Une bibliographie du concept Offentlichkeit, terme qui peut etre traduit comme publique ou sphere publique, est necessairement eclectique. Sa fonction est de rassembler les travaux qui definissent et defient les limites du concept. Suit une bibliographie complete sur le concept

A Bibliography of the Concept Offentlichkeit

Festival marketplaces have been developed in many cities of the United States under public-private partnerships as a means to promote urban revitalization in historic downtowns, and especially on waterfronts. While some critics have welcomed the return of public life and collective narratives in these new retail landscapes, others have lamented their exclusionary nature, ideological manipulations, and formulaic aesthetics. This paper critically examines these claims and argues that festival marketplaces are profoundly ambivalent places, which in their rhetorical commitment to Utopian values of urbanism open up opportunities for urban politics that both critiques ignore. This is demonstrated through a review of four archetypes of ideal urbanness that are reproduced in these forms, namely public space, the marketplace, street theater, and the waterfront. The archetypes are articulated through powerful narratives of nostalgia, and I draw on Walter Benjamin to argue that the festival marketplace is a dream-ho...

Disquiet on the waterfront: reflections on nostalgia and utopia in the urban archetypes of festival marketplaces

Into the 1990s: a gendered agenda for political geography.

Critical theory faces frequent charges of excessive abstraction, aridity, and political irrelevance. This paper seeks to counter such claims by developing a critical theory program for political organization, linking social theory, epistemology, and institutions. The elements demanded of such a program are identified through reference to the moves successfully accomplished in similar pursuit by critical theory's more established and accepted competitor, Popperian critical rationalism. A comparison of the capabilities of the practices and institutions inspired by the two programs adds further weight to critical theory's claims.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2111287.pdf

Discursive Designs: Critical Theory and Political Institutions*

The historical and conceptual exclusions of the bourgeois public sphere have prompted theorists to consider alternative models. The three non-deliberative models examined in this article reinscribe...

Toward a Normative Conception of Difference in Public Deliberation

The paper interprets C. Wright Mills's distinction between ‘private troubles' and ‘public issues' as indicating both a conceptual and an institutional separation between civil society and the public sphere. It goes on to argue that Habermas's social theory is founded upon the view that ‘distorted communication’ should be analysed within an already institutionalized public space within civil society. Arguments that claim that the public sphere is degenerate on historical or theoretical grounds are rejected. The paper differentiates between pre-institutional and institutional levels of the public sphere and concludes by illustrating this conceptual distinction, first, through a brief discussion of ‘new social movements' and Alain Touraine's actionist sociology, and secondly, through a discussion of natural justice and public inquiries.

John J. Rodger

Papers

On the Degeneration of the Public Sphere