Sarah Brouillette
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,”...
A Confederacy of Haters
Sarah Brouillette
Here is a story about the public sphere. Hundreds of years ago, a class of newly wealthy people used a burgeoning print culture to bolster their anti-monarchical claims to a larger role in public affairs. The capitalism that generated their wealth immiserated many more, who formed a variety of proletarianized counter-publics. Not seeing their interests represented in the bourgeois public sphere, these people attacked its protocols of reason and decorum....
