Conceptualizing the Multicultural Public Sphere : Public Sphere, Rationality and Multiculturalism

Abstract

The search for a political order provokes interests in the art of separarion

between the public and the private; and each society has developed its own way

of securing the public sphere as the social space and procedure for collective

deliberation. The formation of the public sphere includes perception,

idealization and institutionalization; it can also be described as an interactive

process of externalizing the inner public sphere or enlarged mentality.

Public sphere has been subject to historical change and its dimension has been

multiplied; while in the traditional model it was political in nature, the modern

public sphere involves political, economic and cultural dimensions with a

distinct principle of rationality working in each form of the public sphere. The

modern public sphere has thus lived tensions between the imperatives of

legitimacy, social integration and economic welfare. The imperatives of

legitimation and social integration make it necessary to link critical rationality

in public deliberation to transversal rationality in diverse realms of cultural life.

Those are the forms of rationality which can curb the imperialist expansion of

instrumental rationality beyond its domain of economic efficiency. In this

regard, we need multi-focal sensibilities and imagination which enable us to recognize ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves, being attentive to

both universalizable principles of legitimacy and cultural resources for

solidarity. This paper attempts to broaden our understanding of the public

sphere in view of competing paradigms of rationality and to incorporate the

politics of multiculturalism in a tentative plan of conceptualizing the

multicultural public sphere.