Critical Sociology

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Critical Sociology
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Content

• Marx on Refication
• Lukács on Reficatino
• Gramsci on Hegemony
• Horkheimer and Adorno on Culture Industry
• Habermas on Communicative Action and Public Sphere

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Marx on Refication

• "Commodities, which exist as use-values, must
  first of all assume a form in which they appear
  to one another nominally as exchange-values, as
  definite quantities of materialised universal
  labour-time. The first necessary move in this
  process is, as we have seen, that the commodities
  set apart a specific commodity, say, gold, which
  becomes the direct reification of universal
  labour-time or the universal equivalent

4
Marx on Refication

• Capital employs labour. The means of production
  are not means by which he can produce products,
  whether in the form of direct means of
  subsistence, or as means of exchange, as
  commodities. He is rather a means for them,
  partly to preserve their value, partly to
  valorise it, i.e. to increase it, to absorb
  surplus labour . Even this relation in its
  simplicity is an inversion, a personification of
  the thing and a reification of the person, for
  what distinguishes this form from all previous
  ones is that the capitalist does not rule the
  worker in any kind of personal capacity, but only
  in so far as he is "capital" his rule is only
  that of objectified labour over living labour
  the rule of the worker's product over the worker
  himself

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Marx on Refication

• "Because as a result of their alienation as
  use-values all commodities are converted into
  linen, linen becomes the converted form of all
  other commodities, and only as a result of this
  transformation of all other commodities into
  linen does it become the direct reification of
  universal labour-time, i.e., the product of
  universal alienation and of the supersession of
  all individual labour."

6
Marx on Refication

• "The production of capitalists and wage-laborers
  is therefore a major product of the process by
  which capital turns itself into values. Ordinary
  political economy, which concentrates only on the
  objects produced, forgets this entirely. Inasmuch
  as this process establishes reified labor as what
  is simultaneously the non-reification of the
  laborer, as the reification of a subjectivity
  opposed to the laborer, as the property of
  someone else's will, capital is necessarily also
  a capitalist. The idea of some socialists, that
  we need capital but not capitalists, is
  completely false. The concept of capital implies
  that the objective conditions of laborand these
  are its own productacquire a personality as
  against labor, or what amounts to the same thing,
  that they are established as the property of a
  personality other than the worker's. The concept
  of capital implies the capitalist. However, this
  error is certainly no greater than that of, e.g.,
  all philologists who speak of the existence of
  capital in classical antiquity, and of Roman or
  Greek capitalists. This is merely another way of
  saying that in Rome and Greece labor was free, an
  assertion which these gentlemen would hardly
  make. If we now talk of plantation-owners in
  America as capitalists, if they are capitalists,
  this is due to the fact that they exist as
  anomalies within a world market based upon free
  labor. Were the term capital to be applicable to
  classical antiquitythough the word does not
  actually occur among the ancients (but among the
  Greeks the word arkhais is used for what the
  Romans called the principalis summa reicreditae,
  the principal of a loan)then the nomadic hordes
  with their flocks on the steppes of Central Asia
  would be the greatest capitalists, for the
  original meaning of the word capital is cattle."

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Marx on Refication

• Capital employs labour. Even this relation in its
  simplicity is a personification of things and a
  reification of persons. But the relation becomes
  still more complexand apparently more
  mysteriousin that, with the development of the
  specifically capitalist mode of production, not
  only do these thingsthese products of labour,
  both as use values and as exchange valuesstand
  on their hind legs vis-à-vis the worker and
  confront him as "capital"but also the social
  forms of labour appear as forms of the
  development of capital, and therefore the
  productive powers of social labour, thus
  developed, appear as productive powers of
  capital. As such social forces they are
  "capitalised" vis-à-vis labour. In fact, communal
  unity in cooperation, combination in the division
  of labour, the application of the forces of
  nature and science, as well as the products of
  labour in the shape of machinery, are all things
  which confront the individual workers as alien,
  objective, and present in advance, without their
  assistance, and often against them, independent
  of them, as mere forms of existence of the means
  of labour which are independent of them and rule
  over them, in so far as they are objective while
  the intelligence and volition of the total
  workshop, incarnated in the capitalist or his
  understrappers (representatives), in so far as
  the workshop is formed by the combination of the
  means of labour, confront the workers as
  functions of capital, which lives in the person
  of the capitalist.

