Institutionalization and socionormativity of Habermas’s public sphere

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the institutionalization and socionormative deficits of the public sphere, “ignored” by Habermas since Structural change of the public sphere (1962) and immediately subsequent works, continuing with an unsatisfactorily clarification approach on the theme in the Theory of communicative action (1981). These deficits represent a serious problem for the institutionalization of the “public use of reason”, which requires rethinking the articulation between the concepts of civil society, the public sphere and social and political learning in response to cognitive-epistemic, practical-moral and political institutionalization deficits. Thus, I assume the conjecture that the institutionalization and socionormative deficits of the public sphere account for the social and political learning deficits, because the absence of social institutions with socionormative potential hinders the effective social participation of civil society in normative contexts for solving practical-moral and political problems. To the extent that the institutionalization of the “public use of reason” should not be limited to the level of discourse, especially in the case of political discourse, the structural-theoretical formulation and the institutional-normative content of the public sphere should be compatible with the epistemic claim of the social learning processes outlined in the Theory of Communicative Action, one of the blind spots of the “political program” of the 1981 work.