The Public Sphere:

The sphere of social life where people bring up matters of general interest, resolve differences by rational argument; free and open discussion.

Proliferation of clubs, cafes, journals, newspapers in the l8th c. helped erode the basic structure of feudalism; agreement reached through public debate and discourse among free citizens.

The role of public speech:

How is the public sphere different from civil society?

The public sphere is undermined by the power of the state (the expansion of bureaucracy). There is differentiation between successes and life world processes.

Organizations and a variety of other domains (such as money and power) are systems disconnected from life world contexts and moral values; life world, as social integrated, is informed by communicative action, mutual understanding and moral values.

The life world is fragmented, colonized by media steered systems, money and power; much of daily life is rationalized and instrumentalized.

Ideology plays an important role in the control of the state over the life world.

When a society's conception of itself and the realities it experiences cease to be congruent, social change takes place.

Modern society is poorly integrated; the economy and the state colonized life world processes concerned with mutually shared meanings, understandings, and intersubjectivity.

Legitimization Crisis:

The decline in the public sphere is historical trends in modern societies. State intervention into the market is justified by economic instability. Science is controlled in the service of the state's interests.

In the crises of capitalist society, political issues are translated into technical problems. Issues tend to be represented as technical problems that experts in bureaucratic organizations can handle.

The criteria of the efficiency of means in realizing explicit goals are set up by instrumental reason. The ideology of technocratic consciousness does not resolve dilemmas of political legitimization.

Three subsystems of capitalist societies are integrated; the economic, the political adrninistrative, the cultural (life world).  Insufficient productivity bring about an economic crisis; people's needs are not met; a rationality crisis arises from the failure of the politico-adrninistrative system to generate a sufficient number of instrumental decisions; in a motivation crisis, cultural symbols do not provide means for actors to generate sufficient meaning.

Communicative Action:

Communicative action seeks an understanding about action situations and plans of action for coordinating their actions by way of agreement.

Compared with communicative action, other types of action do not involve intersubjective understanding; dramaturgical action (the actor's subjective world of desires) and normative regulated action (complying with agreed norrns); goal oriented action (utility maximization).

Emancipation from domination is sought through communicative action. Hermeneutic analysis focuses on the processes by which actors interpret one another's subjective states; actors implicitly make, accept, and challenge one another's validity claims.

Rationality serves as the basis for reconstructing the social order; there are four types of action, teleological, normative, dramaturgical, communicative; only through communicative action, actors reach intersubjective understanding, knowledge of a life world.

Emancipation:

Emancipation from unquestioned traditions and coercion; domination is based on moral considerations and democratic challenges.

The liberation of the life world is informed by communicative action, mutual understanding and moral values. Truth and moral rightness are sought by emancipatory activities.

How is rationality related to a process to claim truth?

Is conflict resolution (mediation) a rational process?

Rationality is a cognitive conception grounded in communication (oriented toward argumentative speech).

A rational form of life is achieved by consensus (intersubjective understanding) The question is how to reach consensus?

Consensus reached through intersubjective understanding It cannot be achieved through a false consensus;

The Ideal Speech Situation:

The major concern is how to reach intersubjective understanding, consensus (not manipulated); emancipation.

The shared goal of participants is reaching mutual understanding; There have to be no internal and external constraints for an equal and open chance of entering the discussion.

How can truth claims be made?

Comprehensible (epistemologically; the entire body of an elephant, not just a leg); right (based on normative judgement, murder is wrong); sincere expression; consensus (non-coercive).

The ideal outcome is an agreement about truth and rightness achieved through rational discussion. Four validity claims can be made (comprehensive; true; normatively justified; the speaker not being deceptive or coercive).

In consensual speech action, free agreement is reached through a process of discursive will formulation.

Truth and rightness are essential emancipatory activities which enable individuals and societies to loosen the hold of mythological world-views. Societies can learn evolutionarily by utilizing the cognitive potential contained in world views for reorganizing action systems.

The paradigm of undistorted communication may exist in the dyad, the smallest unit of social action.

Modern states are founded on a common will, communicatively shaped and discursively clarified in the political public sphere.

Further Study:

How does Habermas differ from Foucault (institutionalization, discipline, knowledge), Marx (class consciousness) or others?

The articulation of modern social science provides the epistemological foundation for belief in an autonomous and universal human subject; a subject whose existence, once verified, as the postmodernists note, become the focus of control, discipline, and subjection.

Critical Theory:

Early critical theorists (Horkheimer, Adorno) question historical forces that dominate human freedom, and expose ideological justifications of these forces; further, these theorists explore praxis, the development of ideas about oppression.

Habermas and Conflict Resolution:

The major concern for Habermas is how social order is legitimized. How do we understand communicative aspects of social life?

In a hegemonic perspective on disputing, one developed in the US during the 1970s and exported world-wide, a hegemony is referred to as harmony ideology, and whose primary function is pacification.