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Marx on Refication

• The social forms of their own labourthe
  subjective as well as the objective formsor the
  form of their own social labour, are relations
  constituted quite independently of the individual
  workers the workers as subsumed under capital
  become elements of these social constructions,
  but these social constructions do not belong to
  them. They therefore confront the workers as
  shapes of capital itself, as combinations which,
  unlike their isolated labour capacities, belong
  to capital, originate from it and are
  incorporated within it. And this assumes a form
  which is the more real the more, on the one hand,
  their labour capacity is itself modified by these
  forms, so that it becomes powerless when it
  stands alone, i.e. outside this context of
  capitalism, and its capacity for independent
  production is destroyed, while on the other hand
  the development of machinery causes the
  conditions of labour to appear as ruling labour
  technologically too, and at the same time to
  replace it, suppress it, and render it
  superfluous in its independent forms. In this
  process, in which the social characteristics of
  their labour confront them as capitalised, to a
  certain extentin the way that e.g. in machinery
  the visible products of labour appear as ruling
  over labourthe same thing of course takes place
  for the forces of nature and science, the product
  of general historical development in its abstract
  quintessence they confront the workers as powers
  of capital

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Definition of Refication

• The act (or result of the act) of transforming
  human properties, relations and actions into
  properties, relations and actions of man-produced
  things which have become independent (and which
  are imagined as originally independent) of man
  and govern his life. Also transformation of human
  beings into thing-like beings which do not behave
  in a human way but according to the laws of the
  thing-world. Reification is a special case of
  ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form
  characteristic of modern capitalist society.
• Reification occurs when specifically human
  creations are misconceived as "facts of nature,
  results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of
  divine will".

10
Lukács on Refication

• Man in capitalist society confronts a reality
  made by himself (as a class) which appears to
  him to be a natural phenomenon alien to himself
  hi is wholly at the mercy of its laws his
  activity is confined to the exploitation of the
  inexorable fulfillment of certain individual laws
  for his own (egoistic ) interests. But even while
  acting he remains, in the nature of the case,
  the object and not the subject of events.

11
Lukács on Refication

• This rational objectification conceals above all
  the immediate - qualitative and material -
  character of things as things. When use-values
  appear universally as commodities they acquire a
  new objectivity, a new substantiality which they
  did not possess in an age of episodic exchange
  and which destroys their original and authentic
  substantiality. As Marx observes
• "Private property alienates not only the
  individuality of men, but also of things. The
  ground and the earth have nothing to do with
  ground-rent, machines have nothing to do with
  profit. For the landowner ground and earth mean
  nothing but ground-rent he lets his land to
  tenants and receives the rent - a quality which
  the ground can lose without losing any of its
  inherent qualities such as its fertility it is a
  quality whose magnitude and indeed existence
  depends on social relations that are created and
  abolished without any intervention by the
  landowner. Likewise with the machine.

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Lukács on Refication

• Thus even the individual object which man
  confronts directly, either as producer or
  consumer, is distorted in its objectivity by its
  commodity character. If that can happen then it
  is evident that this process will be intensified
  in proportion as the relations which man
  establishes with objects as objects of the life
  process are mediated in the course of his social
  activity. It is obviously not possible here to
  give an analysis of the whole economic structure
  of capitalism. It must suffice to point out that
  modern capitalism does not content itself with
  transforming the relations of production in
  accordance with its own needs. It also integrates
  into its own system those forms of primitive
  capitalism that led an isolated existence in
  pre-capitalist times, divorced from production
  it converts them into members of the henceforth
  unified process of radical capitalism

13
Lukács on Refication

• These forms of capital are objectively
  subordinated, it is true, to the real
  life-process of capitalism, the extraction of
  surplus value in the course of production. They
  are, therefore, only to be explained in terms of
  the nature of industrial capitalism itself. But
  in the minds of people in bourgeois society they
  constitute the pure, authentic, unadulterated
  forms of capital. In them the relations between
  men that lie hidden in the immediate commodity
  relation, as well as the relations between men
  and the objects that should really gratify their
  needs, have faded to the point where they can be
  neither recognised nor even perceived.

