Historia y crítica de la opinión pública

by Jürgen Habermas

This is Jürgen Habermas's most concrete historical-sociological book and one of the key contributions to political thought in the postwar period. It will be a revelation to those who have known Habermas only through his theoretical writing to find his later interests in problems of legitimation and communication foreshadowed in this lucid study of the origins, nature, and evolution of public opinion in democratic societies.

Genres: Philosophy, Sociology, Nonfiction, Politics, History, Theory, Academic

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Jürgen Habermas was a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, the topic of his first book entitled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics—particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests.

Reviews

[Vik]

Habermas' bourgeois pubic sphere is a seminal contribution to the Frankfurt School.

[Rowland Pasaribu]

Several important influences on Habermas's work are evident. Firstly, he borrows many important terms and categories from Kant, Hegel and Marx. Many of his ways of thinking about the public sphere are explicitly Kantian, and he develops Hegel's central category of civil society into the basis from which public opinion emerges. Of these, Kant is perhaps the greatest influence, simply because for Habermas his work represents the "fully developed" theory of the public sphere.

The Marxist cultural theory of the Frankfurt School is also an important influence, particularly on the second part of the Structural Transformation.The Frankfurt School was a group of philosophers linked to the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, active from the 1920s on. Two of its most famous names were Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. The Frankfurt School adapted Marx's theories greatly, in order to study modern culture and society. They took the unorthodox view that the experience of totalitarianism in the Second World War showed that the lower classes, or proletariat, had become corrupted by mass culture. They could no longer act as a revolutionary force. Their pessimism about what social force might replace the proletariat increased as the twentieth century progressed. Adorno is well known for his critique of the modern "culture industry", which manipulated the public, creating consumers of the mass media, rather than critical readers. Habermas draws on this savage criticism of modern society and culture in his treatment of advertising and the press.

A more personal influence was the German legal scholar Wolfgang Abendroth, who supervised Habermas's original thesis at Marburg, after it was rejected by Horkheimer and Adorno in Frankfurt. Abendroth's work analyzed the relationship between the social-welfare principle and the inherited structure of the German constitutional state. He argued that the Federal German constitution aimed to extend the ideas of equality and welfare, and that a socialist democratic state could emerge from its constitutional predecessor. Habermas moved away from this concept of the development of states, but acknowledges his debt to Abendroth in the dedidcation to the Structural Transformation.

Habermas's influence over other writers is considerable. It has recently become more evident in the English-speaking world, with the publication of a translation of the Structural Transformation. An important collection of essays edited by Craig Calhoun (see bibliography) shows wide range of responses to his work: scholars in English, political theory and philosophy respond to Habermas in this volume. Responses are so varied because so many different elements are present in Habermas's work. Historians criticise the factual basis of many of his claims about the publishing industry, about economic history and bourgeois culture. More abstract theorists challenge his assumptions about a range of issues. Feminist scholars, for example, argue that Habermas neglects the importance of gender, and of the exclusion of women from the public sphere. This is a point that Habermas has recently conceded.

Theorists have attempted to work out the implications of the Structural Transformation for modern political theory. This perhaps a more difficult task, as the second half of the book is more problematic and less satisfying than the first. Habermas's debates about public reason with the US philosopher John Rawls are well-known. Also, many writers have attempted to apply Habermas's model of the bourgeois public sphere to other countries and periods. They have tried to find the public sphere in America, the Far East, and a host of other unlikely places. There is a tendency for these projects to misrepresent Habermas's original idea of the public sphere. Given that he makes it clear that the public sphere was inseparably related to the social and economic conditions of eighteenth century Europe, these attempts do not always seem worth the effort. Almost all histories of publishing and the book trade, such as those of the US historian Robert Darnton, react to Habermas's ideas.

