The Concept of the Public Realm by Noël O'Sullivan

Author:Noël O'Sullivan [O'Sullivan, Noël]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, Social Policy, Human Rights, Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780415448314
Google: iThDAQAAIAAJ
Goodreads: 4971099
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-01-15T07:37:46+00:00

Neo-Aristotelianism and the autonomy of the political

We can begin with the intellectual and political context in which the book first appeared. This has remained obscure even with the publication of the English version, not least because the translator's introduction gives a brief and perfunctory account of the book's interdisciplinary range while saying nothing about its origins or background.2 This was one in which intellectuals from a variety of political positions were concerned with the question of whether the people of the postwar Federal Republic of Germany, whose politics had been poisoned by Nazism and whose political culture had in any case been described, already before World War II, as ‘belated’, were ready to embrace a Western European understanding of the relationship between state, society and individual, and to take politics and the duties of public office as seriously as democracy requires.3 Although his mentor, or one of them, Adorno, famously mocked the excuse-making that could be encouraged by such questions — encapsulated in the apologist's statement that ‘we are not mature enough for democracy’ — the questions themselves were urgent (Adorno 1986). This perhaps explains the references to a series of conservative thinkers by one who would later use ‘neo’ or ‘young’ conservative pejoratively; indeed, the footnotes in the first part of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, as well as in the first essay of Theorie und Praxis of 1963, ‘The classical doctrine of politics and its relationship to social philosophy’, read like a virtual Who's Who of German conservative thought in the twentieth century: Arendt, Brunner, Freyer, Gadamer, Hennis, Koselleck, Riedel, Ritter, Schmitt, and Strauss are all cited as authorities. And a glance at the list of works in the Luchterhand series in which both books were included should give us pause.4

For many of these thinkers the key to a stable political culture lies in the capacity of citizens to distinguish between matters that are political and those that are not, and in a corresponding sensitivity towards the different modes of conduct appropriate to the prosecution of different matters. To be sure, the point of the argument is to distinguish the political public sphere as a ‘realm’ between the private and public spheres, a realm that emerges as an offshoot of the growth of a market economy and the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Although state authority is so to speak the executor of the political public sphere, it is not a part of it. To be sure, state authority is usually considered ‘public’ authority, but it derives its task of caring for the well-being of all citizens primarily from this aspect of the public sphere. Only when the exercise of political control is effectively subordinated to the democratic demand that information be accessible to the public, does the political public sphere win an institutionalised influence over the government through the instrument of law-making bodies. (Habermas 1974, p. 49)

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