Agonism and Junta: Greece’s Late Bourgeois Contribution to Public Sphere Discourse Barbara Syrrakos New School for Social Research Department of Political Science New York, NY
[email protected] Paper presented at the 3rd Ph.D. Symposium of the Hellenic Observatory of the London School for Economics and Political Science June 14-15, 2007 Do not cite without author’s permission PART I: INTRODUCTION The purpose of this paper is to suggest a model of the public sphere under conditions of dictatorship. I build on three pre-existing models: Jurgen Habermas' theory of the public sphere, Nancy Fraser's conception of multiple publics in response to the Habermas model, and finally Hannah Arendt's conception of the agonistic public sphere by way of the ancients.1 In this introduction, I begin with a hypothetical portrait of democratic participation. I then move on to discuss the Habermasean perspective of the public sphere and Nancy Fraser's multiple publics critique. This will be followed by a discussion of Arendt's classical-based portrait of the public sphere, for descriptive purposes, with a focus on agonism. I will then present the historical case of Greece, as an empirical illustration of the hypothetical, as interpreted through the lenses of Habermas and Arendt and offer up a model of the public sphere, consequently, with distinct traits that will allow us to perceive of a departure from the presumptions imposed by normative accounts of public sphere in a non-authoritarian political environment. Finally I will suggest 1 Habermas, Jurgen (Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence): The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.