Arendt's Public Sphere And Its Modern Survey

In the field of contemporary political philosophy, the theory of the public sphere, as a research paradigm to analyze modern society and academic discovery to resolve modern political crisis, is more and more valued by scholars. On the base of criticizing the falsity, depoliticization and anti-politicization of modern political lives and from the point of view of recovering human life dignity and value, Hannah Arendt, the Jewish western Marxism theoretician, first raised the concept of the public realm and constructed the theory. It’s very important to systematically analyze the source, composition and foundation of the theory of public sphere and examine by comparative and developmental sight, for clear thinking the intellectual history of public sphere, enriching ideological resource of public sphere, exploring the realistic value of the theory of the public sphere and modeling ideal public living.Because of the development of politics, economy, science and technology in the20th century, the rise of totalitarianism, the persecute of the Jews, crises of the republic in the democracy countries after the war and personal experiences, Arendt realized that modernity, formed from rationalism and progressivism resulted in the collapse of political publicity and the extinct of public sphere, so that human political live was under the danger we never met before. From the analysis of human nature, human essence and human condition, she was sure that it was human lives’purpose and meaning to live in public sphere. Arendt divided social fields according to the activities of human lives, put forward that human lives could be divided into labor, work and action which are according to private realm, social realm and public realm. From there she raised the concept of the public realm, and deep analyzed the connotation of the public realm from the view of publicity, privacy, plurality, identity, politics and permanence. Arendt believed that after the rise of recent social realm, labor and family was regarded as public lives, which not only destroyed the privacy of personal realm, but also encroach on the politics of public realm. It made human’s action to change to the action of equalization and homogenization and the politics changed to housekeeping management which reflects the relationship of command and obedience. The decline of the public sphere needs actual revolution actions to rescue. Council system can be regarded as ideal polity of republic. Besides, action, thought, judgment and political virtue composed the basis of Arendt’s theory of the public sphere.As an open ideological system, Arendt’s public realm ideology is confronted with the examination of epoch all along, reflects the value of epoch and is always developing and improved. Virtual technology and Cyberworld, post-modern advocating personality, aestheticization, cultural expansion, daily life revolution and Post-mankind apparent provide new opportunities and challenges for realizing the public realm ideology. The significance of the public realm ideology, for contemporary China, is to construct the theory for the phenomenon of China’s public sphere using it, to analysis integral structure, Development Mechanism and Operating mechanism about China’s public sphere based on empirical research, to summarize the significance of constructing China’s public sphere and exploring the construction strategies for China’s public sphere.