Transcript Part I: The Tradition of Positivism: Positivism, Sociologism and

Critical Sociology
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Marx on Refication
Lukács on Reficatino
Gramsci on Hegemony
Horkheimer and Adorno on Culture Industry
Habermas on Communicative Action and Public Sphere
Marx on Refication
• "Commodities, which exist as use-values, must first of all
assume a form in which they appear to one another
nominally as exchange-values, as definite quantities of
materialised universal labour-time. The first necessary
move in this process is, as we have seen, that the
commodities set apart a specific commodity, say, gold,
which becomes the direct reification of universal labourtime or the universal equivalent
Marx on Refication
• Capital employs labour. The means of production are not means by
which he can produce products, whether in the form of direct means
of subsistence, or as means of exchange, as commodities. He is
rather a means for them, partly to preserve their value, partly to
valorise it, i.e. to increase it, to absorb surplus labour . Even this
relation in its simplicity is an inversion, a personification of the
thing and a reification of the person, for what distinguishes this
form from all previous ones is that the capitalist does not rule the
worker in any kind of personal capacity, but only in so far as he is
"capital"; his rule is only that of objectified labour over living labour;
the rule of the worker's product over the worker himself
Marx on Refication
• "[B]ecause as a result of their alienation as use-values all
commodities are converted into linen, linen becomes the
converted form of all other commodities, and only as a
result of this transformation of all other commodities
into linen does it become the direct reification of
universal labour-time, i.e., the product of universal
alienation and of the supersession of all individual
labour."
Marx on Refication
•
"The production of capitalists and wage-laborers is therefore a major product of the process by
which capital turns itself into values. Ordinary political economy, which concentrates only on the
objects produced, forgets this entirely. Inasmuch as this process establishes reified labor as what
is simultaneously the non-reification of the laborer, as the reification of a subjectivity opposed to
the laborer, as the property of someone else's will, capital is necessarily also a capitalist. The idea
of some socialists, that we need capital but not capitalists, is completely false. The concept of
capital implies that the objective conditions of labor—and these are its own product—acquire a
personality as against labor, or what amounts to the same thing, that they are established as the
property of a personality other than the worker's. The concept of capital implies the capitalist.
However, this error is certainly no greater than that of, e.g., all philologists who speak of the
existence of capital in classical antiquity, and of Roman or Greek capitalists. This is merely
another way of saying that in Rome and Greece labor was free, an assertion which these
gentlemen would hardly make. If we now talk of plantation-owners in America as capitalists, if
they are capitalists, this is due to the fact that they exist as anomalies within a world market based
upon free labor. Were the term capital to be applicable to classical antiquity—though the word
does not actually occur among the ancients (but among the Greeks the word arkhais is used for
what the Romans called the principalis summa reicreditae, the principal of a loan)—then the
nomadic hordes with their flocks on the steppes of Central Asia would be the greatest
capitalists, for the original meaning of the word capital is cattle."
Marx on Refication
• Capital employs labour. Even this relation in its simplicity is a personification of
things and a reification of persons. But the relation becomes still more complex—and
apparently more mysterious—in that, with the development of the specifically
capitalist mode of production, not only do these things—these products of labour,
both as use values and as exchange values—stand on their hind legs vis-à-vis the
worker and confront him as "capital"—but also the social forms of labour appear as
forms of the development of capital, and therefore the productive powers of social
labour, thus developed, appear as productive powers of capital. As such social forces
they are "capitalised" vis-à-vis labour. In fact, communal unity in cooperation,
combination in the division of labour, the application of the forces of nature and
science, as well as the products of labour in the shape of machinery, are all things
which confront the individual workers as alien, objective, and present in advance,
without their assistance, and often against them, independent of them, as mere forms
of existence of the means of labour which are independent of them and rule over
them, in so far as they are objective; while the intelligence and volition of the total
workshop, incarnated in the capitalist or his understrappers (representatives), in so
far as the workshop is formed by the combination of the means of labour, confront
the workers as functions of capital, which lives in the person of the capitalist.
