century America as an exciting historical potential. Unlike the recent theorists of social capital, Tocqueville is interested in the value of a quite particular type of solidarity; in the capacity of rights-bearing private individuals to build understandings across their differences about the reasonableness of different points of view and to forge shared projects in a world of strangers.

Week 3

Alexis De Tocqueville: the Threat of the Authoritarian State

While he was a great enthusiast for the achievements and the potentials of modern democratic processes, Tocqueville also considered that these were very vulnerable to dynamics within democratic societies that threatened to undermine a spirit of active participation. Tocqueville considered that, unless vigorously checked, the tendencies of democratic societies to civil privatism would see the collapse of democratic potentials and would permit the rise of a new kind of tyranny. Have his fears been borne out or was Tocqueville looking in the wrong quarters for the threats to democratic solidarities?

Week 4

Market Society and the Public Sphere

Tocqueville thought that if the vibrancy of a democratic culture wavered, mighty authoritarian states would rush into the power vacuum. Determined to govern all aspects of modern life, a modern totalitarian state would further sap participatory energies necessary to a democratic culture. Contemporary commentators on the decline of a public sphere have seen the major threats somewhat differently. Today the biggest challenge to the modern public sphere appears to come from aggressive attempts to universalise the norms, expectations and purposes of the market. A market that tries to impose its norms across all aspects of life, would see individuals encountering each other as competitively structured buyers and sellers in every domain of their activities. It would mean the colonisation of all those processes and interactions whereby private individuals seek to build solidarities around shared interpretations of their problems, needs and interests. Zygmunt Bauman is amongst the most vigorous critics of the assault of market ideologies on a modern public sphere.

Week 5

The Public Sphere in a Multicultural Society

As already noted, Barack Obama has compellingly spoken about the need to combat fatalism and revive a hopeful attitude about building our futures. The idea of a ‘more perfect union’ sounds inviting but what can it mean and how can it be reconciled with a hard-won respect for cultural differences? In this session we critically review different accounts of what the project of reconstructing public sphere might entail (how do we try and balance the task of building solidarities across differences with a sensitivity to our differences). We explore the challenges that face the task of building a public sphere in terms that support rather than contests the multicultural commitments of liberal democratic societies through the work of Jeffrey Alexander. Are the pessimists right in supposing that liberal democratic ideals and institutions are so contaminated by their repressive histories that they are not worth saving?  It seems that we need a sophisticated understanding of the potentials of the modern public sphere.

Part 2: Jürgen Habermas – Theorist of the Public Sphere

Week 6

Habermas: The Rise and Restructure of the Public Sphere

First published in 1962, Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere offers an historical/sociological account of the emergence, transformation and partial degeneration of the modern public sphere. Habermas looks to 18th century European bourgeois culture to identify the social and cultural conditions that allowed reasoned discourse about public issues conducted by private persons willing to let arguments, not status and not the authority of tradition, be decisive. He encourages us to revisit the now neglected achievements of a bourgeois public sphere, to consider its unrealised potentials and to understand the processes that threaten to overwhelm it.

Week 7

Habermas: Philosophical Underpinnings of Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere

Habermas becomes increasingly persuaded that the way in which the 18th century had described the modern public sphere is too clogged with the prejudices of a bourgeois elite to provide an adequate way of thinking about the potentials of a modern democratic culture. We need another way of reflecting on the kinds of claims that a democratic mode of interaction exerts upon us. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, he develops his theory of communicative interaction. In this theory, Habermas outlines his critique of the one-sided character of our appreciation of processes of cultural modernisation. We need to grasp modernisation not simply as a process that extends our ability to achieve instrumental control over our environment but also as a process whereby our ability to reflect upon and to deliberatively build shared interpretations of our purposes is expanded. The over-development of this former description of modernisation (instrumental reason) and its colonisation of the latter (communicative reason) informs the terms of Habermas' s critique of late modern societies. The theory of communicative action insists that all human beings, simply by their use of language to communicate, betray an implicit commitment to the expectation that we can build shared understandings with differently placed others. To Habermas, this suggests that we need to protect and defend the communicative rationality upheld by the public sphere not as a value that underpins only a particular type of society but as an expectation that all of humanity has, implicitly, embraced.

