Edward Ongweso Jr
A Nicely Situated Ideal | On the Public Sphere
Edward Ongweso Jr, Ege Yumuşak, Erik Baker, Ismail Ibrahim, Megan Marz, Noelle Bodick, Sam Adler-Bell, Sarah Brouillette, Tarpley Hitt
When the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died in mid-March, the contentious debates about his ideas and influence that had stalked his career reappeared in posthumous assessments. Some recognized Habermas’s role in keeping Frankfurt School critical theory alive and defending the values of “democratically organized social life,” as Matt McManus wrote in Jacobin, against reactionaries. Others condemned Habermas’s own rightward drift, especially his “long history of being deliberately unquestioning of Israel,”...
Directing the Herd
Edward Ongweso Jr
Long before academics and pundits began mourning the loss of the Habermasian public sphere, Walter Lippmann, America’s dean of journalism, questioned whether such a sphere had ever existed. Writing in the 1910s and 1920s, Lippmann argued that the very notion of a civic society capable of understanding and advocating for the common good was a fantasy. The public was a “phantom” and society a “bewildered herd,” with individuals too trapped...