Marx on Refication
• The social forms of their own labour—the subjective as well as the objective forms—or
the form of their own social labour, are relations constituted quite independently of
the individual workers; the workers as subsumed under capital become elements of
these social constructions, but these social constructions do not belong to them. They
therefore confront the workers as shapes of capital itself, as combinations which,
unlike their isolated labour capacities, belong to capital, originate from it and are
incorporated within it. And this assumes a form which is the more real the more, on
the one hand, their labour capacity is itself modified by these forms, so that it
becomes powerless when it stands alone, i.e. outside this context of capitalism, and
its capacity for independent production is destroyed, while on the other hand the
development of machinery causes the conditions of labour to appear as ruling labour
technologically too, and at the same time to replace it, suppress it, and render it
superfluous in its independent forms. In this process, in which the social
characteristics of their labour confront them as capitalised, to a certain extent—in the
way that e.g. in machinery the visible products of labour appear as ruling over
labour—the same thing of course takes place for the forces of nature and science, the
product of general historical development in its abstract quintessence: they confront
the workers as powers of capital
Definition of Refication
• The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties,
relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of
man-produced things which have become independent (and which
are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life.
Also transformation of human beings into thing-like beings which
do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the
thing-world. Reification is a ‘special’ case of ALIENATION, its most
radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist
society.
• Reification occurs when specifically human creations are
misconceived as "facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or
manifestations of divine will".
Lukács on Refication
• Man in capitalist society confronts a reality “made” by
himself (as a class) which appears to him to be a natural
phenomenon alien to himself; hi is wholly at the mercy
of its “ laws”; his activity is confined to the exploitation
of the inexorable fulfillment of certain individual laws for
his own (egoistic ) interests. But even while “acting” he
remains, in the nature of the case, the object and not the
subject of events.
Lukács on Refication
• This rational objectification conceals above all the immediate - qualitative
and material - character of things as things. When use-values appear
universally as commodities they acquire a new objectivity, a new
substantiality which they did not possess in an age of episodic exchange and
which destroys their original and authentic substantiality. As Marx
observes:
• "Private property alienates not only the individuality of men, but also of
things. The ground and the earth have nothing to do with ground-rent,
machines have nothing to do with profit. For the landowner ground and
earth mean nothing but ground-rent; he lets his land to tenants and
receives the rent - a quality which the ground can lose without losing any of
its inherent qualities such as its fertility; it is a quality whose magnitude and
indeed existence depends on social relations that are created and abolished
without any intervention by the landowner. Likewise with the machine.”
Lukács on Refication
• Thus even the individual object which man confronts directly, either as
producer or consumer, is distorted in its objectivity by its commodity
character. If that can happen then it is evident that this process will be
intensified in proportion as the relations which man establishes with
objects as objects of the life process are mediated in the course of his social
activity. It is obviously not possible here to give an analysis of the whole
economic structure of capitalism. It must suffice to point out that modern
capitalism does not content itself with transforming the relations of
production in accordance with its own needs. It also integrates into its own
system those forms of primitive capitalism that led an isolated existence in
pre-capitalist times, divorced from production; it converts them into
members of the henceforth unified process of radical capitalism
Lukács on Refication
• These forms of capital are objectively subordinated, it is true, to the
real life-process of capitalism, the extraction of surplus value in the
course of production. They are, therefore, only to be explained in
terms of the nature of industrial capitalism itself. But in the minds
of people in bourgeois society they constitute the pure, authentic,
unadulterated forms of capital. In them the relations between men
that lie hidden in the immediate commodity relation, as well as the
relations between men and the objects that should really gratify
their needs, have faded to the point where they can be neither
recognised nor even perceived.
