Selective Solidarity and Discursive Modulation in the Brazilian Public Sphere
Abstract In this article the author argues that solidarity can be used as an analytical concept in order to understand the dynamics of discourses in the public spheres of contemporary democracies. He begins by discussing conceptions of solidarity in political theory, followed by descriptions of its manifestations in recent public debates in different countries. After that, he relates solidarity to Habermas’s formal-pragmatic concept of communicative rationality, which enables him to sketch out notions such as discursive and selective solidarity, as well as discursive modulations of solidarity, which are formulated through analogies of discourse theory and musical theory. In the last part of the article, the author applies these notions to three specific examples of public debates in the Brazilian public sphere.