LeVine and Salvatore 67or counterpublics that, according to him, are basically “the periodically
recurring violent revolt or a counterproject to the hierarchical world of
domination with its official celebrations and everyday disciplines.”^4
hen plebeian/subaltern/marginalized popular movements enter W
the public sphere, they can remain unbounded by the strictures of liberal
conceptions and norms of publicness, and possess a level of complexity
and rationality that goes beyond their potential characterization as mere
resistance movements, i.e., that challenge bourgeois hegemony but are
devoid of a positive, alternative sociopolitical program.^5 We propose to
look at socioreligious movements by employing a theorization that is not
restricted to the public sphere’s Western secular forms. This is because
in both non-Western and premodern settings public spheres have been
articulated through a combination of partial consensus and a shared hier-
archy of leadership, which are mediated by informal and pervasive pat-
terns of influence, responsibility, and shared expectations.^6 These arrange-
ments offered a framework for discourse and practice that went beyond
immediate localities, facilitating discussions of the common good and
redefinitions of patterns of inclusion and exclusion. When not limited to
modern secular settings, the public sphere can be understood as the site
where contests take place over the definition of the obligations, rights and
especially notions of justice that members of society require for the com-
mon good to be realized.^7
e idea of the public sphere is at once a wider and a more specific Th
notion than that of civil society. “Civil society entails a public sphere, but
not every public sphere entails a civil society,” is how Eisenstadt concisely
put it, because not every public sphere has the market-based and trust-
oriented economic dimension that is crucial to civil society’s functioning.^8
Habermasian definitions of the public sphere are too rigidly premised on
a notion of a civil society of private citizens, a limitation that becomes a
particular handicap to contemporary theorization when we confront two
other problems inherent in the way the public sphere is often described:
first, such definitions do not sufficiently consider the modalities through
which modern states introduce disciplining and legitimizing projects
into public sphere dynamics, or the tension between such activities and
the public sphere’s specific role as a site for solidarities against the dis-
cursive power of the state; second, public spheres interact continuously