The Modern Public Sphere: Transforming Practical Reason into Prudential Communication

Abstract

We have seen in the previous chapter how the implosion of axial traditions generated the modern quest for a new definition of human agency, autonomy, and creativity, and how this demand brought about new kinds of tensions, paradoxes, and attempted solutions. In this chapter I turn the attention to an attempt to redefine the axial triadic relationship between ego, alter, and Alter/God governed by faith and practical reason into a basically dyadic ego-alter relationship administered by trust and prudential communication. This approach, which will yield the modern public sphere in an accomplished, Habermasian sense—as the “third sphere of society” (see introduction)—was not only an attempt to modernize tradition in socially constructive ways—largely through a specification of the basic tenets held by the contractarians—but also a reaction and a critique to the positions of the modern political realists (see chapter 5).