Habermas himself has attempted to answer his critics. In his essay Further reflections on the public sphere, he revises his position in several ways.. Firstly, he admits some problems with the historical basis of his work. He also suggests other areas for consideration, namely; one) the possibility of a popular or plebian public sphere with a different social basis, in which popular culture is not merely a backdrop to representative publicity two) a reconsideration of the role of women in the bourgeois public sphere three) a need to develop a less pessimistic view about the modern mass public. Some of the issues about public discourse and the role of the state raised in the Structural Transformation reemerge in later works, such as his Theory of Communicative Action and Legitimation Crisis. Habermas has changed so many of his positions, however, that it is unwise to see his work on public sphere as a basis for his later philosophy.

[Kaia]

This is the ur-text of publics theory. I'm glad I read it, like I'm glad when I eat healthy food.

[Caitlin]

he says the word "public" 47 times in the first two pages....

[Andrew]

Habermas, you're a helluva humanist thinker. I can't complain about the man's motives-- this is the sort of qualitative commentary that stands on its own merits rather than feeling like the speculations of some dude in a bourgeois university position in Paris or New York.

But when he tries to claim that the public sphere has degenerated from its role in the early-capitalist era, I have to question Habermas' work. To what extent did this public sphere play a role in the expansion of justice, and to what extent did it simply protect its own neck? Looking for a "Golden Age" is almost always a bad idea, and I'm afraid Habermas slips into this trap. His analysis of how consumers receive rather than debate culture remains provocative, however.

[Lindsay Campbell]

okay, yes its dense and wordy and translated from german. but it kind of is like a political sociology epic poem. smash together my high school modern european history class from high school with my freshman year college political philosophy course with the word bourgeois sprinkled throughout and you get a flavor. its fun to watch the public sphere evolve from feudalism to high industrial capitalism era. i'm sure i didnt glean whole swaths of it, but what i did get i enjoyed.

[Stefan Szczelkun]

A remarkable book that describes the profound changes in society that allowed capitalism to emerge from a feudal society ordered by blood and sword. Habermas focuses on the bourgeois literary public sphere that emerges in C18th Britain and mediates between the needs of the new capitalists or bourgeoisie, and the monarchial state with its legal, administrative, religious and political wings. This struggle between a public and the state gives rise to a legal equality and a parliamentary system to represent all owners of property. Habermas is at pains to emphasis the rational critical nature of the discourse that was possible in this early public sphere which took similar forms in Germany and France. The power of publishers had yet to become infused with capitalist interests. A wide public were at liberty to discuss a wide range of subjects for the first time, to give these debates wide publicity and to form an informed public opinion.

Habermas celebrates the rational nature of this discourse, informed as it was by the European enlightenment. He also points out that the liberty of this public discourse did not critique the violent exploitation of labour that was at the heart of the capitalist mode that was spreading over the globe.

The book goes on to see how the liberty and rational critical aspect of the early public sphere, and its apparent equality of opportunity to participate, degrades as capitalism develops into the C19th. However, aspects of the early formation are still evident in the system we have today. As the Public Sphere degrades, or even becomes re-feudalised, the voting franchise expands to gradually include all adults.

This is not a passive history as it is implies we ask if it is possible to recreate a rational public sphere to include the whole population. In fact how a modern democracy might be possible.

It is however not an easy read… just when you think you can’t go on with the stodgy language or plodding and dated arguments he comes up with a blindingly incisive formulation that wakes you up and drives you on. As someone on twitter said those who persist with Habermas gain something of a super power.
My longish summary and commentary followed by a short conclusion from the point of view of a working class artist in London in 2023 is here:
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...

PS I should add that there was an apparent update of this in October 2023 'A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics' but it seems from reviews this is a bit of a hatchet job and not any profound rewrite.

[Iván]

Hermanas dimos cátedra en la ponencia. Pues el libro me gustó pero un poco bola a veces. Me parece excesivamente utópico el planteamiento de la esfera pública burguesa pero sin duda da pie, a través de la propia crítica y decadencia que dibuja Habermas, a hablar de esfera pública en la actualidad. Creo que si queremos hablar de teoría democrática es un must y no es meterse de lleno en la Teoría de la acción comunicativa.