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Lukács on Refication

• For that very reason the reified mind has come to
  regard them as the true representatives of his
  societal existence. The commodity character of
  the commodity, the abstract, quantitative mode of
  calculability shows itself here in its purest
  form the reified mind necessarily sees it as the
  form in which its own authentic immediacy becomes
  manifest and - as reified consciousness - does
  not even attempt to transcend it. On the
  contrary, it is concerned to make it permanent by
  scientifically deepening the laws at work. Just
  as the capitalist system continuously produces
  and reproduces itself economically on higher and
  higher levels, the structure of reification
  progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully
  and more definitively into the consciousness of
  man. Marx often describes this potentiation of
  reification in incisive fashion. One example must
  suffice here

15
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16
GramsciIdeological Hegemony

• Gramsci accepted the analysis of capitalism put
  forward by Marx in the previous century and
  accepted that the struggle between the ruling
  class and the subordinate working class was the
  driving force that moved society forward. What he
  found unacceptable was the traditional Marxist
  view of how the ruling class ruled. It was here
  that Gramsci made a major contribution to modern
  thought in his concept of the role played by
  ideology.
• Often the term "ideology" is seen as referring
  simply to a system of ideas and beliefs. However,
  it is closely tied to the concept of power and
  the definition given by Anthony Giddens is
  probably the easiest to understand. Giddens
  defines ideology as "shared ideas or beliefs
  which serve to justify the interests of dominant
  groups" Giddens 1997 p583 Its relationship to
  power is that it legitimises the differential
  power that groups hold and as such it distorts
  the real situation that people find themselves
  in.

17
Gramsci on Hegemony

• The traditional Marxist theory of power was a
  very one-sided one based on the role of force and
  coercion as the basis of ruling class domination.
  This was reinforced by Lenin whose influence was
  at its height after the success of the Russian
  Revolution in 1917. Gramsci felt that what was
  missing was an understanding of the subtle but
  pervasive forms of ideological control and
  manipulation that served to perpetuate all
  repressive structures. He identified two quite
  distinct forms of political control domination,
  which referred to direct physical coercion by
  police and armed forces and hegemony which
  referred to both ideological control and more
  crucially, consent. He assumed that no regime,
  regardless of how authoritarian it might be,
  could sustain itself primarily through organised
  state power and armed force. In the long run, it
  had to have popular support and legitimacy in
  order to maintain stability.

18
Gramsci on Hegemony

• By hegemony, Gramsci meant the permeation
  throughout society of an entire system of values,
  attitudes, beliefs and morality that has the
  effect of supporting the status quo in power
  relations. Hegemony in this sense might be
  defined as an 'organising principle' that is
  diffused by the process of socialisation into
  every area of daily life. To the extent that this
  prevailing consciousness is internalised by the
  population it becomes part of what is generally
  called 'common sense' so that the philosophy,
  culture and morality of the ruling elite comes to
  appear as the natural order of things.

19
Gramsci on Hegemony

• Marxs basic division of society into a base
  represented by the economic structure and a
  superstructure represented by the institutions
  and beliefs prevalent in society was accepted by
  most Marxists familiar with the concepts. Gramsci
  took this a step further when he divided the
  superstructure into those institutions that were
  overtly coercive and those that were not. The
  coercive ones, which were basically the public
  institutions such as the government, police,
  armed forces and the legal system he regarded as
  the state or political society and the
  non-coercive ones were the others such as the
  churches, the schools, trade unions, political
  parties, cultural associations, clubs, the family
  etc. which he regarded as civil society. To some
  extent, schools could fit into both categories.
  Parts of school life are quite clearly coercive
  (compulsory education, the national curriculum,
  national standards and qualifications) whilst
  others are not (the hidden curriculum).

20
Gramsci on Hegemony

• So for Gramsci, society was made up of the
  relations of production (capital v labour) the
  state or political society (coercive
  institutions) and civil society (all other
  non-coercive institutions).
• Gramsci's analysis went much further than any
  previous Marxist theory to provide an
  understanding of why the European working class
  had on the whole failed to develop revolutionary
  consciousness after the First World War and had
  instead moved towards reformism ie tinkering with
  the system rather than working towards
  overthrowing it. It was a far more subtle theory
  of power than any of his contemporaries and went
  a long way to explain how the ruling class ruled.

