Constitutional patriotism is a term introduced but not developed by Jürgen Habermas. Muller's approach to Constitutional Patriotism has brought more substance into it. This thesis is a journey through Habermasian scholarship, primarily, for finding pieces of constitutional patriotism. The scope of this is not limited to jurisprudence or sociology alone but it is interdisciplinary in nature. Constitutional patriotism was an idea put forward by Jürgen Habermas in the aftermath of the Second World War. I have a reconstructive approach to the emergence of CP in the first few chapters of my thesis. I lay down the intellectual and political context which gave rise to it. I will maintain that it is not only the immediacy of the German political context which gave rise to the emergence of the term Constitutional Patriotism. Constitutional Patriotism also stands on different aspects of his political philosophy. Philosophical and sociological aspects of Habermas`s work have different dimensions which could be interpreted into CP. His direct references to the term CP are very rare. This thesis aims to bring together the different meanings underlying his philosophy. I maintain that seemingly different concepts of his philosophy can, and ought to be read constructively with a view to a holistic umbrella term which I bring under CP. In this thesis, these concepts are identity, Europe, human rights, cosmopolitanism, the self and democracy. Constitutional patriotism, which I seek to construct here, is a new idea of attachment. It is based on existing forms of political and social attachment. In this respect, it is ‘post'-national. Identity, in Constitutional Patriotism, is a form of attachment. It's a relationship with your own self and with others. It accepts that the individual and the collective are closely linked while investigating the political and social dimension of these relationships. It seeks to increase the critical thinking capacity. This process paves the way for the realisation of abstract political and legal ideals such as human rights and democracy. Each chapter of this thesis follows the former and opens up the space for discussion for the latter. I hope that each reader will find a small piece of herself in it.

Since their inception in the early 1960s, Australian content requirements for commercial television have been subjected to considerable scrutiny through a series of formal inquiries. Over the last ten years this process has intensified. In recent years there have been a number of academic criticisms regarding the state of debate about the regulation of Australian content on commercial television and the capacity of the debate to generate genuine criticism and embrace change. This thesis examines the dynamics of debate about Australian content. It focuses on the ABT's Inquiry into Australian Content on Commercial Television (ACI) which ran from 1983 to 1989. It takes as its basic point of reference Jurgen Habermas' concept of the 'public sphere'. This concept refers to a realm of social life, separate from the state and private spheres, in which 'public opinion' can be formed. Habermas has argued that, with the refeudalisation of the public sphere, the state and private interests have increasingly collaborated to close off the public sphere. The thesis concludes that in many respects Habermas' concept of a refeudalised 'public sphere' is a useful explanatory tool for understanding the dynamics of the ACI and the limited degree of criticism generated by it. However, Habermas' model is limited in so far as it fails to accord adequate recognition to the complexities and significance of the mediation of the 'public interest' by key participants in the inquiry and the strategic role of rhetoric for these participants. Habermas concludes that with the refeudalisation of the public sphere and the disappearance of the historical conditions which supported its operation, the public sphere must now be reconstructed on a case by case basis. Attempts to achieve this, have tended to focus on the facilitation of citizen participation in public policy debate. However, as this analysis of the ACI demonstrates, the dynamics of the debate itself appear to limit I the degree to which 'public opinion' can be elevated above 'private interest'. This thesis demonstrates that the mediation of the 'public interest' assumed a central role in the rhetoric and strategy of the ACI. Each of the key players represented distinct interests and were largely unaccountable to the 'public' they claimed to serve. This thesis concludes that in order to gain a more detailed understanding of how communication works in such a context, and in order to conceive of alternative participatory forms, we need to focus on those aspects of public discourse which Habermas neglects: the rhetoric and the strategic nature of public representation. It suggests that fruitful avenues for further study may lie with Bantz's notion of communicative structures or Luhmann's systems approach to communication.

Jürgen Habermas is a preeminent European intellectual who was a German teenager during World War II. He was profoundly impacted by the devastation wrought by the Nazi regime and the social regression that it embodied. He dedicated his intellectual efforts to studying philosophy and developing a theoretical framework that demonstrates how collaboration and unimpeded dialogue are consistent with the promotion of human interest and how there exist quasi-transcendent protections against threats to modern social progress. This thesis explicates how the Third Reich, from Habermas's perspective, exemplifies violence to Habermas's model of communicative action and how we can learn to better protect it, thereby stimulating more healthy social development.

