The Public Sphere and Political Development: The Macro-Spatial Formation of Institutionalized Uncertainty

• In Event: 238 - Regular Session. Historical Sociology. Large Processes, Big Questions

Abstract

To non-specialists, the prevailing adoption of the concept of the public sphere in the Anglophone scholarship since the 1990s appears completely counterintuitive: it considers large parts of the public arena actually not as part of the “public sphere.” The confusion results from the fact that it does not actually refer to an overarching macro-space, despite the spatial designation, but rather to the sum of micro-spaces in which one type of social practice takes place: civic-minded deliberation or civic action in the realm of civil society, as opposed to instrumental action in the realms of formal political institutions and the market. Instead of such a conflation of types of practices with types of institutional spaces, this paper proposes a pragmatist approach to the public sphere that can grasp the macro-spatial phenomenon itself and its historical and comparative distinctiveness. The paper seeks to theorize the ordinary expressions of “the public arena” or “the public square” in the singular which social scientists of all stripes inevitably deploy as an ad hoc concept. By focusing on the direct relationship between civic micro-settings and formal political institutions, the leading theoretical models in political sociology and political science do not articulate the peculiar effects of this common macro-space that links dispersed symbolic exchanges into one great exchange and in which events can take on a momentum of their own. In comparative and historical perspective, the macro-spatial formation of the public sphere generates institutionalized uncertainty about the outcome of cultural and political conflicts, the paper argues.

Author

• Andreas Koller, New York University