Making of Public Space

Luc Boltanski is Professor of Sociology at EHESS, Paris.Arnaud Esquerre is Director of Research at the CNRS, Paris.

"The Making of Public Space is about nothing less than how humans produce a shared sense of what they have in common and how they elevate issues to politics. Once again, Boltanski and Esquerre deliver their magic: deeply steeped in pragmatism, their strikingly original book combines convincing theoretical arguments about world-making with richly informed empirical insights. The result is a path-breaking analysis that should inform frontier thinking across the social sciences."Michèle Lamont, Harvard University"The Making of Public Space offers a theoretically informed and empirically grounded account of the two broad processes through which public opinion is formed."Richard Foster, Oxford Political Review"Given the abundance of news and news coverage of the world today, the relevance of this work is especially timely."American Association of Geographers Review of Books

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionNews as a global cultureThe corpuses of data on which this work has focused The empirical analysis of the politicization and formation of ‘opinions’Crowds, masses, networksDemocracy as it isI Being immersed in the newsChapter 1. The presence and periodization of the inaccessibleThe consistency of the NowKnowing by experience or by hearsayThe accessible and the inaccessibleWhat news in which history?Time’s arrowSome problems of historical periodizationThe formation of planes of news itemsThe news in the eyes of its critics (1): inauthenticityThe news in the eyes of its critics (2): fake democracyChapter 2. The process of the eventNews, History and the need to select  Selection and censorshipThe truth of facts, the adequacy of interpretationsTrouble with eventsThe coalescence of facts in the plane of news items   The de-composition and deconstruction of eventsPrecedentsPrimary facts and derived facts: the worth and force of an eventPolitical facts as a seriesDocument 1. History (with a capital H) and historyChapter 3. Political events and the formation of generationsThe salience of eventsBreak or continuity: a question of scaleAt what scale does Le Monde view the world (le monde)? The obituary testBreaks in institutional continuityThe role of major political events in the formation of generationsStructural collectives and generational collectives‘Our generation!’   IIPoliticizationDocument 2. PlotChapter 4. Political discussionConversation or discussionThe risks of political discussionDocument 3. MediasChapter 5. Le Monde and its readers: between news and HistoryLe Monde as a news organ and quasi-institutionLe Monde and HistoryJournalists and their readersDocument 4. CensuredChapter 6. The structure of comments on the newsPre-texts and commentsThe constraints on utteranceContesting the truth of the facts: the 11 September 2001 attacks, with comments made on INA SociétéDiscussion, moderation and commercial censorship Commenting is not denouncingThe irony of the commentatorsDocument 5. What are their names?Chapter 7. The work of ‘one’The intense pleasure of commentStates of mindAnonymity and mishmashThe ‘one’ of the newsDocument 6. Readers’ repliesChapter 8. Politicizing the newsWhat are they thinking of?What is a political problem?The process of politicizationMedically assisted procreation, from the non-political to politicsPolitical shiftsTalking about IslamDifferent shifts in the notion of environmentalismWhen politics proves to be ‘inextricable’ Document 7. ‘Generations’Chapter 9. The dynamics of politicizationShifting positions and generation conflictsPolitical problems and ideologiesThreats and remediesFeeding into politicizationDocument 8. ‘Democracy’Conclusion. The meaning of HistoryInterpretation: between adequacy and violence‘On the right’ or ‘on the left’: the political description of interpretationsTowards the extremePolitics and desolationThe digitalization of strugglesAppendicesConceptual lexiconBibliographyNotesIndex