21
Gramsci on Hegemony

• Now, if Gramsci was correct that the ruling class
  maintained its domination by the consent of the
  mass of the people and only used its coercive
  apparatuses, the forces of law and order, as a
  last resort, what were the consequences for
  Marxists who wished to see the overthrow of that
  same ruling class? If the hegemony of the ruling
  capitalist class resulted from an ideological
  bond between the rulers and the ruled, what
  strategy needed to be employed? The answer to
  those questions was that those who wished to
  break that ideological bond had to build up a
  counter hegemony to that of the ruling class.
  They had to see structural change and ideological
  change as part of the same struggle. The labour
  process was at the core of the class struggle but
  it was the ideological struggle that had to be
  addressed if the mass of the people were to come
  to a consciousness that allowed them to question
  their political and economic masters right to
  rule. It was popular consensus in civil society
  that had to be challenged and in this we can see
  a role for informal education

22
Gramsci on Hegemony

• Overcoming popular consensus, however, is not
  easy. Ideological hegemony meant that the
  majority of the population accepted what was
  happening in society as common sense or as the
  only way of running society. There may have been
  complaints about the way things were run and
  people looked for improvements or reforms but the
  basic beliefs and value system underpinning
  society were seen as either neutral or of general
  applicability in relation to the class structure
  of society. Marxists would have seen people
  constantly asking for a bigger slice of the cake
  when the real issue was ownership of the bakery.

23
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24
Culture Industry

• Culture industry is a term coined by critical
  theorists Theodor Adorno (19031969) and Max
  Horkheimer (18951973), who argued in The
  Culture Industry Enlightenment as Mass
  Deception, that popular culture is akin to a
  factory producing standardized cultural goods
  through film, radio and magazines to manipulate
  the masses into passivity the easy pleasures
  available through consumption of popular culture
  make people docile and content, no matter how
  difficult their economic circumstances.
• Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced
  culture as a danger to the more difficult high
  arts. Culture industries may cultivate false
  needs that is, needs created and satisfied by
  capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom,
  creativity, or genuine happiness.

25
Culture Industry

• Although Western culture used to be divided into
  national markets and then into highbrow,
  middlebrow and lowbrow , the modern view of mass
  culture is that there is a single marketplace in
  which the best or most popular works succeed.
  This recognizes that the consolidation of media
  companies has centralized power in the hands of
  the few remaining multinational corporations now
  controlling production and distribution.

26
Culture Industry

• The theory proposes that culture not only mirrors
  society, but also takes an important role in
  shaping society through the processes of
  standardization and commodification, creating
  objects rather than subjects. The culture
  industry claims to serve the consumers' needs for
  entertainment, and is delivering what the
  consumer wants. "The standardized forms, it is
  claimed, were originally derived from the needs
  of the consumers that is why they are accepted
  with so little resistance. In reality, a cycle of
  manipulation and retroactive need is unifying the
  system ever more tightly". By standardizing these
  needs, the industry is manipulating the consumers
  to desire what it produces. The outcome is that
  mass production feeds a mass market that
  minimizes the identity and tastes of the
  individual consumers who are as interchangeable
  as the products they consume.

27
Culture Industry

• The rationale of the theory is to promote the
  emancipation of the consumer from the tyranny of
  the producers by inducing the consumer to
  question beliefs and ideologies. Adorno claimed
  that enlightenment would bring pluralism and
  demystification. Unfortunately, society is said
  to have suffered another fall, corrupted by
  capitalist industry with exploitative motives.

28
Culture Industry

• Anything made by a person is a materialisation of
  their labour and an expression of their
  intentions. There will also be a use value the
  benefit to the consumer will be derived from its
  utility. The exchange value will reflect its
  utility and the conditions of the market the
  prices paid by the television broadcaster or at
  the box office. Yet, the modern soap operas with
  their interchangeable plots and formulaic
  narrative conventions reflect standardised
  production techniques and the falling value of a
  mass produced cultural product. Only rarely is a
  film released that makes a more positive
  impression on the general discourse and achieves
  a higher exchange value, e.g. Patton (1970)
  starring George C. Scott as the eponymous
  American general, was released at a time of
  considerable anti-war sentiment. The opening shot
  is of Patton in front of an American flag making
  an impassioned speech. This was a form of
  dialectic in which the audience could identify
  with the patriotism either sincerely (the thesis)
  or ironically (the antithesis) and so set the
  tone of the interpretation for the remainder of
  the film. However, the film is manipulating
  specific historical events, not only as
  entertainment, but also as a form of propaganda
  by demonstrating a link between success in
  strategic resource management situations and
  specified leadership qualities. Given that the
  subtext was instrumental and not "value free",
  ethical and philosophical considerations arise.