[Caro]

If this wasn't assigned reading I probably would've enjoyed this much more - that or I would've never picked it up. I'm glad it's over anyways.

[Walter Schutjens]

The best work of critical theory I have read to date.
I've written 3 essays on this tome (banger of a debut) so will not attempt to do so again, but let it be known: we are prisoners and happy deniers of the fact that we in no measure live up to the demands of our own ideas. Claims to liberal democracy sounds hollow on the tongues of usurpers of capital in the age of the masses. Much like King Arthur I want justice and a round table of strongman intellectuals. But though I may want it, there is no reason to take history to task for not delivering it at my feet. The writing was always on the immanent contradictions.

[Phillip]

(Second Review): Habermas presents a strong case for understanding the history of the public sphere tied primarily to the interests of a bourgeois reading class during the Liberal era (roughly mid 18th-10th centuries), evolving out of a coffeehouse and salon culture and then mutating into different forms that eroded the rational-critical aspect of the public sphere while and by expanding democratic political participation.
What Habermas means by the 'public sphere' is a rational-critical space where educated and propertied (which were almost universally the same thing during this period) individuals could gather together to discuss issues of common interest--literary, artistic, political, economic, social, etc. The central aspect of this public sphere was a debate between educated people which was ostensibly stripped of social rank and deference, and conducted entirely on the basis of reasoned arguments. He ties this public sphere strongly to classical Liberalism, which supported the ideals of individual rights (but only insofar as those rights were tied to property ownership) and freedom of ideas, information, expression, and assembly.
One of the things I find most fascinating about Habermas' description of the public sphere and its Liberal partisans is how anti-democratic this sphere and philosophy was (an anti-democratic tendency revived today in neoliberalism), at least by the etymological definition of democracy (the authority of the people). The late Liberal era developed (or seized upon) the idea of representative democracy precisely as a way of preventing non-property owners--women, the working classes, and the poor--from effectively engaging in politics. The idea was (and I think we see this in how contemporary US and UK politics runs) that if the people could only vote for leaders rather than vote on issues, then effective power would remain in the hands of property owners because they would have the leisure time and education to construct political platforms--in essence, we get to endorse someone's platform rather than having our own opinions on issues.

(Original Review): I didn't get all the way through this book, but I read a decent sized chunk of it considering how much other stuff I had to do this week (I read this for a class). But I think I got the major idea. Habermas argues that the rise of a specifically bourgeois public sphere, as opposed to the ancient and feudal conceptions of publicness, was based in the rise of critical rational debate, or in the age of reason. He argues that the bourgeois public sphere began during the era of the coffee houses and salons, when ostensibly anyone could join in discussions of contemporary political, economic, and philosophical issues based on reason (of course in practice access to education, leisure, and reading material excluded many people from the public realm of debate).

[Sibel Çokşen]

Kavramın etimolojik tarihinde belirtildiği üzere, antik Yunan'da polis(kamu) özgür vatandaslarin alanı olarak kabul edilirken, oikos, bir anlamıyla da ekonomi, şahsi bir alan olarak biliniyordu. Günümüze dek devam eden Helenik kamu modeli hala normatif bir güç taşıyor. Merkantilist kapitalizmin gelişimiyle beraber mal ve haber dolaşımı artmış, sermayenin ihtiyacı doğrultusunda etkili bir vergi sisteminin kurumlaşmasını baz alan modern devletin kurulmasıyla modern kamusallık ortaya çıkmıştır. Yani kamu ve devlet özdeşleşmeye başlar. Oikos'tan (ev ekonomisi) pazar ekonomisine geçişle birlikte kamunun ekonomi-dışı özelliği yerini burjuva kamusuna bırakmıştır. Modern devlet kurumlaştıkça, muhatabının adresi halk olarak kabul ediliyordu, ancak burada halk sıradan insana değil, eğitimli zümrelerin oluşturduğu burjuvaya tekabül etmektedir. Bu noktadan sonra Habermas, burjuva kamusunun tarihini anlatır, aleniyet ilkesinin en iyi bu kamuda ortaya konduğunu belirtir. Kamusal akıl yürütmenin bizatihi kendisinin tüketim nesnesine dönüştüğünü belirtip parlamenter kamusallığa yönelik haklı eleştirisine rağmen burjuva kamusunu idealize edip siyaseti bu kamuya havale etmiş ve özel-kamusal ayrımıyla birlikte geçmişten beri süregelen hiyerarşiyi devam ettirmiştir. Rancier'ci bağlamda belirtirsek siyaseti devlet idaresine indirgediğini ve sıradan halk kitlesini-demos'u dışlayarak elitleştirdiğini düşünüyorum.