Lukács on Refication
• For that very reason the reified mind has come to regard them as the
true representatives of his societal existence. The commodity
character of the commodity, the abstract, quantitative mode of
calculability shows itself here in its purest form: the reified mind
necessarily sees it as the form in which its own authentic immediacy
becomes manifest and - as reified consciousness - does not even
attempt to transcend it. On the contrary, it is concerned to make it
permanent by ‘scientifically deepening’ the laws at work. Just as the
capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself
economically on higher and higher levels, the structure of reification
progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more
definitively into the consciousness of man. Marx often describes this
potentiation of reification in incisive fashion. One example must
suffice here:
卢卡奇论”物化”
• 资本主义社会的人面对一个由他
自己（作为一个阶级）“制造的”
现实，这个现实显得像是外在于
他本身的一种自然现象；他整个
地置身于此现实的“规律”的怜悯
之下；他的活动限于利用某些特
定的规律以实现其自我的利益。
但即便如此“行动”，他仍然只是
事件的客体而非主体。
• 物化（reification）卢卡奇由马克思
的商品概念入手，商品凝集的是人
与人之间的社会关系，但它表现的
却是物的属性，展开的是一种客体
的形式。在资本主义社会中，人们
在与自然的活动中生产了各种物品
或商品。但人们常常看不到这样的
事实，是他们制造了这些商品并赋
予它们以价值。价值被认作是由独
立于行动者的市场所创造的。商品
与市场被资本主义社会的行动者赋
予了独立客观的存在，这就是商品
拜物教的过程。马克思的这一概念
是卢卡奇物化概念的基础。但卢卡
奇扩展了商品拜物教的释义，将它
从原来限定的经济领域推广至全部
社会领域：国家、法律和经济制度。
资本主义社会的人们倾向于相信，
社会结构有其自身生命，因而它们
拥有客观的属性。
Gramsci:Ideological Hegemony
• Gramsci accepted the analysis of capitalism put forward by Marx in the
previous century and accepted that the struggle between the ruling class
and the subordinate working class was the driving force that moved society
forward. What he found unacceptable was the traditional Marxist view of
how the ruling class ruled. It was here that Gramsci made a major
contribution to modern thought in his concept of the role played by
ideology.
• Often the term "ideology" is seen as referring simply to a system of ideas
and beliefs. However, it is closely tied to the concept of power and the
definition given by Anthony Giddens is probably the easiest to understand.
Giddens defines ideology as "shared ideas or beliefs which serve to justify
the interests of dominant groups" [Giddens 1997 p583] Its relationship to
power is that it legitimises the differential power that groups hold and as
such it distorts the real situation that people find themselves in.
Gramsci on Hegemony
• The traditional Marxist theory of power was a very one-sided one
based on the role of force and coercion as the basis of ruling class
domination. This was reinforced by Lenin whose influence was at its
height after the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Gramsci
felt that what was missing was an understanding of the subtle but
pervasive forms of ideological control and manipulation that served
to perpetuate all repressive structures. He identified two quite
distinct forms of political control: domination, which referred to
direct physical coercion by police and armed forces and hegemony
which referred to both ideological control and more crucially,
consent. He assumed that no regime, regardless of how
authoritarian it might be, could sustain itself primarily through
organised state power and armed force. In the long run, it had to
have popular support and legitimacy in order to maintain stability.
Gramsci on Hegemony
• By hegemony, Gramsci meant the permeation throughout society of
an entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs and morality that has
the effect of supporting the status quo in power relations. Hegemony
in this sense might be defined as an 'organising principle' that is
diffused by the process of socialisation into every area of daily life.
To the extent that this prevailing consciousness is internalised by
the population it becomes part of what is generally called 'common
sense' so that the philosophy, culture and morality of the ruling elite
comes to appear as the natural order of things.
Gramsci on Hegemony
• Marx’s basic division of society into a base represented by the economic
structure and a superstructure represented by the institutions and beliefs
prevalent in society was accepted by most Marxists familiar with the
concepts. Gramsci took this a step further when he divided the
superstructure into those institutions that were overtly coercive and those
that were not. The coercive ones, which were basically the public
institutions such as the government, police, armed forces and the legal
system he regarded as the state or political society and the non-coercive
ones were the others such as the churches, the schools, trade unions,
political parties, cultural associations, clubs, the family etc. which he
regarded as civil society. To some extent, schools could fit into both
categories. Parts of school life are quite clearly coercive (compulsory
education, the national curriculum, national standards and qualifications)
whilst others are not (the hidden curriculum).
Gramsci on Hegemony
• So for Gramsci, society was made up of the relations of production
(capital v labour); the state or political society (coercive institutions)
and civil society (all other non-coercive institutions).
• Gramsci's analysis went much further than any previous Marxist
theory to provide an understanding of why the European working
class had on the whole failed to develop revolutionary consciousness
after the First World War and had instead moved towards
reformism ie tinkering with the system rather than working towards
overthrowing it. It was a far more subtle theory of power than any of
his contemporaries and went a long way to explain how the ruling class
ruled.
