More Than Regulation: Challenging Habermas on the Future of the Public Sphere

Although Jürgen Habermas is widely recognized as one of the most prolific social philosophers of the last decades, his very first book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit), remains arguably his most influential. Published in 1962 and translated into English in 1989, whereupon it reached a much wider audience, the book retraces the historical emergence of the bourgeois public sphere, its consolidation during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and its gradual disintegration. Combining historical, sociological, and philosophical analyses, Habermas argues that the advent of civil society opened up a space for public debate and criticism that was progressively eliminated with the rise of the mass media, consumer capitalism, and the modern welfare state. Yet the book's success, as he himself has recently recognized,1 is due not so much to its historical argument, which has since been challenged in different ways, as to its novel definition of Öffentlichkeit that is, ‘publicness’ or ‘public sphere’. Before Habermas, the term Öffentlichkeit stood mainly for the realm of ‘public opinion’, the study of which had long been dominated by opinion polls. Indeed, while early social theorists like Tarde, Tönnies, or Dewey2 elevated public opinion to an important theoretical concept, the generalization of large-scale polling in the 1930s caused opinion research to abandon its theoretical pretenses and evolve in a thoroughly empirical direction.3 With Habermas, this trend was reversed: the study of the formation and evolution of public discourse acquired a new theoretical legitimacy, which went beyond the mere collection and quantification of individual opinions. The public as such re-emerged as a central social category, soon taken up by different disciplines across the social sciences. Following Habermas' focus on the public as a political agent, capable of rational debate and deliberation, others approached the public sphere from the standpoints of media and communication theory, cultural studies, or literary criticism.4 In the last 50 years, the public sphere has undergone significant transformations. The invention of the Internet and, more recently, the rise of digital social networks have ushered in a new cultural era, in which publicness and public communication have acquired radically new meanings. Aware of these transformations, Habermas has returned periodically to the notion of Öffentlichkeit in order to revise and expand his initial views, but only recently has he attempted an explicit update of his 1962 analysis. In his latest book, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, he discusses the digitalization of public communication, the growing influence of social media and the ‘impairment of deliberative opinion and will formation’ it brings in its wake (2023 [2022]: 22). To be sure, this new work is hardly comparable, in size or scope, to his first one. It amounts, in reality, to the revised version of a chapter contributed to a special issue of the journal Leviathan (Seeliger and Sevignani 2021), complemented by an interview and a short text on deliberative democracy. Still, the conceptual approach followed in both books is largely the same: the public sphere, by enabling the free discussion of relevant social issues, plays a mediating role that is indispensable to a fair and well-functioning democracy; conversely, without collective to the political will and society will up into and In this the of Habermas' notion of the public sphere, and its to on the media by in the first a of Habermas' initial of the public sphere and the it has that his of the bourgeois public is a of his the of from its initial approach is to the of as by early Habermas to himself from this In he to the order as with a rational public sphere, for a more of the and the The with the of the public sphere and the to which it from the one. by on term the of digital and digital mass media both the of public discourse to a the on different in and communication is the of in the digital from the of on the and of Internet With this important in focus on the of digital Habermas, the deliberative of the public sphere is by the of and to in the work in media but it a of the in the for to the of digital communication, by and to the of the public sphere into a of from one The and discusses Habermas' to the of the public Following his of the media he the of both the of media and the of the on (2023 [2022]: but not to the and of public To be sure, the by and the of the and these not the of that the digital communication to the role of the public sphere is with a that the of a of of A public sphere on the a digital media that is and by society as a The of ‘public digital has been in years, by different To this is a but for a of the media A to the in which digital and to the of the Habermas digital social networks for to which to and political Yet this of criticism to the of the that is In the by social media, Habermas a the and the of political his media political by of will the that the digital social sphere, on the the and the of the to the of is by the of or it is to its is from its so that is a but a its In Structural Habermas himself to the of the ‘public both as a theoretical and as a historical to the of its and the he by the of and that the of the rise of the modern the consolidation of as the of and and the of the to the emergence of a new social the bourgeois growing influence the social the of publicness had been with the public of the with the of individual the bourgeois public sphere as an civil society and the state. the first to as a and on of the of public opinion’, the bourgeois public sphere the in with the of more a mere the social and the political this new sphere to a new of to that of the state. 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