[Ian]

The thing that I don't understand about this book is how Habermas spends the last hundred pages of it constantly referring back to a previously existing public sphere and analyzing the consequences of its loss after spending the first half of the book seemingly making clear that there never was a fully functioning public sphere in the strict sense; he analyzes how the Greeks and the coffee houses and salons of the 18th century where only able to think of their interests as objectively general because the public spheres were small, gatekept ponds of discussion composed of people who could only enjoy the supposed separation of their private lives from the public by virtue of their own domination (of slaves, the "penurious masses," women, the patriachal domination of the conjugal family, etc), and that once you scratched this surface, as happened in the 19th century, it was revealed to be ideology and one "group's" interests rather than a general interest. In other words, it only ever appeared to be a public sphere because of its unacknowledged reliance on a social hegemony that was simply taken for granted. It seems to me that the fully functional public sphere Habermas laments losing never actually existed beyond the mythological form on which democracy is predicted. Writing a summary of this book as a fairy tale, as another reviewer has done, seems spot on.

[Paula]

jürgen hat für meinen geschmack zu viel spaß an fancy wörtern, komplizierten sätzen und französischen zitaten

[Aditya]

Fascinating and thorough analysis of the rise and fall of the bourgeoise public sphere. Studies like this are a reminder that the institutions taken for granted as foundational are often the most contingent and malleable. However, Habermas does not engage enough with the notion that the public sphere was bound to disintegrate from the moment of its inception. The endogenous factors are, I think, just as important as the exogenous factors in its decline (e.g., the bourgeoise’s double role as private and public participant will inevitably collapse into one or the other—as Habermas notes in the section on Marx). At the very least, the question ought to be examined more thoroughly than it was (historical rather than purely theoretical analysis would help), seeing as it would determine whether the bourgeois public sphere is a viable option in the first place.

[Catarina Silva]

Até pareço intelectual, mas fui obrigada a lê lo

[Tia]

Lowkey Trash and kinda boring. Plato is way better

[lana_cobb]

DNF

[Mariana Aleixo]

Se eu fui obrigada a ler isto, que não é um livro pequeno, vai contar para o desafio.

[Diego]

Opera interessante, tuttavia a mio modesto parere possiede una generalità dei temi molto ampia, fin troppo.
Dunque è poco incisiva sull'argomento principale.
Inoltre, possiede un linguaggio fumoso e pregnante di specificità che conduce inesorabilmente al tedio personale del lettore e alla perdita di concentrazione.
Ultimo appunto: possiede un lessico astruso, quasi quanto codesta recensione

[David Warner]

