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CHAPTER 2. THE PUBLIC SPHERE 39
public status to their strongly held personal convictions. The cry of ’In spite
of all, I believe’ is the hallmark of such usage” (Barber 1984, 192).
The expression of dissenting voices, even after a “decision” has been reached,
allows issues considered important to at least some element of the public to be
kept on the political agenda. Finally, Barber argues that all political talk ought to
“converge toward a single, crucial end – the development of a citizenry capable
of genuinely public thinking and political judgment and thus able to envision a
common future in terms of genuinely common goods.”
What links these various functions of political talk together is their reflectivity, or
reciprocity. All are focused on providing participants in discourse with access to
the positions of other citizens, and with providing participants the tools necessary
to understand the positions of others.
An idealized public sphere must, in addition to satisfying the conditions of equality,
diversity and reciprocity, be a certain quality as well. The quality of the discourse
in the public sphere is an indicator of its closeness to the idealized vision
put forth by Habermas (1989), who described the classical bourgeois public sphere
of the 17th and 18th century as focused on rational-critical argument. The defining
characteristics of rational-critical argument are that the merits of the argument, not
the characteristics of the arguer, carry the day. For an argument to be evaluated on
the basis of its merits, though, it must be of a certain quality. Political discourse
– the reasoning that people do together in attempts to resolve questions of concern
– requires some minimum levels of knowledge (Neuman 1990), deliberative
abilities (Fishkin 1991) and cognitive skills (Tetlock 1985). Further, high quality
political discourse requires that individuals with these talents make use of them in
their public interactions with other citizens (Habermas 1996).
One of the factors that distinguishes political discourse from ordinary discourse is
that in the former, a group of people is engaged in attempts to resolve a problem;
their discussion is not the end in itself, but a means to an end. Yet, at the same time,
the people involved are likely to have different visions of justice and the public
good (Gutmann & Thompson 1996). Quality in public sphere discourse can also
be measured by the degree to which participants manage to come together and
find common ground in their deliberations and discussions.
Finally, the tension between high quality discourse and inclusivity should be realized.
As Calhoun (1992, 3) emphasizes, the quality of discourse in the public
sphere may actually be reduced by the degree to which a public sphere is open