Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Digital Public Sphere

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In September 2022, sixty years after he first released the German edition of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (STPS) in 1962, Habermas published A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics (Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik). This renewed engagement with the theme of the public sphere has been a long time coming. Despite the impact that Habermas’s concept of the public sphere has had in political science, political theory, history, sociology and communication studies, for much of the past sixty years his work has been devoted to other issues.

Habermas’s influence on debates about the public sphere is not a mere historical relic. On the contrary, Structural Transformation remains a key touchstone for contemporary debates, as he introduced the idea of ‘publicity’ into the jargon of political theory, using it to replace the previously dominant concept of public opinion. Given that Habermas’s focus on the external conditions of the public sphere has set the agenda for a much of the scholarly inquiry into these issues to this day, his return to these issues deserves special attention at a time when changes to the structural imperatives of the public sphere are once again at the top of both the theoretical and political agenda.

The papers included in this panel critically engage with Habermas’s new work on the digital public sphere. It brings together interpreters of Habermas, who reflect on the importance of this work to his theoretical oeuvre, as well as scholars of digital communication, who apply his theoretical insights to the empirical scholarship on the effects of the internet and digital technology on the public sphere. In addition to reflecting on the 2023 APSA conference theme on the rights and responsibilities or citizens and scholars in an age of mis- and disinformation, it also addresses the role of political theory in the public sphere, the relationship between truth and mutual understanding and how mis- and disinformation affect foundational concepts including sovereignty, freedom, equality, justice, popular sovereignty and democracy.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Ideology and Simultaneously More than Mere Ideology - Sebastian Sevignani

• Deliberative Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere - Simone Chambers, University of California, Irvine

• A Not-Very-New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere - William E. Scheuerman, Indiana University, Bloomington

• Rights, Responsibilities & Imagination in Digital Public Spheres - Cristina Lafont, Northwestern University

• Opinion-Leadership in the Digital Public Sphere - Claudia Ritzi, University of Trier

Chair

• Peter J. Verovšek University of Groningen

Discussants

• Jacob Samuel Abolafia Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Jennifer Forestal Loyola University, Chicago