Szűcs László Gergely

László Gergely Szűcs was born in Székesfehérvár in 1979. He studied at the Eötvös Loránd University, he holds degrees in Philosophy and Sociology with a specialization in „History of Mentality”. He defended his PhD thesis about Jürgen Habermas’s theory of democracy in 2013 at ELTE. Between 2014 and 2019 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of Philosophy. His research topic was the social philosophies of human rights and human dignity. In 2015 he published a monography entitled „A kommunikatív hatalom és az emberi jogok. Jürgen habermas politikai filozófiája a kilencvenes években” (Communicative Power and Human Rights. Jürgen Habermas’s Political Philosophy in the 1990s).

Research Program

Public and Private Freedom in the Age of Digital Communication

Distinguishing between public and private spheres of action is an essential part of modern democratic politics. One of the most important questions of modern political thinking also refers to how one can define the dividing line between the public and the private and whether one can enjoy the utmost freedom in one’s private sphere or one’s social relations. According to the classical liberal point of view, private freedom has to be guaranteed before the making of any political decision and all decisions that were allegedly based upon “public good” have to be revised from the perspective of the ‘private person” again and again. On the other hand, republican and communitarian aspects underline the mutual decision making process of citizens as the basis of legitimation, thus, defining the boundaries of private sphere is preceded by creating the possibility of public decision making and the solidarity of civil association. My research aims at the exploration of the practice of civil liberties in an age when (1) the questions of data protection provide new context for the division between the public and the private and (2) online communication weakens the mechanism of classical civil public sphere and overwrites its logic.