From colonization to circulation: public sphere and diagnoses of the time in Jurgen Habermas work

• Grant number: 23/18033-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: July 01, 2024
• End date: February 29, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Marcos Severino Nobre
• Grantee: Pedro Pacheco e Zan
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 19/22387-0 - Crises of democracy: critical theory and the diagnosis of present time, AP.TEM

Abstract

This research aims at investigating two distinct formulations of the concept of the public sphere in Habermas work: one included in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and the other one introduced in Between Facts and Norms (1992). While in the first one Habermas understands that the public sphere is responsible for containing the colonizing advances of the systemic imperatives in the lifeworld, in the second one the author puts the public sphere in his conception of the circulation of political power, granting this model a more offensive character, in which the demands elaborated in the public sphere must be thematized in the political system. This alteration, already interpreted by commentators on the topic, is marked for important conceptual and theoretical changes. However, there is an element that was put to a side in the current interpretation, namely, a concomitant change in the authors diagnosis of the times. If in 1981 Habermas was analyzing the impacts of the project of the welfare state in the lifeworld, highlighted by his diagnosis of colonization, in 1992 the author writes in the context of the depletion of this project, that opened up the possibility of rising a neoconservative movement that advocates for the shutdown of the political system to the lifeworld. This research aims at interpreting the relation between these theoretical, conceptual, and diagnostic changes as elements that mark transformations between two distinct concepts of the public sphere in Habermas work.