Gramsci on Hegemony
• Now, if Gramsci was correct that the ruling class maintained its domination
by the consent of the mass of the people and only used its coercive
apparatuses, the forces of law and order, as a last resort, what were the
consequences for Marxists who wished to see the overthrow of that same
ruling class? If the hegemony of the ruling capitalist class resulted from an
ideological bond between the rulers and the ruled, what strategy needed to
be employed? The answer to those questions was that those who wished to
break that ideological bond had to build up a ‘counter hegemony’ to that of
the ruling class. They had to see structural change and ideological change as
part of the same struggle. The labour process was at the core of the class
struggle but it was the ideological struggle that had to be addressed if the
mass of the people were to come to a consciousness that allowed them to
question their political and economic masters right to rule. It was popular
consensus in civil society that had to be challenged and in this we can see a
role for informal education
Gramsci on Hegemony
• Overcoming popular consensus, however, is not easy. Ideological
hegemony meant that the majority of the population accepted what
was happening in society as ‘common sense’ or as ‘the only way of
running society’. There may have been complaints about the way
things were run and people looked for improvements or reforms but
the basic beliefs and value system underpinning society were seen as
either neutral or of general applicability in relation to the class
structure of society. Marxists would have seen people constantly
asking for a bigger slice of the cake when the real issue was
ownership of the bakery.
葛兰西论”霸权”
• “霸权”（hegemony），在葛兰西看来，这是
一个历史哲学的概念，它被定义为由统治阶级
行使的文化领导权。他拿霸权与强制相对比，
强制是由合法权力行使的，或者说是借助警察
权力的运作表现的。经济决定论的马克思主义
者倾向于强调经济和国家统治的强制方面。反
之，葛兰西强调“霸权和文化领导权”，统治
阶级维持其统治，并非只是依靠其赤裸裸的强
制性暴力，还依靠其文化上对社会的主导影响，
令被统治者在观念上认同现存的秩序。葛兰西
的研究试图了解，在资本主义社会中，一些为
资本利益服务的知识分子如何获得文化领导权
和大众的认同的。霸权概念不仅有助于我们理
解资本主义社会中的支配，也使我们了解葛兰
西对革命的观点。通过革命而掌握经济与国家
机器是不够的，还必须获得对社会的文化领导
权。正是在这里，葛兰西看到了共产主义知识
分子和共产党的关键作用。
Culture Industry
• Culture industry is a term coined by critical theorists Theodor
Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), who
argued in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,
that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized
cultural goods – through film, radio and magazines – to manipulate
the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through
consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no
matter how difficult their economic circumstances.
• Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a
danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may
cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by
capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or
genuine happiness.
Culture Industry
• Although Western culture used to be divided into
national markets and then into highbrow, middlebrow
and lowbrow , the modern view of mass culture is that
there is a single marketplace in which the best or most
popular works succeed. This recognizes that the
consolidation of media companies has centralized power
in the hands of the few remaining multinational
corporations now controlling production and
distribution.
Culture Industry
• The theory proposes that culture not only mirrors society, but also
takes an important role in shaping society through the processes of
standardization and commodification, creating objects rather than
subjects. The culture industry claims to serve the consumers' needs
for entertainment, and is delivering what the consumer wants. "The
standardized forms, it is claimed, were originally derived from the
needs of the consumers: that is why they are accepted with so little
resistance. In reality, a cycle of manipulation and retroactive need is
unifying the system ever more tightly". By standardizing these
needs, the industry is manipulating the consumers to desire what it
produces. The outcome is that mass production feeds a mass market
that minimizes the identity and tastes of the individual consumers
who are as interchangeable as the products they consume.
Culture Industry
• The rationale of the theory is to promote the
emancipation of the consumer from the tyranny of the
producers by inducing the consumer to question beliefs
and ideologies. Adorno claimed that enlightenment
would bring pluralism and demystification.
Unfortunately, society is said to have suffered another
fall, corrupted by capitalist industry with exploitative
motives.
