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
I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
-- Nelson Mandela
Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
-- Abraham Lincoln
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
-- John Adams