Page 433 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | Publ c Sphere

T. Salmon and Theodore L. Glasser, eds., Public Opinion and the Communication of Con-
sent. New York: Guilford Press, 1995.
Justin Lewis

PuBliC sPhere

As modern industrial life has linked the concerns and fates of millions of
individuals in forms of social and political organization such as nation-states,
interpersonal and mediated communication have become critical aspects of the
political process. The space and mode in which such communication takes place
is the “public” or the “public sphere.” In the indirect, representative democracies
of many Western countries as well as other forms of modern political organiza-
tion, the public sphere is thus a crucial battleground and space in which citizens
seek to impact on the formulation of political will.
The “public sphere”—as opposed to related yet more commonplace terms
such as “the public,” or “public opinion”—is primarily an academic concept
that seeks to analyze forms of public and political discussion and debates in
modern societies. While few dispute the immense significance of mass com-
munication in achieving and maintaining political power in contemporary so-
cieties, the notion of the public sphere links the analysis of media industries,
technologies, and content with the exploration and, crucially, evaluation of the

Jürgen haBerMas

Jürgen Habermas (born June 18, 1929, in Düsseldorf ) is a German philosopher and sociolo-
gist who has been associated with the second generation of the Frankfurt School, a group
of scholars originally based at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt,
whom from broadly Marxist, yet also psychoanalytical perspectives sought to critically as-
sess modernity and its prevalent social, cultural, and economic conditions. While Haber-
mas’s work departs substantially from many conceptual traditions of the first generation of
the Frankfurt School, he shares with its most prominent exponents, such as Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer, an emphasis on the role of (mass) communication in the analysis of
modern societies. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, written as Habermas’s
habilitation—a substantial thesis that qualifies scholars in the German academic system to
obtain the rank of professor—and first published in German, thus set the framework for
much of Habermas’s subsequent work, including his magnum opus, Theory of Communica-
tive Action (1981).
Habermas himself was a professor at Frankfurt University between 1964 and 1971 and
from 1982 until his retirement in 1994. In recognition of his work, he has received numerous
awards and remains one of the most influential European philosophers who is still actively
engaged in the public debate as in his outspoken protest against the U.S.-led invasion of
Iraq in 2003.