Recent trends of globalisation and democratic development have accentuated the problems of participation in and inclusivity of the public sphere in democratic polities. On the one hand, we face the alienation of large sections of population from a genuine involvement in democratic politics. On the other hand, we can observe how globalisation brings together different peoples, cultures, religions, and highlights the question of openness to and acceptance of differences. At the same time, these trends might have added more urgency to these problems with the public sphere, but they have not created them. In fact, the whole history of the public sphere is often portrayed as that of decline. For example, it has been criticised for being too passive and uncritical to balance the state, or for lacking inclusivity to legitimise the state. The research proposes a fresh look at the concept of the public sphere by returning to its conceptual conditions of possibility. Its main motivation is to ask whether there exists something in the manner we conceptualize the public sphere that keeps undermining its cognitive value. The rationale of this approach is based on the view that we see the world through the lenses of concepts, and by re-interpreting them and their interrelations we might change the way we behave towards the world. In this particular case, the proposed changes in conceptual understanding should be conducive to a more inclusive public sphere with more active and responsive participation in it.
In addressing the questions of participation in and the inclusivity of the public sphere, the research inquired into the possibility that these problems are rooted, at least partially, in the inadequate conceptual separation of state and society. The hypothesis of the research was that even if Immanuel Kant (if not Jean-Jacques Rousseau) initiated the conceptual separation between the two, necessitating thereby their mediation, state and society, nevertheless, remained latently linked by something that was left theoretically unaccounted for and that constantly undermines the need for the mediation (the public sphere). The central claim of the research project was that the idea of legitimacy must be addressed, if this conceptual separation is to be brought to its conclusion. This requires a concept of legitimacy that, on the one hand, establishes a relation between state and society, but on the other hand, also maintains the separation. Developing such a concept of legitimacy and outlining its effects on various other theoretical concepts, like the public sphere, democracy, and sovereignty, was the task of this research project.