This is a highly theoretical and abstract examination of what constitutes the public sphere and how it has developed from the eighteenth century age of enlightenment to the industrialised late twentieth century. Habermas' approach is both philosophical and sociological but rooted in the dialectical historical materialism of Hegel and Marx, so that the specific ideologies that permeate the public sphere remain unexplained, the focus instead being upon how the space in which those ideologies function is constructed and which individuals and groups constitute the membership of that space.
Habermas establishes that at the beginning of what he characterises as bourgeois society, the public realm was a product and function of the private world of the minority who had property and sufficient education to engage in critical-rational debate, namely males who headed a household and whose property was sufficient to give them status within the public sphere. It was of men of wealth and status that the public sphere was built, being open, not democratic, in so far as anyone could enter the sphere on condition they acquired sufficient property and social standing. It was class based and exclusionary in that property was a requirement of becoming a member, meaning politics and ideology were a function of the capitalist mode of production determined ultimately by materiality, confirming to the Marxist conception of bourgeois-capitalist society in which consciousness is determined by class.
From this basis, Habermas shows how industrialisation and mass society relevolutionised the public sphere from a privately formed critical reasoning space to a mass space of passively receptive and socially controlled citizens of equal political value but widely varying engagement and aptitude to critical thinking, such that the ability to think ceased to be a requirement of participation in the public sphere along with the need for propery or education. In this way, mass democracy, while increasing participation in theory, actually reduced the critical-rational role of the public sphere, since the majority were either uninterested and unengaged or lacked the intelligence and knowledge to participate, so that public debate and the emergence of public opinion changed from being an intellectual engagement by the rational minority to a behavioural and psychological receptivicity by the public as a mass.
As part of the increasingly participatory nature of the political realm with the expansion of the franchise until it encompasssed all citizens of adult age, the liberal-constitutional state of the eighteenth to late nineteenth century has evolved into the social-welfare state of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so that a state limited to the public sphere and defined by negative rights has become one which envelops much of the private realm through regulation and intervention, and is involved in the provision of benefits to citizens, their material wellbeing, and the regulation of what previously had been private relations between individuals and commercial bodies, such that much of private law has become public law, but also reciprocally as the state's purview has expanded beyond its capacity to administer all in which it is involved, public utility has been devolved to private and semi-private organisations. In this, punlic law has encroached upon private law, thereby the public sphere and what previously was demarked as the private sphere have been increasingly merged and what is the public sphere defined by the state rather than existing as the realm in which the private citizen and private interests met to debate public issues as equals, within a status determined and propertied social strata of political equals.
By this process, the nature of the state has changed and its purpose evolved from the miniminalist role of providing security and defence and the legal protection and regulation of private relations and contracts to a maximalist entity in which its aim is to provide for social equality and the health, education, and wellbeing of each citizen according to need and irrrespective of property ownership and social status. The state no longer seeks only to protect the citizens from outside and inside avoidable harms and to guarantee a public space in which individuals and corporations can enter into private market relations, it now seeks to involve itself in all such relations in order to minimise what it deems unfairness, equalise what had been asymmetrical economic relations into relations between social equals, and to move beyond political equality towards providing for and enforcing what is deemed social equality. The state has therefore changed from being a materialist entity and product of private interests into an ideological entity dedicated not to a minimal provision of services in the market of political equals, who are socially differentiated by wealth and status, which determines their economic power and access to the public sphere, into an entity which seeks to enforce the idea of social equality upon a public sphere of not only political but social equals, regardless of material wealth, status, or education. The state has thus changed from one of defined rights and duties where encroachment upon the private realm was minimal to a state of regulation and benefits and welfare, where the private realm is that which the state determines to be not-public, with the state increasingly synonymous with the public sphere, regulating relations not only between citizens but also the terms of political discourse. As Habermas shows, rather than private citizens and interests actively determining the actions of the state, the state now determines the actions and relations of a public whose involvement becomes passive, the state providing both welfare and regulation of previously private relations, and also determining and delimiting the terms of political discourse within the public sphere, which is no longer a space for individual private interests and relations, but the space where the state and corporations relate to individuals in their capacity as public entities.
To manage this public space and to guarantee the publicity necessary for its legitimacy - a public action can be legitimate in the public sphere only in so far as it is open and known publicly - two entities have developed within the public sphere: bureaucracy and mass media. The role of bureaucracy is to manage the administration of policies determined by the state and corporations, while that of the media is to transmit the knowledge of these policies to the people and to reflect back to the state and corporations the reactions of the people, thereby providing the means by which communication between individuals and corporations can be affected in the public sphere. However, as Habermas shows, both bureaucracy and media which are supposed to be means in the public sphere dependent upon the state, corporations, and individuals have increasingly become autonomous and have now developed their own interests in the public sphere distinct from the means they were originally intended to provide.
