The public sphere is a social phenomenon just as elementary as action, the actor, the group, or the collective; but it eludes the conventional sociological concepts.
Philosophers
Jürgen Habermas
Born in 1929 in Germany, Juergen Habermas is a philosopher and social theorist representing the second generation of the Frankfurt School. In The Theory of Communicative Action he proposed a dialogical rationality as an alternative to instrumental reason, and in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere he traced the rise and decline of the bourgeois public sphere. He laid the theoretical foundations of discourse ethics and deliberative democracy, defending the Enlightenment as an 'unfinished project.'
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Jürgen Habermas's Other Quotes
Modernity — an unfinished project.
Only those rules and communicative presuppositions that enable universalization in the sense of reciprocal consideration of all parties' interests can claim consent.
Mutual understanding is inherent in human language as its telos.
In a secular state, citizens of faith as well as citizens without faith may mutually expect that in the political public sphere each side will learn to take the perspective of the other.
Related Quotes
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race ... those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.
-- John Stuart Mill
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.
-- Karl Popper
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
-- John Dewey
Only by settling our differences with other members of the group can we actually understand the shortcomings of our own beliefs.
-- Lawrence Kohlberg
To love justice and equality, the people need no great virtue; it is enough that they love themselves.
-- Maximilien Robespierre
Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.
-- Jawaharlal Nehru