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A communication-centered explanation of the difficulty to reform Wall Street so far would depend largely on which view of public opinion and the nature of the public sphere (indeed, which view of democracy) you adopt. University of Pennsylvania Provost and communication researcher Vincent Price (2008) usefully describes four models of the public sphere that could potentially apply to the U.S. at various points in the debate over financial reform and other issues:
"What do scholars offer present politics? Does it depend on the discipline - sociology vs. history vs. chemistry - and, within disciplines, on sub-fields? Amongst historians, does a US historian like Cronon have more to offer than, say, a medievalist? Does it matter *where you live* (Cronon's made much of his place-based identity), or *what you know* (e.g. for the sake of comparison), or *how you think* (pattern recognition, textual analysis, &c.)?
Possibly all of these questions matter. What I want to figure out is (1) what Cronon thinks he has to offer as a "Scholar Citizen" (which is *not* the same as a "Citizen Scholar," the analogue of the "Citizen Scientist"), and (2) how this relates to the relationship between "scholarship" and "citizenship" (or politics)."
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1. From ancient times to the Renaissance, “public” was synonymous with the state and the state was synonymous not with its people (that’s our modern notion) but with its rulers.
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2. In the so-called early modern period of the 16th and 17th centuries (also known as the Renaissance), Gutenberg’s printing press as well as the theater, music, art, maps, and markets enabled some people to create their own publics, as the Making Publics project at McGill University argues (I’ll explore their ideas further in a later chapter). These were voluntary publics formed among strangers sharing similar interests
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Public Reason is a peer-reviewed journal of political and moral philosophy. Public Reason publishes articles, book reviews, as well as discussion notes from all the fields of political philosophy and ethics, including political theory, applied ethics, and legal philosophy. The Journal encourages the debate around rationality in politics and ethics in the larger context of the discussion concerning rationality as a philosophical problem.
in list: Philosophy Notes, Journals of Interest
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- Preparation - Consciously plan, design, convene and arrange the engagement to serve its purpose and people.
- Inclusion - Incorporate multiple voices and ideas to lay the groundwork for quality outcomes and democratic legitimacy.
- Collaboration - Support organizers, participants, and those engaged in follow-up to work well together for the common good.
- Learning - Help participants listen, explore and learn without predetermined outcomes -- and evaluate events for lessons.
- Transparency - Promote openness and provide a public record of the people, resources, and events involved.
- Impact - Ensure each participatory effort has the potential to make a difference.
- Sustainability - Promote a culture of participation by supporting programs and institutions that sustain quality public engagement.
There are many ways government officials and community leaders can engage the public around the myriad issues that affect people's lives. It is our stance that quality public engagement must take into consideration seven core principles if it is to effectively build mutual understanding, meaningfully affect policy development, and inspire collaborative action among citizens and institutions.
The following seven principles overlap and reinforce each other in practice. They serve both as ideals to pursue and as criteria for judging quality. Rather than promoting partisan agendas, the implementation of these principles generates authentic engagement in public problem-solving.The Seven Core Principles
in list: Philosophy Notes
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In strategic action, actors are not so much interested in mutual understanding as in achieving the individual goals they each bring to the situation.
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In communicative action, or what Habermas later came to call “strong communicative action” in “Some Further Clarifications of the Concept of Communicative Rationality” (1998b, chap. 7; German ed., 1999b), speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals on the basis of a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit-worthy. Whereas strategic action succeeds insofar as the actors achieve their individual goals, communicative action succeeds insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behavior. Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilize the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.
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The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles by Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs. University of Chicago Press, 151 pages, $15.00
The Case for Big Government, by Jeff Madrick. Princeton University Press, 205 pages, $22.95
in list: Economic Crisis
He did his part in his time, but the ideal public sphere he described — a bourgeois public sphere dominated by broadcast media — should not be taken as the model for the formation of public opinion in 21st century democracies.
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