Public Space and the Public Sphere: Political Theory and the Historical Geography of Modernity

1993 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
P Howell

This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of the historical geography of modernity. It is argued that the exclusive focus on social theory has detrimental effects on the appreciation of normative political concerns and that it ignores the resurgence of normative political theory. Habermas's concept of the public sphere, and its place within his theoretical and empirical studies, is, by contrast, commendably concerned with linking the social and historical work with normative political theorising, and its usefulness for geographical investigation is applauded. However, the criticisms directed from, in particular, communitarian political theorists and contextualist social researchers would seem to make his attempt to bring a ‘strong’ theory of public political life back within the remit of a reconstructed social theory less plausible. One set of responses to this criticism comes in the form of the attempt to build geography into this normative political theory, turning public spheres into public spaces; Arcndt's political theory, in conclusion, is thus held to be a significant contribution to the historical geography of modernity.

Author(s):  
Niamh Reilly

This chapter outlines major developments shaping contemporary debates about religion and secularism in public and political life and the role of women and feminism therein. It considers, from a gender perspective, debates in normative political theory about religion, secularism, and the Habermasian public sphere. These themes are explored as they are dealt with in feminist scholarship on the critical edges of Enlightenment thinking. The phenomena of the separation of church and state, the progressive “secularization” of modern societies and relegation of religious practice to private domains, and the growing acceptance of gender equality, are no longer presumed to be inevitable and interrelated. This chapter considers what is involved in rethinking secularism as a feminist political principle, in a context of globalization and in contemporary multicultural societies.


Author(s):  
Joel Gillin

Summary This article considers the utility of a liturgical lens for locating and analyzing religion in the public sphere. Dominant paradigms in the study of religion tend to either dissolve the religious/secular distinction or base it on overly cognitive content. Drawing on the work of James K. A. Smith, the article outlines an approach which instead locates religion in embodied practices that shape human desire. I suggest the religious/secular binary is better conceptualized as a continuum in which liturgical intensity is the primary criterion of religiosity. A liturgical continuum better articulates the contested nature of public space and the religious aspects of political life.


2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Whipple

In this article, I introduce the Dewey-Lippmann democracy debate of the 1920s as a vehicle for considering how social theory can enhance the empirical viability of participatory democratic theory within the current context of advanced capitalism. I situate within this broad theoretical framework the theories of Habermas and Dewey. In the process, I argue (a) that while Dewey largely failed to reconcile his democratic ideal with the empirical constraint of large-scale organizations, Habermas, in particular his work on the public sphere, provides an important starting point for considering the state of public participation within the communication distortions of advanced capitalism; (b) that to fully understand the relation between communication distortions and public participation, social theorists must look beyond Habermas and return to Dewey to mobilize his bi-level view of habitual and reflective human agency; and, finally, (c) that the perspective of a Deweyan political theory of reflective agency best furthers our understanding of potential communication distortions and public participation, particularly in the empirical spaces of media centralization and intellectual property rights.


2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (166) ◽  
pp. 151-162
Author(s):  
Michael Janoschka ◽  
Jorge Sequera

The radical conquest of public space and its transformation into political spacehave introduced major alterations of the Spanish public sphere after the outbreak of the 15-Mmovement. Such modifications refer also to a topic of symbolical interest, which is the conceptionand configuration of urban space – a space that in the course of neoliberal urbanproduction has been characterized as a residual category and a place of controlled and profitorientedactivities. By analysing key practices of the protest movement, the article brings togetherdebates from critical urban geography and political theory. In a first step, it develops aconceptual perspective towards the multiple logics of neoliberal urbanism and the transformationof public space. Subsequently, counter-hegemonic spatial politics and urban demandswill be discussed through the conceptualization of protest as acts of citizenship, proclaimingthe construction of the public sphere and public space via strategic disobedience and thetransgression of rules and laws. Protest camps, public political assemblies and recent squattingcan be analysed as newly created spaces of citizenship that reconstruct the meaning of publicspace and of a political and politicised public sphere, claiming different ways of policy making.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Vanessa Kaiser

<p>A juicio de Tocqueville, la igualdad implica dos tendencias en la democracia; una impulsa directamente a los hombres a la independencia y otra los conduce a la servidumbre, a una igualación que cabe denominar homogeneidad. El artículo tiene por objeto avanzar –desde el pensamiento arendtiano– en el estudio de la homogenización denunciada por Tocqueville. El argumento se divide en dos partes. En la primera, sostiene que la igualdad propiamente política ha colapsado bajo las dinámicas de la homogenización desatada tras el auge de lo social y la consecuente destrucción de la esfera pública denunciados por Arendt. Estamos, en el marco de su teoría, ante la igualdad de los modernos, la cual implica la destrucción de la condición humana de la pluralidad. Luego, en la segunda parte, se explica el vínculo entre la pluralidad, cuya realización está dada por la igualdad, en el primer sentido que le da Tocqueville, y la esfera pública. La tesis plantea que este vínculo es elaborado por Arendt en La condición humana, donde sostiene que la pluralidad es una conditio per qam de la vida política, un rasgo exclusivo del actor político u hombre de acción, la más elevada de las tres condiciones que componen la vita activa.</p><p>Palabras clave: igualdad, libertad, servidumbre, espacio público, Tocqueville, Arendt.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p><em>THE HUMAN PLURALITY AS A CONDITIO PER QUAM OF POLITICAL LIFE</em></p><p><em>According to Tocqueville, equality involves two trends in democracy; one drives men directly to independence and the other leads to servitude, to an equalization that may be called homogeneity. The aim of the article is to advance the study of Tocqueville’s homogenization through Hanna Arendt’s thinking. The argument is divided into two parts. In the first part it argues that actual political equality has collapsed under the homogenisation unleashed after the rise of the social and the consequent destruction of the public sphere denounced by Arendt. In the context of her theory, we are facing “modern equality”, which involves the destruction of the human condition of plurality. Then in the second part, the link between plurality, whose realization is given by ‘equality’ in the first sense that Tocqueville describes, and the public sphere, is explained. The thesis argues that this link is worked by Arendt in her book The Human Condition, which states that plurality is conditio per quam from political life, an exclusive feature of the political actor or man of action, the highest of the three conditions that make the vita activa.</em></p><p><em>Keywords: equality, freedom, servitude, public space, Tocqueville, Arendt.</em></p><p><em> </em></p><p> </p>


