The liberal public sphere is necessarily structured by power, not merely imperfect

Evidence

It isn’t enough to respond to this criticism, as is sometimes done, by saying that although the public sphere is less than perfect as an actual forum for rational debate, it is still an ideal worth striving for. The point here is that the public sphere is a space necessarily (not just contingently) articulated by power. And everyone who enters it must address power’s disposition of people and things, the dependence of some on the goodwill of others. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 897

Categorization

• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 897
• XREF: connects to: Both liberal and socialist public-sphere models wrongly assumed the public can control the state — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2375; Power includes the ability to define contexts of public life — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 159; Liberalism and democracy are only contingently articulated, not necessarily linked — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 332 (+1 more)