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enhanced private 'inward-facing' freedom (e.g. more shopping choices) for
less public 'outward-facing' freedom (e.g. the ability to effectively challenge
elected governments). Politics should not, they both argue, be the preserve
of a minority of activists, political party members or pressure groups. Third,
democracies emphasise the 'freedom' and 'liberty' of their members - in
part to protect them from domination by others, in part to encourage
diversity and novelty in ways of thinking and doing. The basic idea here
is that incumbent or potential governing parties must
persuade
(not force)
citizens to support them, and that part of persuasion is the obligation of
those parties to debate
alternative
values, goals and policies.
BOX 3.4
According to the German theorist Jurgen Habermas (1962), in his
seminal book
The structural transformation of the public sphere
, the 'pub-
lic sphere' first came into existence in the fledging democracies of
eighteenth-century Europe. The public sphere is not a physical place.
Instead, it's a sphere of interaction that can be virtual and strung
out as much as face-to-face and localised. The word 'public' has close
etymological connections to the word 'people'. In the system of self-
government known as a 'republic', it quite literally means self-rule
rather than rule by non-elected or imposed leaders. According to
Habermas, the public domain was a sphere where members of a polity
could come together and consider matters of common concern on
a notionally equal basis. It was irreducible to the
private domain
(the
household and family), the
market domain
(the sphere of commod-
ity production, distribution and exchange) or the domain of the
state
(elected governments, bureaucracy, the law, the police and the armed
forces). Yet deliberations in the public sphere could legitimately have
consequences for all three of these domains if people decided to change
the law or to alter existing regulations via their elected governments.
For Habermas, the public sphere overlapped with what's called
civil
society
. This is that mixture of activities and organisations devoted
to tackling issues that affect wide sections of society (e.g. a charity
devoted to helping homeless people). It depends, he argues, on the
free circulation of information, argument and opinion.
As Habermas rightly argued, a key condition of possibility for a func-
tioning 'public sphere' is that there's such a thing as a 'public' in any
given country (which itself requires that the
idea
of 'the public' is widely
understood). Yet publics do not arise spontaneously. Their creation
and maintenance requires considerable effort. In eighteenth-century
Europe,
it required revolutions, such as that in France in 1789,