29
Culture Industry

• Normally, only high art criticises the world
  outside its boundaries, but access to this form
  of communication is limited to the elite classes
  where the risks of introducing social instability
  are slight. A film like Patton is popular art
  which intends controversy in a world of social
  order and unity which, according to Adorno, is
  regressing into a cultural blandness. To Hegel,
  order is good a priori, i.e. it does not have to
  answer to those living under it. But, if order is
  disturbed? In Negative Dialectics, Adorno
  believed this tended towards progress by
  stimulating the possibility of class conflict.
  Marx's theory of Historical Materialism was
  teleological, i.e. society follows through a
  dialectic of unfolding stages from ancient modes
  of production to feudalism to capitalism to a
  future communism. But Adorno felt that the
  culture industry would never permit a sufficient
  core of challenging material to emerge on to the
  market that might disturb the status quo and
  stimulate the final communist state to emerge.

30
Culture Industry

• Critics of the theory say that the products of
  mass culture would not be popular if people did
  not enjoy them, and that culture is
  self-determining in its administration. This
  would deny Adorno contemporary political
  significance, arguing that politics in a
  prosperous society is more concerned with action
  than with thought. Wiggershaus (1994) notes that
  the young generation of critical theorists
  largely ignore Adorno's work which, in part,
  stems from Adornos inability to draw practical
  conclusions from his theories. Adorno is also
  accused of a lack of consistency in his claims to
  be implementing Marxism. Whereas he accepted the
  classical Marxist analysis of society showing how
  one class exercises domination over another, he
  deviated from Marx in his failure to use
  dialectic as a method to propose ways to change.
  Marx's theory depended on the willingness of the
  working class to overthrow the ruling class, but
  Adorno and Horkheimer postulated that the culture
  industry has undermined the revolutionary
  movement.

31
Culture Industry

• Adorno's idea that the mass of the people are
  only objects of the culture industry is linked to
  his feeling that the time when the working class
  could be the tool of overthrowing capitalism is
  over. Other critics note that "High culture" too
  is not exempt from a role in the justification of
  capitalism. The establishment and reinforcement
  of elitism is seen by these critics as a key
  element in the role of such genres as opera and
  ballet.
• However, despite these problems, the concept has
  influenced intellectual discourse on popular
  culture, popular culture studies, and Cultural
  Institutions Studies.

32
Habermas Communicative Action

• Communicative action for Habermas is possible
  given human capacity for rationality. This
  rationality, however, is "no longer tied to, and
  limited by, the subjectivistic and
  individualistic premises of modern philosophy and
  social theory."Instead, Habermas situates
  rationality as a capacity inherent within
  language, especially in the form of
  argumentation. "We use the term argumentation for
  that type of speech in which participants
  thematize contested validity claims and attempt
  to vindicate or criticize them through
  argumentation." The structures of argumentative
  speech, which Habermas identifies as the absence
  of coercive force, the mutual search for
  understanding, and the compelling power of the
  better argument, form the key features from which
  intersubjective rationality can make
  communication possible. Action undertaken by
  participants to a process of such argumentative
  communication can be assessed as to their
  rationality to the extent which they fulfill
  those criteria.

33
Communicative Rationality

• Communicative rationality is distinct from
  instrumental, normative, and dramaturgic
  rationality by its ability to concern all three
  "worlds" as he terms them, following Karl
  Popper--the subjective, objective, and
  intersubjective or social. Communicative
  rationality is self-reflexive and open to a
  dialogue in which participants in an argument can
  learn from others and from themselves by
  reflecting upon their premises and thematizing
  aspects of their cultural background knowledge to
  question suppositions that typically go without
  question.

34
Communicative Action

• Communicative action is action based upon this
  deliberative process, where two or more
  individuals interact and coordinate their action
  based upon agreed upon interpretations of the
  situation. Communicative action is distinguished
  from Habermas from other forms of action, such as
  pure goal-oriented behavior dealt with primarily
  in economics, by taking all functions of language
  into consideration . That is, Communicative
  action has the ability to reflect upon language
  used as express propositional truth, normative
  value, or subjective self-expression.

