Abstract

SILVA, Filipe Carreira da. Habermas e a esfera pública: reconstruindo a história de uma ideia. Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas [online]. 2001, n.35, pp.117-138. ISSN 0873-6529.

The objective of this article is to discuss the notion of the public sphere, as proposed by Jürgen Habermas. To this end we analyse three different points in the process of conceptualising this notion, which were set out in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and Between Facts and Norms (1992). Another aspect of our analysis is the relationship between this concept of the public sphere and the theory of deliberative democracy. In subjecting the Habermasian theoretical edifice to internal criticism, we attempt to discuss the validity of the historical ideal on which it is based - the bourgeois public sphere of the 18th and 19th centuries, seen as a universally accessible space for the free exchange of ideas, in which social inequalities were neutralised.

Keywords : Public sphere; communicative reason; deliberative democracy.

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