Abstract
There is a widely held view that public space is necessary for democ racy, and that contemporary democracies suffer from a lack of public space. Sometimes public space is associated with a heroic view of democracy, especially its creation. Consider the following paean to public space in the New York Times recently:
“Taksim is where everybody expresses freely their happiness, sorrow, their political and social views,” said Esin, 41, in a head scarf, sitting with relatives on a bench watching the protest in the square. She declined to give her surname, fearing disapproval from conservative neighbors. “The government wants to sanitize this place, without consulting the people.”
So public space, even a modest and chaotic swath of it like Taksim, again reveals itself as fundamentally more powerful than social media, which produce virtual communities. Revolutions happen in the flesh. In Taksim, strangers have discovered one another, their common concerns and collective voice. The power of bodies coming together, at least for the moment, has produced a democratic moment, and given the leadership a dangerous political crisis.
“We have found ourselves,” is how Omer Kanipak, a 41-year-old Turkish architect, put it to me, about the diverse gathering at Gezi Park on the north end of Taksim, where the crowds are concentrated in tent encampments and other makeshift architecture after Mr. Erdogan’s government ordered bulldozers to make way for the mall.1
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Notes
Hannah Arendt, “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 508–541.
Herbert Marcuse, “The End of Utopia,” in Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans. Jeremy Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). Marcuse’s comment is in response to a question in a question and answer session that is included as part of the lecture.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 30. [orig. 1962]
M. M. Austin and P. Vidal-Naquet, Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece: An Introduction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 24–26.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 32–33. Abbreviated in text as HC. Aristotle, Politics, III.13.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 143. Wolin, “Hannah Arendt,” 17.
Wolin, “Hannah Arendt,” 15; Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Mariner Books, 1972), 212–213.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 597. Fullness is not necessarily what is sometimes called a limit experience. It can simply be the sense that “somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be” (7).
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 83. All page references in the text are to Eros and Civilization.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1989), 43–80.
David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 404.
Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 188–252, 239–243.
Max Weber, Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xvi.
Marcuse, Eros, 162; Rainer Maria Rilke: Sonnets to Orpheus: Duino Elegies, trans. Jessie Lemont (New York: Fine Editions Press, 1945), first elegy.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2006), 247.
Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). [orig. 1972]
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© 2014 Diana Boros and James M. Glass
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Alford, C.F. (2014). Idealizing Public Space: Arendt, Wolin, and the Frankfurt School. In: Boros, D., Glass, J.M. (eds) Re-Imagining Public Space. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373311_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373311_7
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