35
Communicative Action

• Much of Habermas' work has been in response to
  his predecessors in the Frankfurt School.
  Communicative rationality, for instance, can be
  seen as a response to the critique of
  enlightenment reason expressed in Max Horkheimer
  and T.W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.
  Horkheimer and Adorno had argued that the
  Enlightenment saw a particular kind of
  rationality enshrined as dominant in western
  culture, instrumental reason, which had only made
  possible the more effective and ruthless
  manipulation of nature and human beings
  themselves. Habermas' form of critical theory is
  designed to rediscover through the analysis of
  positive potentials for human rationality in the
  medium of language, the possibility of a critical
  form of reason that can lead to reflection and
  examination of not only objective questions, but
  also those of social norms, human values, and
  even aesthetic expression of subjectivity.

36
Communicative Action

• Habermas' earlier work, The Structural
  Transformation of the Public Sphere, anticipates
  his concern for argumentation and can be read
  retrospectively as an historical case study of
  Western European societies institutionalizing
  aspects of communicative action in the political
  and social spheres. Habermas notes the rise of
  institutions of public debate in late seventeenth
  and eighteenth century Britain and France
  especially. In these nations, information
  exchange and communication methods pioneered by
  capitalist merchants became adapted to novel
  purposes and were employed as an outlet for the
  public use of reason. The notion of communicative
  rationality in the public sphere is therefore
  heavily indebted to Immanuel Kant's formulation
  of the public use of reason in What is
  Enlightenment?

37
Communicative Action

• Habermas argues that the bourgeoisie who
  participated in this incipient public sphere
  universalized those aspects of their class that
  enabled them to present the public sphere as
  inclusivehe even goes so far as to say that a
  public sphere that operates upon principles of
  exclusivity is not a public sphere at all. The
  focus on foundations of democracy established in
  this work carried over to his later examination
  in The Theory of Communicative Action that
  greater democratization and the reduction to
  barriers to participation in public discourse
  (some of which he identified in the first public
  sphere of the Enlightenment) could open the door
  to a more open form of social action. The shift
  from a more Marxist focus on the economic bases
  of discourse in Structural Transformation to a
  more "super-structural" emphasis on language and
  communication in Theory of Communicative Action
  signals Habermas' transition to a post-Marxist
  framework.

38
Habermas on Public Sphere

• The public sphere is an area in social life where
  people can get together and freely discuss and
  identify societal problems, and through that
  discussion influence political action. It is "a
  discursive space in which individuals and groups
  congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest
  and, where possible, to reach a common
  judgment."The public sphere can be seen as "a
  theater in modern societies in which political
  participation is enacted through the medium of
  talk" and "a realm of social life in which public
  opinion can be formed".

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Public Sphere

• The public sphere mediates between the "private
  sphere" and the "Sphere of Public Authority",
  "The private sphere comprised civil society in
  the narrower sense, that is to say, the realm of
  commodity exchange and of social labor." Whereas
  the "Sphere of Public Authority" dealt with the
  State, or realm of the police, and the ruling
  class. The public sphere crossed over both these
  realms and "Through the vehicle of public opinion
  it put the state in touch with the needs of
  society.""This area is conceptually distinct from
  the state it is a site for the production and
  circulation of discourses that can in principle
  be critical of the state."The public sphere 'is
  also distinct from the official economy it is
  not an arena of market relations but rather one
  of discursive relations, a theater for debating
  and deliberating rather than for buying and
  selling."These distinctions between "state
  apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic
  associations...are essential to democratic
  theory." The people themselves came to see the
  public sphere as a regulatory institution against
  the authority of the state The study of the
  public sphere centers on the idea of
  participatory democracy, and how public opinion
  becomes political action.

40
Public Sphere

• The basic belief in public sphere theory is that
  political action is steered by the public sphere,
  and that the only legitimate governments are
  those that listen to the public sphere.
  "Democratic governance rests on the capacity of
  and opportunity for citizens to engage in
  enlightened debate". Much of the debate over the
  public sphere involves what is the basic
  theoretical structure of the public sphere, how
  information is deliberated in the public sphere,
  and what influence the public sphere has over
  society.

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Reference

• Yu Hai Western Social Theory
• - Gramsci, No.46 Intellectuals and
  Hegemony
• - Horkheimer, No.47 Notes on Science and
  the Crisis
• - Adorno, No. 50 The Culture Industry
  Reconsidered
• - Habermas, No.52Public Sphere
• No.53 Communicative
  Action
• Fred Rush Critical Theory