International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Jürgen Habermas (born 1929 in Germany) is one of the leading philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. He has had and continues to have a decisive influence on communication theory and research internationally through his work on the public sphere and his theory of communicative action, as well as his theory of deliberative democracy and public deliberation. In his book on The structural transformation of the public sphere (originally published in German in 1962, but available in English only in 1989, several years after his Theory of communicative action appeared in English, in two volumes, 1984 and 1987), Habermas describes, in an ideal-typical fashion, the emergence of a bourgeois →  Public Sphere in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The bourgeois public sphere opened a space for rational-critical discussion between private individuals about matters of common concern and thus constituted a social sphere separate from self-interested interaction in the marketplace, on the one hand, and the authority of the state, on the other. Habermas portrayed the development of public communication since the mid-nineteenth century as a process of increasing commercialization of the mass media (→  Commercialization of the Media ) and a growing tendency toward publicity aimed at securing mass loyalty rather than critical debate (a process he called ... log in or subscribe to read full text