MID-SEMESTER BREAK

Week 8

Democratic Potentials: Reviving the Public Sphere

In the 1990s Habermas moves back to a defense of the modern public sphere as a specific cultural potential of liberal democratic societies. In Between Facts and Norms, he describes the modern public sphere as a structural potential of these societies that is systematically frustrated and blocked by the hegemonic ambitions of other competing imperatives. At this stage, he thinks that the task of rescuing the modern public sphere requires that the channels between the processes in an active civil society (through which problems and needs seek recognition for their generalized, society-wide significance) and the decision-making centres of democratic political institutions need to be unblocked.  Habermas considers that a democratisation of the welfare project could result from a systematic commitment to release the communicative flows between democratic government and civil society as the two ends of a modern public sphere.  Over the last decade, Habermas has offered a significant contribution to debates over the future of modern democracy in a post-national, globalised constellation. We will briefly talk about his distinctive views. In the last few years there has been an interesting attempt to theorise the relevance of modern religions to the task of rebuilding a modern public sphere.

Part 3: Contemporary Contexts (Problems and Opportunities)

Week 9

An Australian Public Sphere?

In this part of the unit we will consider the public sphere in some of its contemporary configurations. We begin by looking at the question: is there a distinctive Australian public sphere?  We also look at some changes in contemporary political and social life that might seem to threaten conditions that are necessary to the future of a democratic public sphere.  What of a populist politics that has turned its back on the task of building solidarities with strangers and sees democracy as a matter of giving voice to each minority interest?  And what of the internet? Is this an ally or threat to the democratic public sphere? Finally we take up the topic of the mass media and the public sphere. We begin with a discussion of Eva Cox’s account of the state of the public sphere in contemporary Australia to introduce the question: what is distinctive about an Australian public sphere? What distinguishes Australian public culture and how resilient is it?  We will particularly focus on the importance of the Australian welfare state in underpinning and shaping the public sphere. The welfare state has played a vital role in addressing the inequalities that deprive individuals from effective participation. However, has a road been taken in re-functioning the Australian welfare state that slides away from its erstwhile contribution to the public sphere?

Week 10

Politics for the Ranter and Individuality for the Shopper?

Are we losing basic conditions that are required for a modern public sphere? We are witness to a resurgence of a democratic politics that has little to do with the commitment to public reason that underpins a modern public sphere. The ‘tea party’ movements are just the tip of an iceberg of a politics of self –assertion by groups that describe themselves as victims of democratic institutions. We will discuss the rise of populism here and abroad and its relationship to the public sphere. There are changes too in the way in which individuality is being seen that also appear to undermine conditions that are vital to the modern public sphere. Thinking back to de Tocqueville, we see that for him democracy depended on a strong individuality in which each was bent on freely determining his/her own futures. But today, we are told, individuality has been reconstructed by a consumer/therapy culture.  Have we lost the ideal of an individual bent on freely shaping a shared future? Instead the individual is seen to be seeking the protection and support of the crowd and its pleasures. Is this critique too strongly negative about the futures of the public sphere?

Week 11

Democracy and the Internet

Debates over the contributions of the internet to democratic politics go way back. On the negative side we see arguments that the internet has been hostile to public reason. It has typically made itself available to a populist politics that is impatient with the slow uncertainties of democratic interchanges. More recently, critics have argued that social networks of the internet age cement the grip of a consumer/therapy culture. They serve to produce a personality that is happy to ‘twitter’ away and sacrifice that individuality that Tocqueville told us was the great potential of modern democracies. Are the critics too strong? There are strong arguments on the positive side too. After all, the internet is a technology which gets under the radar of the broadcast media to confer the power of expressing and shaping opinions to us all (aka Wiki Leaks!). Again, the point could be made that far from the obliteration of individuality, the social network sites are driven by the longing to build communicative bridges between individuals. In this session we explore the range of issues thrown up.

Week 12

Democracy, the Mass Media and the Public Sphere

In this lecture we sum up the main themes of the unit by comparing the way in which various models of the public sphere construct different accounts of the role of the mass media in fostering democratic potentials.  The mass media has been seen to occupy an important function in sustaining a modern public sphere. It has been attributed with the crucial task of acting as a ‘transformer’ between opinion-forming processes within civil society and the decision-making bodies of the political public sphere. The growing trend towards monopolisation and the undermining of public broadcasting are seen as a major challenge to this role. Yet perhaps we can still find symptoms of not yet defeated hopes that the media can contribute to a renovation of an Australian public sphere?

Week 13

Review