In Search of the Private, Public, and Counterpublic: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postsocialism^* Free

The aim of this article is to once again analyze the development of the private and public spheres in the three latest stages in the evolution of human society—modernity, postmodernity, and postsocialism—with a focus on the last. The evolutionary nature of social development makes necessary a retrospective analysis, for it would be almost impossible to sketch the contemporary shape of the private, public, and counterpublic in postsocialism without analyzing them in the modern and postmodern world. Indeed, those shapes have served as models and inspiration for Eastern Europeans dreaming for and demanding changes for half a century. Building on Michael Warner’s structural intersubjectivist definition of publics and counterpublics—the self-defining and the defining of others as members of them—as the best way of determining the places where counterpublics in postsocialism can be found, and also analyzing their relationship with the rising private sphere and the initially receding but later returning ubiquitous, state-dominated public sphere, I find these counterpublics at the Eastern European intellectuals.