Culture Industry
• Anything made by a person is a materialisation of their labour and an expression of
their intentions. There will also be a use value: the benefit to the consumer will be
derived from its utility. The exchange value will reflect its utility and the conditions of
the market: the prices paid by the television broadcaster or at the box office. Yet, the
modern soap operas with their interchangeable plots and formulaic narrative
conventions reflect standardised production techniques and the falling value of a
mass produced cultural product. Only rarely is a film released that makes a more
positive impression on the general discourse and achieves a higher exchange value,
e.g. Patton (1970) starring George C. Scott as the eponymous American general, was
released at a time of considerable anti-war sentiment. The opening shot is of Patton
in front of an American flag making an impassioned speech. This was a form of
dialectic in which the audience could identify with the patriotism either sincerely (the
thesis) or ironically (the antithesis) and so set the tone of the interpretation for the
remainder of the film. However, the film is manipulating specific historical events,
not only as entertainment, but also as a form of propaganda by demonstrating a link
between success in strategic resource management situations and specified
leadership qualities. Given that the subtext was instrumental and not "value free",
ethical and philosophical considerations arise.
Culture Industry
• Normally, only high art criticises the world outside its boundaries, but
access to this form of communication is limited to the elite classes where
the risks of introducing social instability are slight. A film like Patton is
popular art which intends controversy in a world of social order and unity
which, according to Adorno, is regressing into a cultural blandness. To
Hegel, order is good a priori, i.e. it does not have to answer to those living
under it. But, if order is disturbed? In Negative Dialectics, Adorno believed
this tended towards progress by stimulating the possibility of class conflict.
Marx's theory of Historical Materialism was teleological, i.e. society follows
through a dialectic of unfolding stages from ancient modes of production to
feudalism to capitalism to a future communism. But Adorno felt that the
culture industry would never permit a sufficient core of challenging
material to emerge on to the market that might disturb the status quo and
stimulate the final communist state to emerge.
Culture Industry
• Critics of the theory say that the products of mass culture would not be
popular if people did not enjoy them, and that culture is self-determining in
its administration. This would deny Adorno contemporary political
significance, arguing that politics in a prosperous society is more concerned
with action than with thought. Wiggershaus (1994) notes that the young
generation of critical theorists largely ignore Adorno's work which, in part,
stems from Adorno’s inability to draw practical conclusions from his
theories. Adorno is also accused of a lack of consistency in his claims to be
implementing Marxism. Whereas he accepted the classical Marxist analysis
of society showing how one class exercises domination over another, he
deviated from Marx in his failure to use dialectic as a method to propose
ways to change. Marx's theory depended on the willingness of the working
class to overthrow the ruling class, but Adorno and Horkheimer postulated
that the culture industry has undermined the revolutionary movement.
Culture Industry
• Adorno's idea that the mass of the people are only objects of the
culture industry is linked to his feeling that the time when the
working class could be the tool of overthrowing capitalism is over.
Other critics note that "High culture" too is not exempt from a role
in the justification of capitalism. The establishment and
reinforcement of elitism is seen by these critics as a key element in
the role of such genres as opera and ballet.
• However, despite these problems, the concept has influenced
intellectual discourse on popular culture, popular culture studies,
and Cultural Institutions Studies.
Habermas: Communicative Action
• Communicative action for Habermas is possible given human capacity for
rationality. This rationality, however, is "no longer tied to, and limited by,
the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and
social theory."Instead, Habermas situates rationality as a capacity inherent
within language, especially in the form of argumentation. "We use the term
argumentation for that type of speech in which participants thematize
contested validity claims and attempt to vindicate or criticize them through
argumentation." The structures of argumentative speech, which Habermas
identifies as the absence of coercive force, the mutual search for
understanding, and the compelling power of the better argument, form the
key features from which intersubjective rationality can make
communication possible. Action undertaken by participants to a process of
such argumentative communication can be assessed as to their rationality
to the extent which they fulfill those criteria.
Communicative Rationality
• Communicative rationality is distinct from instrumental,
normative, and dramaturgic rationality by its ability to
concern all three "worlds" as he terms them, following
Karl Popper--the subjective, objective, and
intersubjective or social. Communicative rationality is
self-reflexive and open to a dialogue in which
participants in an argument can learn from others and
from themselves by reflecting upon their premises and
thematizing aspects of their cultural background
knowledge to question suppositions that typically go
without question.
Communicative Action
• Communicative action is action based upon this deliberative
process, where two or more individuals interact and coordinate their
action based upon agreed upon interpretations of the situation.
