Can we still refer to the public sphere Use examples to suggest how Essay

Can we still refer to the public sphere Use examples to suggest how realistic or idealistic this notion is with regards to jour - Essay Example It becomes a focal point of our yearning for the good society, the institutional sites where popular political will should take form and citizens should be able to comprise themselves as active agents in the political process. democratic character and consequently in a sense the most instantly visible indicator of our admittedly flawed democracies (Hallin, Daniel C, 1994). The notion of the public sphere can be used in a very general as well as common-sense manner, as, for instance, a synonym for the processes of public view or for the news media themselves. In its more ambitious appearance, however, as it was developed by Jurgen Habermas (1993), the public sphere ought to be understood as an analytic class, a conceptual device which, while pointing to a definite social occurrence can also help us in analyzing and researching the experience. For Habermas, the idea of the bourgeois public sphere indicates a specific social space, which arose under the development of capitalism in West ern Europe. As an analytic category, the bourgeois public sphere comprises a vibrant nexus which links various actors, factors as well as contexts together in a consistent theoretic framework. So why should we listen to a philosopher, even one so distinguished as Richard Rorty, who still believes in a democratic role for journalism— at least, why should we listen in any frame of mind other than one of ironic knowingness about the fate of philosophy in the real world? (Hall, 1982) â€Å"I think that contemporary liberal society already contains the institutions for its own improvement,† Rorty wrote in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. â€Å"Indeed, my hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs. s private lives alone and preventing suffering† while â€Å"discoveries about who is being made to suffer can be left to the workings of a free press, free universities, and enlightened public opinion. t we di smiss in an especially derisive tone of ironic knowingness any such vision of intellectual history at its end? Rorty, it turns out, has anticipated and subverted our irony with irony of his own. An ultimate ironist, according to Rorty, knows that even if liberal democracy has had the last conceptual revolution it needs, it has not had the last revolution possible. That is because a world in which democracy is fully realized is a world constituted and maintained by a particular language—a language that enables its citizens to articulate their loathing of injustice as well as their love of liberty. The ultimate ironist also knows that such a world can never be entirely secure because its language is a contingent rather than necessary development in human history. Anything, including both suffering and freedom, can be â€Å"made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being re-described.† Thus the ultimate ironist lives with the terrible reali zation that, whenever language hostile to justice or liberty is spoken by the adversaries of democratic values, no ultimate philosophical weapon—no knowledge of what is fundamentally real and no vision of what is truly human—is available to the defenders of democratic values. The defenders can only exercise, and strive to enhance, the descriptive and persuasive powers of their moral language (Glasser, 1998). S position on the