This article originated in a series of workshops organized by Gisèle Sapiro at EHESS and Stefanos Geroulanos at NYU under the title “Crossroads of Intellectual History”.
A collection of essays edited by the organizers has just been published under the title The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas.
The full reference of my chapter is as follows:
Sebastian Veg, “Publicness beyond the Public Sphere,” in Stefanos Geroulanos and Gisèle Sapiro, eds., Routledge Handbook of Intellectual History and the Sociology of Ideas, Routledge, 2023. pp. 44-56.
Abstract:
This essay begins by retracing the diverging reception in the German-, French-, and English-speaking contexts of the notion of the public sphere, which shows the open nature and heuristic potential of Habermas’s original conceptualization. Despite the many valid critiques formulated over the years, the notion of publicness has remained a productive one, and has even been applied in authoritarian contexts, which were not originally included within its scope. This essay argues that the concept of publicness offers a unique connection between three approaches, which no other concept has been able to establish: the history and sociology of the press and media, the study of public opinion, and participative democracy. For this reason, it may be undesirable to entirely discard it or disconnect it from the normative preferences embedded in it.
A pre-print copy of the chapter is available for download below:
Sebastian Veg 