Expanding the Public Sphere through Computer ... - ResearchGate

CHAPTER 2. THE PUBLIC SPHERE 34
While Fraser’s argument that social equality is a necessary condition for participatory
equality in the public sphere is an important corrective to Habermas’s notion,
the more general point remains. This equality of status among participants must
apply so “that no one speaker (or group of speakers) could rightly monopolize the
powers and means of assertion, disputation, and persuasion” (Keane 1984, 160):
The parity on whose basis along the authority of the better argument could
assert itself against that of social hierarchy, and in the end can carry the day
meant, in the thought of the day, the parity of ’common humanity.’ Private
gentlemen made up the public not just in the sense that power and prestige of
public office were held in suspense; economic dependencies also in principle
had no influence. Laws of the market were suspended as were laws of the
state” (Habermas 1989, 36)
Similarly, Mansbridge (Mansbridge 1983) suggests that equality is concerned
with an equality of respect among members, or perhaps through an equality of
respect for the ideas and values of its members.
Equality can also be assessed by reference to communicative competencies. Meaningful
participation in the public sphere requires communicative competence (Dryzek
1990). Although inequality in the distribution of communicative competencies
among participants in the public sphere was recognized by Habermas (1989), at
least as it applies to participation in the earliest public sphere, the ideal if not
the realization was adhered to. Barber (1984, 197) too is concerned with the
distribution among citizens of the ability to reformulate and reconceptualize political
ideas. One function of discussion in the public sphere, he suggests, is to
allow ordinary citizens access to the power of defining key terms and concepts.
“Democracy means above all equal access to language, and strong democracy
means widespread and ongoing participation in talk by the entire citizenry.”
The dimension of diversity is reflected in Habermas’s (Habermas 1989) requirement
that a full range of topics be considered in the public sphere. This is also the
process of “denaturalization” suggested by Stanley (Stanley 1983), in which the
political and social structure implied by the selection of topics and alternatives is
revealed to participants, instead of remaining “hidden” or part of the “accepted”
wisdom. In other words, there ought to be no boundaries on the possible alternatives
considered in the public sphere. Habermas (Habermas 1989) notes the
evolutionary progression of this view: as the market economy gradually came
to produce and distribute works of philosophy, literature and art, the capitalist