PUBLIC SPHERE WITHOUT MEDIATION?

Abstract

In 2022, the social theorist Jurgen Habermas wrote an evaluation of the now classic argument on the public sphere published in his book The structural transformation of the public sphere. In this sixty years old evaluation, Habermas links the crisis of democracy to changes at the level of the public sphere and the diminishing role played by the written press and professional journalists. In this article, I establish a dialogue with the German social theorist and try to bridge his analysis of the public sphere to the idea of an anti-enlightenment tradition based on the work of Zeev Sternhell. The last part of the article is an analysis of the Brazilian crisis of democracy from this perspective.