Ethical state and digital communicative reason

the dialectic of the construction of the public sphere in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

This research investigates the dialectic of the public sphere's construction in contemporary Brazil, confronting the normative ideality of Hegel’s Ethical State and Habermas’s Communicative Reason with a national facticity marked by patrimonialism, inequality, and cordiality. Addressing the dissonance between constitutional validity and exclusionary social práxis, exacerbated by digital colonization and opaque algorithms, the study employs the Critical-Dialectical method and critical bibliographic review to diagnose structural blockages to full citizenship. The work's relevance lies in the urgency of overcoming the crisis of institutional legitimacy and the representation deficit besetting the country. It is concluded that overcoming Brazil’s "selective modernity" demands the articulation of an unprecedented "Deliberative Ethical Life": a synthesis fusing Hegelian institutional robustness, necessary to curb the privatization of the public realm, with Habermasian democratic permeability, essential for legitimizing power via discourse. The vitality of organized civil society and technological regulation are identified as pathways to unblock the system, transforming social fragmentation into the actuality of a concrete, lived freedom.