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CIAO DATE: 9/5/2006
An Arendtian Critique of Deliberative Global Sphere Theory: 'Humanitarian' Violence and the Paradox of Founding
Patricia Owens
January 2004
Center for International Studies University of Southern California
Abstract
Marx’s dictum that ‘violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with the new one’… only sums up the conviction of the whole modern age and draws the consequences of its innermost belief that history is ‘made’ by men as nature is ‘made’ by God.
- Hannah Arendt
The language of the ‘public sphere’ is foundational to democratic theory and practice and most of our activity is oriented toward some form of public. As subject and object of democracy, the notion of a ‘public’ is a discursive weapon second only to the ‘people’ as the political honorific par excellence. Definitions of the public sphere vary, however, not least because different topographical locations and fields of activity are public in different times and places; publics are constituted through a variety of media (face-to-face, print, and electronic encounters); and there are various modes in which one can participate in public discourse and action (liberal, deliberative, agonistic). Most straightforwardly, ‘public spheres’ organise relations among strangers. They are the places in which people talk or read about their common affairs
