Abstract
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas introduced the idea of “public sphere” into academic discourse in 1962. It came to be widely employed in scholarship and intellectual conversation in the English-speaking part of the world only in the 1980s, after Habermas had achieved international renown for other work, but it has become enormously popular since then. Actually, the word Habermas used was Öffentlichkeit, for which no ready English equivalents exist that convey Habermas’s sense. “Public sphere” does as well as anything else.1
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Notes
The book in which Habermas introduced the concept of the public sphere is Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962), translated as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Citations here refer to the English-language edition. One of the reasons that the English term “public sphere” has caught on internationally is its implication of spatiality. It can be thought of as a set of concrete places, with physical attributes and boundaries and specific historical referents, rather than as an abstraction, which Öffentlichkeit suggests. Habermas clearly intended this kind of specificity.
See, for example, several of the contributions to Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), especially those of Michael Schudson (pp. 143–63), Mary P. Ryan (pp. 259–88), and Geoff Eley (pp. 289–339).
This matter will be discussed in chapters 5 and 6. See Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 49–77.
On professionalization in America, see Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism (New York: Norton, 1976),
On professionalization in America, see Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism (New York: Norton, 1976), and Thomas Haskell, ed., The Authority of Experts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
On professionalization in the context of universities (not just in America), see Konrad H. Jarausch, The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860–1930:Expansion, Diversification, Social Opening, and Professionalization in England, Germany, Russia and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 83–99, gives an interpretation of the relationship of the public sphere to modernity.
This arrangement was described in the 1880s by the British observer James Bryce, who believed that it had, in fact, been satisfactorily established. See James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (3 vols.; London and New York: Macmillan, 1888), 3, pp. 3–63.
See Curtiss S. Johnson, Politics and a Belly-full. The Journalistic Career of William Cullen Bryant, Civil War Editor of the New York Evening Post (New York: Vantage Press, 1962).
John William Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 319–22.
Tebbel and Zuckerman, Magazine in America David Seideman, The New Republic: A Voice of Modern Liberalism (New York: Praeger, 1986).
A well-reasoned argument for subsidy appears in John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, “The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers,” Nation, April 6, 2009: 11–20, which also gives a cogent analysis of the current problems of the newspapers.
See, for example, Herbert J. Schiller, Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
This was, for example, one of the themes of the famous “Hutchins Report” on the media, issued in 1947. See Stephen Bates, Realigning Journalism with Democracy: The Hutchins Commission, Its Times, and Ours (Washington, D.C.: Annenberg Washington Program in Communication Studies, 1995).
John Morton, “Facing the Future: Newspapers are Making Necessary Changes to Endure in the Internet Era,” American Journalism Review 29, 2 (April 2007).
Al Gore, Assault on Reason (New York: Penguin, 2007), pp. 245–73.
Kenneth Li and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, “Murdoch Vows to Charge for All Online Content,” Financial Times, August 6, 2009;
Kenneth Li and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, “Murdoch Vows to Charge for All Online Content,” Financial Times, August 6, 2009; Lymari Morales, “Cable, Internet News Sources Growing in Popularity,” Gallup, December 15, 2008 (accessed at http://www.gallup.com/poll/113314/).
See Steve M. Barkin, American Television News: The Media Marketplace and the Public Interest (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002).
For a barebones summary of the workings and financing of American public radio and television, see L.R. Ickes, ed., Public Broadcasting in America (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2005).
See Jerold M. Starr, Air Wars: The Fight to Reclaim Public Broadcasting (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
Jerome De Groot, Consuming History (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 185.
See Bender, New York Intellect, pp. 296–302, and Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 195–227 for the First World War.
See also Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981),
Clarence R. Wyatt, Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the Vietnam War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Atlantic Monthly-Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 557–84.
Gore, Assault on Reason; Schiller, Culture, Inc.; Alasdair Roberts, Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
People have tried to do this. In 1996, the National Review ran a remarkable series of articles that offered various arguments for standing down in the war on drugs and treating drug addiction in a different way. The series seems to have had little effect. See William F. Buckley Jr. et al., “The War on Drugs is Lost,” National Review, February 12, 1996.
Walter Lippmann, for example, made sophisticated versions of this argument in the 1920s. See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1965; original edition 1922), pp. 272–75,
Walter Lippmann, for example, made sophisticated versions of this argument in the 1920s. See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1965; original edition 1922), pp. 272–75, and Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), pp. 13–53.
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© 2010 Woodruff D. Smith
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Smith, W.D. (2010). The Core Public Sphere: What It Is and Why It Needs Help. In: Public Universities and the Public Sphere. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114708_2
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