This is not to suggest that Habermas' theory is irrelevant for the study of rhetoric, but rather that one must regard it as describing only one small portion of the much larger public sphere which actually contains nearly all forms of non-state, public discourse. In his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas proposes a conception of the public sphere that, while flawed, nonetheless offers a useful starting point for considering how individual opinions are mediated and discussed so that they become part of a public opinion separate from officially sanctioned state authority. Habermas' flaw is focusing exclusively on the emergence of the bourgeoisie over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, not because the bourgeois public sphere he describes is not a genuine phenomenon, but rather that he takes this phenomenon to represent the totality of the public sphere. This flaw has led to a number of criticisms, to the point that the utility and validity of the public sphere as a concept has been repeatedly challenged. Rather than disregard the utility of the public sphere as a critical and theoretical concept, Gerard Hauser, in his essay "Civil Society and the Principle of the...
For Hauser, the public sphere is defined not by the solidarity of any one class in opposition to the state or other forms of power, but is instead defined by the rhetorical interaction between disparate groups and ideologies, which all contribute to generate a public opinion that is greater than the sum of its parts and acts on its own accord, separate from the will of any given individual or class. In the end, Hauser's theory is more relevant to modern rhetorical theory and contemporary discussions of democracy, because it offers a far more robust and accurate means of understanding the way in which individuals interact within the public space in order to express a generalized will regarding the state and the proper standards of behavior and discourse within that state.
Ross (1988) notes the development of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century and indicates that it was essentially a masculine phenomenon: Romantic poetizing is not just what women cannot do because they are not expected to; it is also what some men do in order to reconfirm their capacity to influence the world in ways socio-historically determined as masculine. The categories of gender, both in their lives and in their
Companies practically make it mandatory for these people to employ a "nicer than natural" attitude and thus influence them to feel estranged from their emotions. Even with the fact that flight attendants manage to avoid being stressed as a result of their coping mechanism, their thinking can turn in an occupational hazard. Employing such attitudes can lead to serious problems as flight attendants feel detached from their jobs and
While these are some of the more famous elements of rhetorical theory, they do not require extensive discussion here for two reasons. Firstly, they are fairly well-known. Secondly, and more importantly, they actually do not provide much insight into the uses of rhetoric, because Aristotle implicitly inserts an ethics into his discussion of rhetoric that precludes it from having as robust an application to the real world as would
Lawrence Stenhouse (1975) spoke 'initiation' and 'induction' as learning functions and held that these forms of learning effectively reached further than 'training' and 'instruction' which are instrumental learning. The initiation stage of learning is an independent learning stage where the learner grasps and understands for themselves the object of learning and in which the learner's dependence upon both the teacher and upon learning structures are lessened. A higher stage of
The tragedies that befell Germany over the last eighty years can be seen as the product of the failures of two ideologies -- fascism and communism -- to deal with the problems associated with two of the signal conditions of modern Western industrial democracies: ethnic diversity and economic class divisions. Reunification gives Germans an opportunity to build a 21st century industrial democracy that learns the lessons of those ideological failures.
When the work was near completion a reporter came to the cite to interview Rivera and took many scenes from the work as examples of a dangerously revolutionary idea, despite Rivera's impassioned explanation and led the public to believe that Rivera had duped Rockefeller and the American people. A said that, as long as the Soviet Union was in existence, Nazi fascism could never be sure of its survival. Therefore, the
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