scholarly journals How can we trust a political leader? Ethics, institutions, and relational theory

2020 ◽  
pp. 019251212091357
Author(s):  
Markus Holdo
Keyword(s):  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Relational Theory ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
The Public ◽  
Institutional Conditions ◽  
Ethical Commitment ◽  
Relational Perspective ◽  
Authentic Communication ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Leader Ethics

That citizens can trust leaders in politics and the public sphere to be sincere and truthful helps to make democracy work. However, the idea of authentic communication raises both sociological and ethical questions. Scholars focusing on institutional conditions emphasize that audiences only have reasons to trust speakers that appear to have incentives to be truthful, unless they know them personally. However, theorists of ethics argue that authentic communication requires genuine commitment, which is conceptually at odds with self-interested reasoning. This article finds that both incentives and genuine commitment are necessary conditions for trustworthiness in speech, but neither is sufficient on its own. The problem is thus how to combine them. Examining the work of Habermas and Bourdieu, this article develops a relational perspective on authentic communication. It suggests that latent institutions can induce trust by making trustworthiness preferable, and still allow speakers to earn citizens’ trust through genuine ethical commitment.

Chewing the Communal Cud

2011 ◽  
pp. 296-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Mummery ◽  
Debbie Rodan
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Market Demand ◽  
Public Concern ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
Political Blogs ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Mass Media ◽  
The Public Sphere

Contending that media users are more than consumers and that the mass media are able to achieve more in the public sphere than simply meet market demand, Mummery and Rodan argue in this chapter that some types of mass media may in fact fulfil public sphere responsibilities. The authors demonstrate how forums such as broadsheet letters to the editor and online political blogs—despite their commonly recognised limitations due to influence by private/commercial ownership, editorship, and the requirements of authorship—may exemplify, enable and support community deliberation over issues of public concern. More specifically, via engaging with Jürgen Habermas’ conceptions of the necessary conditions for rational and communal deliberation, and critically examining recent debates in these forums, the authors argue both that these mediated forums can enable and exemplify community deliberation and, more generally, that community deliberation itself does not need to be strictly consensus-oriented to be productive.

Revolutionary Critical Rage Pedagogy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter McLaren ◽  
Petar Jandrić
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Structural Transformation ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Value Production ◽  
The Public Sphere

Revolutionary critical rage pedagogy was first introduced in Peter McLaren’s 2015 book Pedagogy of insurrection: From resurrection to revolution. It is aimed at development of heightened recognition of the deception perpetrated by those who write history “from above,” that is from the standpoint of the victors who have camouflaged or naturalized genocidal acts of war, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and other forms of oppression as necessary conditions for the maintenance of democracy. Revolutionary critical rage pedagogy is carried out not only in educational institutions but throughout the public sphere. Its broader social aim is both a relational and structural transformation of society that cultivates pluriversal and decolonizing modes of democratization built upon a socialist alternative to capitalist accumulation and value production.

Public Sphere, Postmodernism and Polemic

1994 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Johnson ◽  
Dana R. Villa
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Standard Account ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Theories of the public sphere, as standardly formulated, aim to specify the minimal, necessary conditions for a discursive realm free of coercion or manipulation. In his article in this Review in September 1992, Dana Villa urged us to reconsider this standard account. He argued that when read in light of postmodernist theory, Hannah Arendt provides the basis for a revised conception of the public sphere that privileges plurality and difference over consensus. Jim Johnson suggests that Villa's analysis is a thinly veiled polemic against critical theory. Johnson argues that, as critique, Villa's argument is neither decisive nor encompassing, and that as polemic it blinds Villa to potentially fruitful disagreements with critical theorists. Villa replies that Johnson misses the synthetic thrust of the original article because he identified public realm theory too narrowly with Habermas. Thus, he misconstrues the dialogue Villa sought to facilitate between Arendt and postmodernism.

scholarly journals Contentious Minds

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Passy ◽  
Gian-Andrea Monsch
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Major Purpose ◽  
The Public ◽  
Relational Processes ◽  
Relational Perspective ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Mind

Why does the mind matter for joint action? Contentious Minds is a comparative study of how cognitive and relational processes allow activists to sustain their commitment. With survey data and narratives of activists engaged in three commitment communities, the minds of activists involved in contentious politics are compared with those devoted to institutional and volunteering action. The book’s main argument is that activists of one commitment community have synchronized minds concerning the aim and means of their activism as they perceive common good (aim) and politics (means) through similar cognitive lenses. The book shows the importance of direct conversational contact with individuals in bringing about this synchronization. Assessing the synchronization within communities as well as the variation between them constitutes a major purpose of this book. It shows that activists construct and enact community-specific democratic cultures, thereby entering the public sphere through collective action. The book makes three major contributions. First, it emphasizes the necessity to return the study of the mind to research on activism, Second, it calls for an integrated relational perspective that rests on the structural, instrumental, and interpretative dimensions of social networks. Finally, it advocates a substantial integration of culture in the study of social movements by effectively valuing the role of culture in shaping a person’s mind.

The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

Female Professionals and (Neo-)Victorianism: The Case ofThe Good Wife

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24
Author(s):  
Isabel Santaularia i Capdevila
Keyword(s):  
Television Series ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Professional Success ◽  
The Law ◽  
Good Wife ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Female Professionals ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

The article examines The Good Wife (CBS 2009–), as well as other recent television series with female professionals as protagonists, alongside nineteenth-century novels such as Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and The Law and the Lady, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, or Bram Stoker's Dracula, which, like The Good Wife, place ‘the law’ and ‘the lady’ in direct confrontation. This comparative analysis reveals that current television series, even those that showcase women's professional success, articulate a discourse that valorises domestic stability and motherhood above professional achievements and, therefore, resonate with Victorian ideologies about the conflicted relation between women and the public sphere. Contemporary television series are not so different from Victorian texts that grant their heroines freedom to move outside home-boundaries, while treating women's public ascendancy as a transgression of normative femininity and using a number of strategies devised to guarantee women's return home and/or an appreciation of what they have to sacrifice in order to advance in their careers.

Habermas, Cultural Hegemony, and the Educational Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Arabic Speaking

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.

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