Communicative action is distinguished from Habermas from other
forms of action, such as pure goal-oriented behavior dealt with
primarily in economics, by taking all functions of language into
consideration . That is, Communicative action has the ability to
reflect upon language used as express propositional truth,
normative value, or subjective self-expression.
Communicative Action
• Much of Habermas' work has been in response to his predecessors
in the Frankfurt School. Communicative rationality, for instance,
can be seen as a response to the critique of enlightenment reason
expressed in Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno's Dialectic of
Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno had argued that the
Enlightenment saw a particular kind of rationality enshrined as
dominant in western culture, instrumental reason, which had only
made possible the more effective and ruthless manipulation of
nature and human beings themselves. Habermas' form of critical
theory is designed to rediscover through the analysis of positive
potentials for human rationality in the medium of language, the
possibility of a critical form of reason that can lead to reflection and
examination of not only objective questions, but also those of social
norms, human values, and even aesthetic expression of subjectivity.
Communicative Action
• Habermas' earlier work, The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere, anticipates his concern for argumentation and can be
read retrospectively as an historical case study of Western European
societies institutionalizing aspects of communicative action in the
political and social spheres. Habermas notes the rise of institutions
of public debate in late seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain
and France especially. In these nations, information exchange and
communication methods pioneered by capitalist merchants became
adapted to novel purposes and were employed as an outlet for the
public use of reason. The notion of communicative rationality in the
public sphere is therefore heavily indebted to Immanuel Kant's
formulation of the public use of reason in What is Enlightenment?
Communicative Action
• Habermas argues that the bourgeoisie who participated in this incipient
public sphere universalized those aspects of their class that enabled them to
present the public sphere as inclusive—he even goes so far as to say that a
public sphere that operates upon principles of exclusivity is not a public
sphere at all. The focus on foundations of democracy established in this
work carried over to his later examination in The Theory of Communicative
Action that greater democratization and the reduction to barriers to
participation in public discourse (some of which he identified in the first
public sphere of the Enlightenment) could open the door to a more open
form of social action. The shift from a more Marxist focus on the economic
bases of discourse in Structural Transformation to a more "superstructural" emphasis on language and communication in Theory of
Communicative Action signals Habermas' transition to a post-Marxist
framework.
Habermas on Public Sphere
• The public sphere is an area in social life where people
can get together and freely discuss and identify societal
problems, and through that discussion influence political
action. It is "a discursive space in which individuals and
groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest
and, where possible, to reach a common judgment."The
public sphere can be seen as "a theater in modern
societies in which political participation is enacted
through the medium of talk" and "a realm of social life in
which public opinion can be formed".
Public Sphere
• The public sphere mediates between the "private sphere" and the "Sphere of Public
Authority", "The private sphere comprised civil society in the narrower sense, that is
to say, the realm of commodity exchange and of social labor." Whereas the "Sphere of
Public Authority" dealt with the State, or realm of the police, and the ruling class. The
public sphere crossed over both these realms and "Through the vehicle of public
opinion it put the state in touch with the needs of society.""This area is conceptually
distinct from the state: it [is] a site for the production and circulation of discourses
that can in principle be critical of the state."The public sphere 'is also distinct from
the official economy; it is not an arena of market relations but rather one of
discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying
and selling."These distinctions between "state apparatuses, economic markets, and
democratic associations...are essential to democratic theory." The people themselves
came to see the public sphere as a regulatory institution against the authority of the
state The study of the public sphere centers on the idea of participatory democracy,
and how public opinion becomes political action.
Public Sphere
• The basic belief in public sphere theory is that political
action is steered by the public sphere, and that the only
legitimate governments are those that listen to the public
sphere. "Democratic governance rests on the capacity of
and opportunity for citizens to engage in enlightened
debate". Much of the debate over the public sphere
involves what is the basic theoretical structure of the
public sphere, how information is deliberated in the
public sphere, and what influence the public sphere has
over society.
Reference
• Yu Hai: Western Social Theory
- Gramsci, No.46: Intellectuals and Hegemony;
- Horkheimer, No.47: Notes on Science and the Crisis;
- Adorno, No. 50: The Culture Industry Reconsidered
- Habermas, No.52:Public Sphere
No.53: Communicative Action
• Fred Rush: Critical Theory