The objective of this article is to examine how Habermas, guided by a normative intuition of the public use of reason, reconstructs a procedural conception of deliberative democracy which, without disregarding the strategic and instrumental dimensions of the public sphere and of politics, reconstructs the epistemic dimension of democracy: the rational acceptability of political agreements. First, I briefly present a historical and sociological analysis of the concept of the public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). I then present two lines of argumentation regarding the concept of the public sphere and deliberative democracy in Between Facts and Norms (1992): one refers to the principle of justification based on public reason as an intersubjective and political reconstruction of the Kantian concept of autonomy; the other refers to the essential aspects of the critical theory of society based on the distinction between lifeworld and system, and on the sociological and institutional "translation" of the public use of reason in the concepts of civil society and public sphere.
Public use of reason; Public sphere; Deliberative politics; Habermas