Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy

Abstract

Today in the U.S. we hear a great deal of ballyhoo about "the triumph of liberal democracy" and even "the end of history." Yet there is still a great deal to object to in our own "actually existing democracy," and the project of a critical social theory of the limits of democracy in late capitalist societies remains as relevant as ever. In fact, this project seems to me to have acquired a new urgency at a time when "liberal democracy" is being touted as the ne plus ultra of social systems for countries that are emerging from Soviet-style state socialism, Latin American military dictatorships, and southern African regimes of racial domination. Those of us who remain committed to theorizing the limits of democracy in late capitalist societies will find in the work of Jiirgen Habermas an indispensable resource. I mean the concept of "the public sphere," originally elaborated in his 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and subsequently resituated but never abandoned in his later work.2