Bureaucracy rather than being the administrative organ by which government and corporate decisions are made practical and related to the private individual and household, has taken on a public and political role of determining for individuals not only what goods and services are accessed through them, but also how these are accessed, and in regulating this access in terms that are in the interests of bureaucracy as an end of its own. The modern development of Human Relations and the regulation of behaviours through H&S and DEI policies is part of this, with the administration of personnel taking on a life and organisation of its own, funded through the core business itself, and therefore ultimately the consumer through the price paid for goods and services.
Similarly, the consumer also pays an additional cost for advertising. Originally, advertising was just a form of publicity - a business would simply advertise its wares to make them known to the public in the public realm. However, advertising has now become an economic system in and of itself, not to provide information so much, or even to grow the market, but to influence consumer choice and behaviour as to guide the consumer into purchasing a good or accessing a service. Of course, advertising can stimulate demand for a particular product, but due to the economy cost, it does not increase aggregate demand, as even demand for the product must be paid for by giving up the possibility of buying alternative goods and services. Advertising is thus an economic cost that provides no overall social benefit, and acts only in the interest of the producer of the product advertised, paid for by the consumer who may or may not have been influenced to buy the particular product. Today the public space both physically and digitally is flooded by advertising, both governmental as well as commercial, whose ubiquitous presence is in the economic interest of the advertisers, imposing unnecessary costs in the system of imperfect competition upon both the producer and the consumer.
The public space, as Habermas has shown, is no longer purely public and is no longer the meeting point for private individuals to meet to exchange ideas and opinions on a peer level as political equals. Now the public space is dominated by the state and public and private organisations, often acting indirectly if not directly to determine the behaviours of the citizenary upon whom an impractical conception of social equality is being imposed at the expense not only of political equality, but also democratic sociability, the right of the private individual to make their own decisions and choices within the public sphere through free access to information that is neither curated nor limited.
With the coming of digital media and portable electronic technology, the public sphere has now invaded the private sphere and indeed the private household: the polis as state and public space now intrudes into the economoi, where the individual is constantly bombarded by the media and by advertising even in what was once the entirely private space of the individual and their household. The personal has indeed become the political, with the destruction of privacy and the intrusion of the public space into the private realm, with the result that not only is indivuality being eroded by corporate and corporatised sociality, but also with the space and time for reflection and cognition being compressed, behaviours are becoming mimetic and socially derived, so that individuals discretion in making public choice is being duperceded by a social conditioning determined by public and private corporate entities in their economic, and therefore, political interests. The public policies pursued by governments in tandem with pharmaceutical corporations and traditional and digital media during Covid-19 are the ultimate proof of this, where the most basic freedoms of assembly, movement, and speech and private choice over medical interventions were determined and abridged by the self-validating purposes of those corporations with little regard to the actual needs of the individual or their right to determine their own public choices as private individuals in the public space.
Habermas' analysis is based upon a Marxist interpretation of society, although not a dogmatic one, relating ideology and political discourse to the socio-economic base from which it emerges and within which it is formed, which in the crude term of Marxism is bourgeois-capitalist society, one which expands and is democraticised, but nonetheless is a society conceived within the paradigm of particularist bourgeois thought determined by the materialism and productive means of that society. What Habermas charts is how the public space that evolved within educated and propertied society, which exhibited the democratic sociability of political equality for those with sufficient property and education to participate, and which, rooted in private relations of individuals, was autonomous of both state and society, has been replaced by a much larger but less equal space dominated by state and corporate bodies and curated by mass media, bureaucracy, and advertising. In this new space, the private individual is neither independent nor active. The role of the individual is now entirely passive, to think and behave submissively, to conform to the paradigms determined by the corporate bodies whose interests control the public space and determine the terms of its discourse. The public space has been privatised in the sense that it is now dominated by the private interests of public entities, not the public needs of private individuals. The public space is now corporate, mimetic, and, ultimately, not so much undemocratic as anti-democratic, opposed to the self-government of the private individual and household within a public space, instead it is the market place for the exhibition and actions of the public interests of private and state corporate bodies mediated by mass communication and advertising. The public space has gone, and with it the individual as free and autonomous being within a public sphere which is a product of their and others privacy has died.

