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Politics In The Public Sphere: The Power Of Tiny Publics In Classical Sociology, Gary Alan Fine, Elisabeth Brooke Harrington, Sandro Segre

Brooke Harrington

As Fine and Harrington [2004] have argued, the relationship between individuals and the social systems which they inhabit is shaped within face-to-face groups. Early work by Habermas and others on the development of the public sphere suggests that interactional arenas – salons, taverns, coffee houses, or other small group modalities – create arenas of discourse in which civil society is enacted and made concrete. However, this research has not led – as one might have expected – to the explicit theoretical attention by political sociologists to small groups and their political incarnation as “tiny publics.” In this article, we make …