Historyczność i normatywność sfery publicznej Habermasa
Historicity and Normativity of Habermas’s Public Sphere

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores historicity and normativity of J. Habermas’s conception of the public sphere. Historicity refers to empirical circumstances in which the public sphere came into being; normativity makes it an organizational and regulative principle of modern political order. In Habermas’s theory historicity intertwines with normativity, and in this combination are to be found references to both: (1) empirical facts and (2) emancipative aspirations and moral obligations. Due to its function to mobilize the strivings of ordinary people who seek to escape the colonizing effects authoritarian powers (absolutist state and the world of systems) produce, the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) is regarded as a synonym for morally justified claims. Its historicity is related to the semi-institutional structures of an early European bourgeoisie; its normativity is rooted in universal morality: individual freedoms (Menschenrechte) and popular sovereignty (Volkssouveränität). Since both dispositions are represented in a model fashion in the bourgeois ethos, Habermas finds in it a repository of that universal sound reason whose new forms he strives to reinstate as a remedy for political inertia in developed capitalism. His notion of the public sphere meticulously underpinned by universal morality retains its normative sense in the modern world of systems and in the democratic state. By organizing the arena for civic communication, the public sphere serves as an indispensable instrument in a democratic legislation crafting process.

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