[Sali]

Very interesting book with very inspiring ideas about the correlation between the public and private spheres. I enjoyed most the historic overview of this correlation. Very nicely written and totally understandable, even if you're not a sociologist.

[Eric]

It's not the easiest read and the most interesting material is front-loaded but Habermas' first major work remains interesting half a century after it was published.

After a definition of terms, he moves onto a multichapter review of the history of the development of critical public debate, its gradual broadening to include more segments of the rapidly expanding bourgeoisie, and then its coalescing into the origins of constitutional states. The focus is primarily France and England with
some acknowledgement of Germany's slow development, disappointingly ignoring most developments elsewhere in the Occident.

This could have served as its own book and perhaps should have as a more thorough examination and a broadening of the analysis would have made some of his later arguments more convincing. However, dividing up the book would belie the fact that this is, at its core, a philosophical work.

The second half shows the deep influence Adorno had on young Juergen as it lays out the ways in which the social welfare state and the corporate media compromise (or destroy) the existence of a true public sphere and propagandize the populace into a sort of political universe of false choices. The argument is a decent read, but overstated and ascribes too much agency to messy bureacracies and too little to individuals. In that way, he occasionally sounds almost libertarian.

The work isn't without its problems. Habermas is particularly weak when he uses the bourgeois family structure as a model for the ideology of the bourgeois state (e.g., in Chapter 6). While his tone makes every attempt to be even throughout, one does find him slipping into utopian idealism: he really has a fondness for the bourgeoisie of the late 18th century and even hints that, really, the only problem with a ruling class is a practical one of proportionate representation from all segments of society.

But this is a book of analysis and not solutions, the fact of which left me feeling unsatisfied through the second half. Perhaps in this mediatized culture I have become so accustomed to punditry that its absence leaves me feeling empty. Perhaps. But perhaps it's also that a book of this scope and insight could benefit from a little speculative futurism.

I remember reading a review somewhere on the internet that argued that the internet made this text irrelevant, but while the internet fulfills C. W. Mills' criteria for a critical public, I think Habermas would argue that it is shot through with the sort of publicity that already infects the rest of mediatized culture. Look at the talking points cut and pasted into any comments thread on gun violence in the United States; the wording is almost always so well-practiced, and it becomes clear that the repetition of this ritual text is an extension of the ubiquitous publicity of nonpublic interests and political parties. It's sloganeering, not critical debate, and the goal is clearly political domination and not consensus and compromise.

A young Habermas would have likely despaired at the quality of modern discourse given the possibilities inherent in the tools, but he's no Adorno and has grown and evolved since these early days. I look forward to reading more of his early work, but I'm going to need some lighter philosophy as a palate cleanser before doing so.

[Turbulent_Architect]

Without a doubt Habermas' most significant book. Habermas first traces the development, in the early modern period, of the public sphere as a space in which private individuals come together to submit matters of public interest to rational scrutiny, then chronicling its decline in the twentieth century with the rise of consumer culture. It's pretty interesting as a work of history. Habermas does a good job charting the trajectory of the modern democratic ideal. At the same time, though, it's philosophically on somewhat weaker ground. Although he hadn't yet developed his theory of communicative action, some of its weaknesses, especially its running together of correctness and consensus, are already on display here. I also can't fathom why a straightforward historical and sociological study like this had to be written in such impenetrable prose. As important as it may be, it is a very, very painful read.

