Abstract
Public sphere and democracy are themes that intertwine in many forms in great part of the normative and democratic theories of the last forty years. In this article, we aim to show how this link has been conceived, based on the theorizing of thinkers from three important strands of contemporary political and democratic theories: (1) J. Rawls’s political liberalism, whose idea of democracy bonds the notions of democratic society, political culture, and civic friendship; (2) J. Habermas’s critical theory, which proposes a procedural model of democracy articulated to the conceptions of publicity and solidarity; and (3) C. Mouffe’s poststructuralist radical agonistic pluralism, which postulates a close link between democracy and an agonistic understanding of society. Finally, (4) We point out how current diagnostics around the democracy crisis put under suspicion the availability and permanence of the public sphere in its various contemporary propositions.
Keywords:
Public sphere; Democracy; Contemporary political theory; Public reason; Agonism