Revisiting the Notion of ‘Public’ in Habermas’s Theory - Toward a Theory of

There exist around the notion of the public three different yet overlapping dichotomies posed on different levels of analysis: public (sphere) versus private (sphere), public versus mass, and publicness versus privacy0secrecy. Habermas’s book ([1962]1989) incorporates all the three sets of dichotomy without resolving the contradictory mean-ings and bridging the gaps among them. As a result, his conception of the public sphere becomes paradoxical in terms, and it undertheorizes the cultural property of public-ness. This article proposes an alternative conception of the public that may encompass the structural, institutional, and cultural levels of theorization in a more precise and coherent way. It is argued that the public is an imagined category about citizen mem-bership that is attached to both institutions of state and civil society. In political prac-tices, a symbolic “public ” is institutionalized through an open communicative space where it is called upon, constructed, and contested as the central source of cultural references. In this connection, a notion of public credibility is introduced as an attempt to bring forth a richer and more dynamic conception about the role of culture in dem-ocratic struggles than that of critical rationality by Habermas. This article is concerned with the notion of “public ” as well as its conceptual place in a theory of public sphere. The significance of public sphere lies in it being an arena for democratic practices among citizens as distinct from both state apparatuses and economic markets ~Arendt 1958; Haberma