Hauke Brunkhorst and the concept of democratic solidarity as criticism to Jürgen Habermas’ post-national public sphere

Abstract

This essay is about the reformulation of Habermas’ concept of public sphere by Hauke Brunkhorst. It aims to rebuild this critic and to elucidate the counterproposal of public sphere from the concept of democratic solidarity. For Brunkhorst, the concept of public sphere, such as extended by Habermas to European and global context, would be insufficient to understand the globalized postnational political constellations. The advantage would be to provide a more flexible and less tight concept of public sphere to the institutional framework.