Rethinking the Public Sphere

Introduction

Nancy Fraser’s essay appeared in Social Text in 1990 and in the volume Habermas and the Public Sphere (1992), edited by Craig Calhoun, after Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere had been translated into English in 1989. Fraser keeps the idea of a public sphere as an arena of citizens’ discussion distinct from both state and market, but rejects four assumptions of the bourgeois model: that differences of status can be bracketed, that one comprehensive public is better than many, that “private” issues should be kept out, and that a functioning public sphere requires a sharp separation between civil society and the state. Her term “subaltern counterpublics”, for arenas where excluded groups develop their own interpretations, has been widely adopted.

Connections

Criticizes

• The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere1962 · Jürgen Habermas

More works by Nancy Fraser

• 1997Justice Interruptus