2012 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 116-134
Author(s):  
Tomas Vaiseta

Straipsnyje siūlomas būdas, kaip viešosios erdvės sampratą pritaikyti sovietinės Lietuvos laikotarpiui ir kaip jos funkcionavimą rekonstruoti per vieną iš dėmenų – bibliotekas. Teigiama, kad nors viešoji komunikacija neatitiko laisvo žodžio, atvirumo ir polilogiškumo kriterijų, tačiau analizei galima pasitelkti viešąją erdvę ne normatyvine prasme, o tik kaip komunikacinę struktūrą, taip pat įvertinti ją per „pasaulio atvėrimo“ koncepciją. Šiai komunikacinei struktūrai priklaususių bibliotekų veikla analizuojama trimis lygmenimis – politiniu, ideologiniu ir administraciniu, kurie leidžia į bibliotekas pažiūrėti kaip į tam tikras informacines piramides, kuriose informacija (spaudiniai) pateikiama pagal hierarchijos principus. Kiekvienu iš šių lygmenų atsiveria skirtingi informacinės hierarchijos aspektai: politiniu lygmeniu reikia kalbėti apie atkirtimą nuo konteksto ir tradicijos; administraciniu lygmeniu išryškėja infrastruktūrinės reformos reikšmė; ideologiniu lygmeniu iškyla dirbtinis prioritetų sudarymas pagal ideologinius principus.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: viešoji erdvė, komunikacinė struktūra, biblioteka, sovietų Lietuva, vėlyvasis sovietmetis, ideologija. The Hierarchy of Information in the Late Soviet Period: the Case of LibraryTomas Vaiseta SummaryThe article deals with the situation of libraries in the late soviet period (1964–1988) as an element of soviet public sphere. The soviet public sphere is interpreted not in a normative sense (as a contribution to a normative political theory of democracy), but only as a structure of communication, and it is compared with the concept of the public sphere as a place of “world-disclosing”, proposed by Craig Calhoun. It is suggested that a typical metaphor of pyramid is valid to understand the hierarchy of information in libraries, but it is necessary to analyse this pyramid on three levels – political, administrative, and ideological. Each of these levels shows that we should approach the soviet libraries not as a place of “world-disclosing”, but as a place of “world-closing”., sans-serif;"> 


2005 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-43
Author(s):  
Thomas Brennan

The 18th-century Parisian tavern was public space that lay beyond the private spheres of home, family, or corporate identity. Taverns, like markets or roads, were without inherent order, so they required the ordering of public authority. For much of the old regime, taverns illustrate the public sphere in its subjection to public control. A second public sphere, found in the coffeehouses of Britain and the cafés of France, was a place of intellectual and social exchange that gradually challenged the royal monopoly on public issues. Yet taverns demonstrated the evolution of a third public sphere from a space monopolized by royal control to one in which the populace constituted a public with its own discursive practices and norms. In their increasingly autonomous use of taverns, the people of Paris were developing a model of behavior that extended to the political life of the city during the French Revolution.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar

This study explores Habermas’s work in terms of the relevance of his theory of the public sphere to the politics and poetics of the Arab oral tradition and its pedagogical practices. In what ways and forms does Arab heritage inform a public sphere of resistance or dissent? How does Habermas’s notion of the public space help or hinder a better understanding of the Arab oral tradition within the sociopolitical and educational landscape of the Arabic-speaking world? This study also explores the pedagogical implications of teaching Arab orality within the context of the public sphere as a contested site that informs a mode of resistance against social inequality and sociopolitical exclusions.


Author(s):  
Natalia Kostenko

The subject matter of research interest here is the movement of sociological reflection concerning the interplay of public and private realms in social, political and individual life. The focus is on the boundary constructs embodying publicity, which are, first of all, classical models of the space of appearance for free citizens of the polis (H. Arendt) and the public sphere organised by communicative rationality (Ju. Habermas). Alternative patterns are present in modern ideas pertaining to the significance of biological component in public space in the context of biopolitics (M. Foucault), “inclusive exclusion of bare life” (G. Agamben), as well as performativity of corporeal and linguistic experience related to the right to participate in civil acts such as popular assembly (J. Butler), where the established distinctions between the public and the private are levelled, and the interrelationship of these two realms becomes reconfigured. Once the new media have come into play, both the structure and nature of the public sphere becomes modified. What assumes a decisive role is people’s physical interaction with online communication gadgets, which instantly connect information networks along various trajectories. However, the rapid development of information technology produces particular risks related to the control of communications industry, leaving both public and private realms unprotected and deforming them. This also urges us to rethink the issue of congruence of the two ideas such as transparency of societies and security.


2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Lipin Ram

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.


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