The challenge posed by the organisers of the International Congress “Transformation of the public sphere – 60 years after Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit”, taking place in Coimbra, Portugal, is to think about the public sphere as defined by Habermas.
The major question underlying the work by Jürgen Habermas, which was prompted by the unspeakable experience of Nazism and the Holocaust, is how to articulate the difference in a non-violent way. “Writing a poem, after Auschwitz, is a barbaric act”, as Theodor Adorno wrote in the aftermath of the war, expressing his disenchantment with the possibility of redemption in the face of the rationally organised human barbarity, of which Nazism was its ultimate expression. As to the origin of that designation, oblivious to the interests of humanity, he attributed it to the restrictions of Enlightenment rationality, to a technical-instrumental rationality that allowed man to rationally dominate nature, and, irrationally, dominate human beings themselves. As we know, Jürgen Habermas followed a different path to that of his professor, finding in communicative reasoning the emancipatory force of Enlightenment rationality. This is the core of his concept of the public sphere, formulated for the first time in 1962, in Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Structural Change of the Public Sphere).

Communicative reasoning serves as the basis for theorising on communicative action, and of other related concepts that mark the course of the author’s reflections, such as universal pragmatics, the ideal speech situation or discourse ethics. Jürgen Habermas’s tremendous theoretical undertaking brings together major authors from various fields of knowledge, from Sociology to Law, Philosophy and Political Science. Law and Democracy – Between Facts and Norms (Faktizität und geltung: Beiträge zur diskurstheorie des rechts und des demokratischen rechtsstaats), published in 1992, is perhaps the culmination of a lifetime’s work devoted to working out a social theory based on communication and oriented towards understanding, aiming at reaching reasonable solutions to accommodate the interests of the various stakeholders involved. It is a model of argumentative decision-making in which the force of the “better argument” is the only “coercion” allowed – that is, the core of the Public Sphere concept, published 30 years earlier.

The Congress aims to encourage reflection on the ongoing changes in the Public Sphere, in the light of the norms proposed by Jürgen Habermas.It is organised by the Research Group “Communication, Journalism and Public Sphere” of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies and of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, both of the University of Coimbra, and by the School of Education of the Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, through the Nucleus for Research in Social and Human Sciences.