Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.
The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A "Public" is "of or concerning the people as a whole." Such a discussion is called public debate and is defined as the expression of views on matters that are of concern to the public—often, but not always, with opposing or diverging views being expressed by participants in the discussion. Public debate takes place mostly through the mass media, but also at meetings or through social media, academic publications and government policy documents.
Alexander Kluge is a German author, philosopher, academic and film director.
The term new social movements (NSMs) is a theory of social movements that attempts to explain the plethora of new movements that have come up in various western societies roughly since the mid-1960s which are claimed to depart significantly from the conventional social movement paradigm.
Alternative media are media sources that differ from established or dominant types of media in terms of their content, production, or distribution. Sometimes the term independent media is used as a synonym, indicating independence from large media corporations, but generally independent media is used to describe a different meaning around freedom of the press and independence from government control. Alternative media does not refer to a specific format and may be inclusive of print, audio, film/video, online/digital and street art, among others. Some examples include the counter-culture zines of the 1960s, ethnic and indigenous media such as the First People's television network in Canada, and more recently online open publishing journalism sites such as Indymedia.
The West German student movement, sometimes called the 1968 movement in West Germany, was a social movement that consisted of mass student protests in West Germany in 1968. Participants in the movement later came to be known as 68ers. The movement was characterized by the protesting students' rejection of traditionalism and of German political authority which included many former Nazi officials. Student unrest had started in 1967 when student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a policeman during a protest against the visit of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. The movement is considered to have formally started after the attempted assassination of student activist leader Rudi Dutschke, which sparked various protests across West Germany and gave rise to public opposition. The movement created lasting changes in German culture.
Oskar Reinhard Negt was a German philosopher and critical social theorist. He was a professor of sociology in Hanover from 1972 to 2002, regarded as one of Germany's most prominent social scientists.
Karl Heinrich Otto Rühle was a German Marxist active in opposition to both the First and Second World Wars as well as a council communist theorist.
Lifeworld may be conceived as a universe of what is self-evident or given, a world that subjects may experience together. The concept was popularized by Edmund Husserl, who emphasized its role as the ground of all knowledge in lived experience. It has its origin in biology and cultural Protestantism.
Wolfgang Walter Arnulf Abendroth was a German socialist, jurist, and political scientist. He was born in Elberfeld, now a part of Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia. Abendroth was a radical social democrat and an important contributor to the constitutional foundation of post-World War II West Germany. In 1943 he was forcibly drafted into one of the 999th Division's "probation units" and while stationed in Greece he deserted to the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS).
A Berlin Republic is a 1997 book composed of a collection of transcripts of interviews with the German philosopher and social critic Jürgen Habermas conducted by various European media in the mid-1990s. The common thread of the interviews is Habermas's disagreement with resurgent German nationalism after the reunification with the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).
In political theory, refeudalization is the process of recovering the political mechanisms and relationships that used to define feudalism. Because the term "feudalism" is slightly ambiguous, "refeudalization" is ambiguous, too.
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society is a 1962 book by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. It was translated into English in 1989 by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. An important contribution to modern understanding of democracy, it is notable for "transforming media studies into a hard-headed discipline." In 2022 Habermas published a brief sequel, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics.
Lutz Wingert is a German philosopher who is sometimes identified as one of the "Third Generation" of the Frankfurt School of philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy focusing on practical philosophy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and a member of the Zentrum Geschichte des Wissens. He is a former student of, and a co-author with, Jürgen Habermas, a founding member of the Frankfurt School. Wingert is a former chair of practical philosophy at the University of Dortmund. Along with Wilfried Hinsch, he edits the Ideen & Argumente series.
Friedrich Adolph Wilhelm Diesterweg was a German educator, thinker, and progressive liberal politician, who campaigned for the secularization of schools. He is said to be precursory to the reform of pedagogy. Diesterweg is considered as "a teacher of teachers".
The Süddeutsche Zeitung, published in Munich, Bavaria, is one of the largest daily newspapers in Germany. The tone of SZ is mainly described as centre-left, liberal, social-liberal, progressive-liberal, and social-democrat.
Public sphere pedagogy (PSP) represents an approach to educational engagement that connects classroom activities with real world civic engagement. The focus of PSP programs is to connect class assignments, content, and readings with contemporary public issues. Students are then asked to participate with members of the community in various forms of public sphere discourse and democratic participation, such as town hall meetings and public debate events. Through these events, students are challenged to practice civic engagement and civil discourse.
The Spartacus League was a Marxist revolutionary movement organized in Germany during World War I. It was founded in August 1914 as the International Group by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, and other members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) who were dissatisfied with the party's official policies in support of the war. In 1916 it renamed itself the Spartacus Group and in 1917 joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which had split off from the SPD as its left wing faction.
Peter Uwe Hohendahl is an American literary and intellectual historian and theorist. He served as the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies at Cornell University, where he is now a professor emeritus.
The European public sphere refers to the public sphere where ideas and information are exchanged by citizens of European societies that can influence the European political life. It is to have an "arena for EU-wide public discourse".
