Patrick O'Mahony

The contemporary theory of the public sphere

Contents: Normative Theories of Democracy, Communication, and the Public Sphere - Habermas, Democracy, and Public Culture - Cognitive Sociology, Collective Learning, and the Public Sphere - Democratic Communication, the Cognitive Order, and the Public Sphere.

Cosmopolitanism and the Construction of Cultural Models in Contemporary Europe

This article outlines a cognitive approach towards analysing and evaluating the process of building a transnational normative culture in Europe through a number of steps. In a first step, employing a number of social theory traditions, a brief outline is offered of European transnationalism as a territorial form. The second step, which is oriented by Habermass idea of democratic learning processes that bridge national and post-national democratic levels, explores the relationship between democratic communication and normative culture formation on the transnational plane. This leads into the third step that outlines the cognitive mechanisms that affect the formation of post-national democracy. These mechanisms will determine the emergence of transnational normative culture understood as a process of forming suitable cultural models, entailing an ontological, epistemological and methodological shift away from a narrowly conceived normative model. Such a normative model bypasses or minimises the cognitive-communicative mechanisms involved in the dynamic, public construction of meaning and validity. The implications of such a revision of perspectives is further developed in a fourth and concluding step by addressing the kind of transnational deliberative-discursive complex required for the needed cognitive innovation that would in turn make possible appropriate normative innovation informed by a cosmopolitan perspective.

Social Theory and the Critique of Capitalism in a Communication Society

The essay attempts to re-contextualise the normative import of capitalism in the light of modern social theoretical developments. It firstly explores the significance in this regard of the procedural turn in both social theory and political philosophy. While important, this turn has come at the price of a loss of focus on the substantive plane of how unjust social relations – such as those often arising from capitalist structures – diminish the moral capacities of democratic institutions to shape social change. The essay goes on to show in the second section how Axel Honneth (2004, 2007), offering a partial corrective, combines a procedural emphasis on communication with a substantive account of embedded normative structures, opening the way to a differentiated sociological approach that remains normative but not one-sidedly transcendent and deontological. Taking a lead from these reflections, the third section presents a social theoretical architecture concerned both with social structures and processes and with normative grounding, balancing a perspective drawn from sociological constructivism with normative reconstruction. Finally, in the concluding section, the foregoing is brought to bear on the study of capitalism in a manner that is intended to open up new avenues for its critical theoretical exploration.

Science and Industry

SUMMARY Industry loses its autonomy in advanced modern society as science increasingly dictates the economic agenda. Rival socio‐political explanations of the relationship–technocratic and Marxist–rely on antagonistic theories which respectively emphasize the primacy of cognitive‐instrumental and social‐normative factors. A critical assessment of both of these positions reveals the theoretical requirement of exploring internal (cognitive)–methodological–and external (normative)–social, cultural and economic–conditions of science in the historical context of changes in economic structures from early capitalist to industrial and, latterly, post‐industrial. The basic historico‐theoretical orientation that emerges is then used to demonstrate how the economy has become scientized and how industrial organizations need adequate learning capability to effectively utilize scientifically produced knowledge. The paper concludes by suggesting that sociological learning theory articulated in the form of a theory of co...

Editors' Introduction: Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism

To the extent that world publics today become aware of the profound risks generated by ecological, political, economic and social forces of transformation and the way the latter fundamentally undermine the exclusivity of a nation-state politics, something historically new emerges, what Beck (2006) refers to as a cosmopolitan ‘vision’ or cognisance of our collective belonging to endangered local, national and global worlds. While the teleology of institutionally resonant concepts can never be entirely predicted, certain ideas, like that of national self-determination, historically have had a profound impact on the political geographies of the modern world. While it is unlikely that this principle will cease to be of relevance in the future, it is also unlikely that cosmopolitanism will only serve as a background idea whose time will quickly pass without institutional consequences. The interdependencies created today by worldwide processes of change oblige a greater recognition of our equal status as members of one global community of rights. The world faces serious civilisational threats in the years ahead (intense migration flows to major urban centres, natural resource deficiencies, deepening poverty, hunger, famine, etc.), challenges that are, as Beck (2006) highlights, every nation and every individual’s concern. Adapting to these challenges in a peaceful and just manner requires a degree of cooperation on the part of global communities not witnessed by this world to date. The cooperation imperative is so serious it could be classified as the most important challenge facing twenty-first century humanity. This challenge ignites a series of related issues, including the question of where our main moral-political allegiances ought to lie; to what degree should we hold to a position of universal right and on basis of what notions of fairness and responsibility can we continue to defend territorial privileges over and above issues of survival, especially the survival of the vulnerable communities of this world? Debates regarding such issues are picked up throughout this special edition, for example in the significance of the divide between citizens and immigrant residents emphasised by Morris, or the renascent discourse of security in the EU and US as a response to climate change identified by Skillington. The conflict