Week 3—The cultural roots of Western liberal politics

Week 3—The cultural roots of Western liberal politics

Main reading: Habermas ([1962] 1992); Fraser (1992); Ryan (1992)

Other reading: Peiss (1991); Warner (2002)

The readings assigned for this week may deserve more than two hours of discussion, and so I have assigned only one additional reading for the next week.

In the next two weeks (at least), we will discuss the concept of a “public sphere” as developed by Habermas as part of a theory of democracy. For Habermas, what we know as liberal democratic institutions are both a product of a specific time and place, but they also contain the seeds of universal ideas. He looks to history so he can develop his own normative theory, or what people should do and what kind of institutions would be legitimate and just in all places and all times. Both his empirical claims about the origins of the liberal public sphere and his normative claims about its value for democracy have been questioned by others, who in turn consider empirical examples to develop their own alternative normative theories.

I suggest reading the selection from Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society ([1962] 1989) first, and then the essays by Ryan (1992) and then Fraser (1992). Peiss (1991) is a review and so is only suggested for its overview of the topic and not for its ideas. The article by Warner (2002) is often mentioned in conjunction with Fraser’s ideas, but is probably less relevant to our first look at this topic.

References

Fraser, Nancy. 1992. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 109–42. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Habermas, Jürgen. (1962) 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

———. (1962) 1992. “The Public Sphere in the World of Letters in Relation to the Public Sphere in the Political Realm.” In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, edited by Thomas McCarthy, translated by Thomas Burger, 51–57. London: Polity Press.

Peiss, Kathy. 1991. “Going Public: Women in Nineteenth-Century Cultural History.” American Literary History 3 (4): 817–28. https://www.jstor.org/stable/489891.

Ryan, Mary. 1992. “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig J. Calhoun, 259–88. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14 (1): 49–90.