What is a public sphere?

Habermas and the public sphere

Before we can diagnose the disappearance of something called the public sphere, we need to find agreement on what it is that is disappearing. I should emphasize at this point that this book is not meant as a conceptual history of the notion of the public sphere in modern political thought and in theories of democracy. Rather, I wish to make this notion of the public sphere fruitful as a tool for scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds (mainly media studies, political science and sociology) to understand challenges to contemporary media and democracy. I want to show that the public sphere concept is still indispensable to formulating a critical agenda and engaging in critical research of the rapid transformation of our digital media and communication environments. Through the analytical lens of the public sphere, we can identify the current trends of democratic society and politics: opportunities for democratization and threats of nondemocratic backlashes.

Such a conceptual discussion needs to take as its starting point the voluminous work of Jurgen Habermas. If the ambition of this book is to combine the tools of structural analysis and critical assessment of contemporary media and communication developments, this design owes much – or almost everything – to the agenda of public sphere research that was set out in Habermas’ book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published in German in 1962 (Habermas, 1990 [1962]). Habermas did not invent the concept of the public sphere but rather located its origins in modern political thought and in the history of the Enlightenment. The first part of his book provides a conceptual history of the notion of the public sphere, while the second part lays out the agenda of critical research of media and communication. It developed a normative template of the ‘modern bourgeois public sphere’ and can be read as an invitation to the social sciences to make this normative template applicable to research with a critical intent (Wessler, 2019). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is, therefore, not primarily a contribution to philosophy and conceptual history in that it has also contributed to the foundations of several disciplines of the social sciences, notably media studies, the sociology of communication, political theory and political sciences, for which it has become a standard reference.