Föreliggande studie har som syfte att studera hur rektorer i sin roll som pedagogiska ledare resonerar och förstår skolans syfte och mål med utgångspunkt i kunskap, bildning och demokrati. Studiens grundläggande antaganden vilar i Habermas system- och livsvärlds-perspektiv som menar att samhället bör förstås utifrån ett dubbelt perspektiv: system vilken är kontext för målorienterat handlande och livsvärlden vilken är kontext för kommunikativt handlande. Studien är en intervjustudie där fem rektorer från fyra olika grundskolor deltagit. Resultatet visar att rektorerna efterfråga en skola som präglas av en livsvärlds kontext där förståelseorienterade och kommunikativa handlingar står i centrum. De ger uttryck för att skolan bör utvecklas till att mer formas utifrån en upplevelse och erfarenhetsbaserad under-visning och inte en undervisning som formas utifrån läroböcker och en på förhand given kunskap. Studiens resultat påvisar dock att skola och utbildning idag formas och styrs inom systemperspektivets sfär där mål- och framgångsorienterade handlingar står i centrum. Det visas tydligt i resultatet att systemet koloniserar livsvärlden inom skola och utbildning.



Diss.--Fakultät der Sozialwissenschaften--Bochum--Ruhr Universität, 2001. / Bibliogr. p. 244-291.

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Etudes germaniques : Lyon 2 : 2005. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. Index.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the public communication activities of Korean people from the Chason dynasty to the present day using the conceptual category of the public sphere theorised by Jurgen Habermas. It is mainly concerned with two fundamental issues: the issue of 'communication and democracy,' and that of 'communication and culture.' Emphasising tradition and culture as among the most significant elements in the consideration of communicative action and the public sphere in the Korean context, the thesis takes issue with the claims to universality in Habermas's theory. My argument is that Habermas's theory cannot easily be applied to non-Western societies unless there is sufficient consideration of their idiosyncratic traditions and cultures. To develop this argument, the thesis addresses the impact of Confucianism on speech acts in Korea and the extent of their difference from those in a Western context. In identifying 'silence' as a key term, the situation of women in Korean cultures is particularly pertinent. The second consideration is the question of political authoritarianism which is responsible for the repression of free expression of opinion in collusion with Confucianism. I have discovered that several kinds of public domains of communication have developed through Korean history, despite those two repressing mechanisms, Confucianism and political authoritarianism, public domains which I suggest are more appropriately called 'the public sphere' according to Habermas's terminology. It is meaningful to filter and interpret various communication activities across historical periods from within the analytic framework of the public sphere. In relation to modem Korea, the thesis focuses on the media-saturated public sphere and the current civil movements to demonstrate the dynamics between power and money and their impact on the democratisation process

This thesis investigates Habermas's attempt to establish a credible form of universalism in moral and political philosophy by means of the theoretical approach which he terms "discourse ethics." The central question motivating this study is whether Habermas succeeds in this ambition. Discourse ethics specifies a procedure which purports to enable all agents involved in a conflict of interest in which issues of justice are at stake to come to a rational and cooperative resolution. It proposes a position unique among contemporary approaches to justice in the strength and character of its anti-relativist stance: the plurality of human cultures and the situated character of human understanding do not, according to this theory, bar the way to arriving at a minimal form of moral universalism. Although the procedure specified in communicative ethics elucidates only a narrow range of concerns--those pertaining to justice in the strict sense--it aims to do so in a way valid across all human cultures. / Habermas's strategy for the defence of a species-wide moral universalism is, I argue, both the key feature of his position, and the least well understood. Discussion of discourse ethics to date has focussed almost exclusively on the question of its appropriateness to the context of modern, Western pluralism. An important reason for this focus has been the intricacy of Habermas's argumentative strategy, which links the recent work on discourse ethics to his longstanding project of developing a theory of communicative action. / The principle aim of this thesis is to clarify Habermas's position by explicating his programme of justification. In so doing, I draw attention to several problems in his approach as a mechanism for cross-cultural conflict adjudication, and endeavour to provide a more perspicuous account of the relation of Habermas's theory to its main philosophical competitors, especially Rawlsian deontology, and contextualism.

Habermas rejects a class-specific approach to social analysis and political practice and, in renewing the social theory of Marx, he turns primarily to a reconstruction of the work of Max Weber. The conceptualization of society is approached from the interrelated themes of rationalization, bureaucratization and reification. But Habermas seeks to overcome the instrumentalist implications of Weber's one-sided view of rationalization and related rejection of a cognitivist ethics by an expanded framework of rationality that introduces the concept of communicative action and, with it, the promise of clarifying the normative foundations of a critical theory of society. / Against contrary views of Habermas' overriding purpose this thesis shows the major strands of his theoretical programme to have their unifying interconnections within an enduring commitment to a rational morally guided practice. Critically vulnerable aspects of this programme, however, suggest that the unity of theory and practice will prove to be as elusive for him as it was for his Marxist predecessors.