Advertising and Democracy: the enclave of an advertising development for the extension of the political horizon of liberal democracy

Abstract

In this article we will analyze the tensions produced between two conceptions of democracy portrayed within the general framework of public sphere in order to show its implications and divergences. On the one hand, we will reconstruct the most relevant aspects of the public sphere category elaborated by Habermas, and inserted in what the German author has called the domain of politically active public opinion, as the appropriate environment to guarantee a consensus of a universal nature that achieves promote democracy, a condition that gives communication and its means of expression a leading role in this process. However, we will show the historical interpretation of democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville portrays, since when describing the emergence of certain anomie produced after the effects of social isolation that democratic individualism fosters, the French author places the center of the public sphere analysis in the conditions existential generated around an egalitarian order, that contribute to dilute the public sphere conditions for an effective deployment in relation to the establishment of a politically active public opinion in the Habermasian way.