As the cases of citizens struck by Coronavirus rise, the pressure on our already weak and overburdened health system will grow. At the same time, the overwhelming focus on managing the fallout of the epidemic will mean that other major problems are left unattended. The millions of Indians who suffer from tuberculosis, heart disease, hypertension and so on may find that the doctors and the hospitals that would otherwise be available to them are now harder to access. More worrying perhaps is the case of the millions of babies born in India every month. Over the years, an institutional structure had been put in place to vaccinate these newborns against deadly diseases (such as measles, mumps, polio, diphtheria, among other ailments). Now, field reports suggest that with their attention diverted to Covid-19, state governments are falling behind in their programmes to provide immunization to our youngest citizens.

Si se entienden los movimientos sociales como procesos de aprendizaje a través de los cuales quedan traducidas a la práctica social estructuras de racionalidad disponibles de forma latente, de modo que éstas finalmente encuentran una materialización institucional, entonces la tarea que a continuación se plantea es la de identificar el potencial racionalizador que poseen las tradiciones

I recently asked Jurgen Habermas in a public forum what his current opinion is about the state of the public sphere, now that the broadcast era has been supplanted by the many-to-many media that enable so many people to use the Internet as a means of political expression. He blew off the question without explanation, and a little further investigation into the very sparse pronouncements he has made in this regard has led me to understand that he simply does not understand the Internet. His ideas about the relationship between public opinion and democracy and the role of communication media, and the commodification and manipulation of political opinion via public relations, are still vitally important. But I think it’s important now to build new theories and not simply to rely on Habermas, who is signalling his ignorance of the meaning of the changes in the infosphere that have taken place in recent decades. He did his part in his time, but the ideal public sphere he described — a bourgeois public sphere dominated by broadcast media — should not be taken as the model for the formation of public opinion in 21st century democracies. Some background on my interest in this subject and Habermas’ personal opinion follows. And then I’ll briefly describe my recent encounter with the man himself.