Public Sphere and Deliberative Democracy in Jürgen Habermas: Theorethical Model and Critical Discourses

The aim of this paper is to present the theoretical model and the major critical discourses about the category of the public sphere, and its centrality in the formulation of deliberative democracy, both from the new settings and transformations of the conception of politics in Habermas’ writings, as well as from the debate on deliberative democracy unleashed in confrontation and beyond to the political traditions of liberalism and republicanism. In the early ’90s, Habermas introduces important changes in the investigations on the public sphere and democracy, reshaping the relationship between system and lifeworld in an offensive emphasis on systemic dimension translated into terms of deliberative procedural politics or deliberative democracy. However, despite the different ways of understanding the power circulation among civil society, public sphere and political and administrative system, many theorists have questioned the basic assumptions of the Habermasian deliberative public sphere and democracy. For our purposes, we are going to clarify the most important critical discourses about the controversies involving the deliberative public sphere and democracy and the critical issues that have become not just problematic for literature but that could also be better investigated.