[Paige]

I forgot to put in that I read this, because I got so swept up in school. So the thing about this is that I had to read the book and then in the next week my class and I had to read different articles all about the problems with the text and it was my job to discuss all the articles that found all the problems and talk about it at length. I don't really know how to rate or even talk about this book, because I can't say that I enjoyed it but I do understand why it's an important foundation. Even in all the articles we went over that talked about the problems with the text it still applauded what Habermas did as groundbreaking. So all at once I don't get it and I do get it. It's not a super clear argument, but is doing something important so I don't know I'm kind of middle of the road about it.

[C. Quabela]

I gave this book four stars because it is well considered and offers some valuable insights concerning the social organization of public opinion. However, not only are there questionable depictions of the historical account of the "public sphere," but I cannot accept the normative indictment on social organization. Habermas paints a convincing picture of what he considers the ideal form of civic participation of 18th century white culture. I object to its limitations though. It is very exclusive and is unapologetic on this point. Also, as a materialist dialectic on the human condition, I don't see how this idealized form could ever be re-captured. The logic precludes it and so the normative aspect of the discourse is self-defeating.

[William Durden]

I read this book to clarify my discussion of public and private, but it only proved useful as a way of understanding Habermas' view of how we lost sight of the modern project, the Enlightenment. That's all it's intended to do, I imagine, so I just needed something else, which I think I've found in Michael McKeon's "The Secret History of Domesticity."

[Gundega]

Habermas ideas about democracy and his attempt on giving historical background to public sphere was very appealing to me. The downside - his described 'democracy' reflects 'ideal' no realistic view on the subject

[Xavier]

El trabajo clásico (1962) sobre la opinión pública en el siglo XX, su propuesta, aunque relevante, resulta limitada desde una perspectiva actual, sin embargo, es el punto de partida para entender la discusión contemporánea al respecto.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick]

Part historical overview (think the Chartist Movement and the February Revolution), part philosophical exploration (everyone from Bayle, to Hobbes, to Rousseau, to Locke), part political science debate (the social welfare state vs. the liberal democracy), Jurgen Habermas's "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society" delineates the outlines of the author's thesis with care and erudition, leading to a work which eases its reader into a discussion of its main elements with rigorousness and supreme clarity. Beginning with an initial "Demarcation of a Type of Bourgeois Public Sphere," the book goes on to outline the role the traditional bourgeois family had, through its cultivation of interiority and concommitant engagement with the public sphere, on informing and creating a rational-critical informed analysis and dialogue with the political-public sphere. Delving deep into this area, Habermas lucidly delineates the role, in the critical 18th century, that the middle class family, with its development of literary engagement with the self and society, had in creating the environment that made possible the great yet short-lived existence of liberal democracy. Moreover, Habermas also dialectically describes the ideology of this period, and its subsequent developments, in a particularly enlightening discussion of thinkers as diverse as Marx, Hobbes, and Locke. All through these introductory chapters the ideas are presented with a lucidity and clearness that both goes far to make clear the sometimes obscure/difficult concepts involved as well as bring the reader along gently in almost a classically "narrative" sense. Developing the history of the public/private sphere dialectic even more, Habermas also discusses the historical development of the journal and newspaper, discussing cogently how technological developments and the negative influence of capitalism weakened this once strong and vigorous voice of the informed public. But perhaps the most compelling aspect of the work is saved for the end, where Habermas, acknowledging the transition from the Bourgeois state to the Social-Welfare state, outlines the growth of publicity and the public sphere in a world where "public relations" artifically molds what was once an authentic voice, publicity, into a easily manipulable form of false consciousness. However, not all is completely bleak, for Habermas postulates a future where rational consensus can return. And while this may seem like just a fig-leaf of hope, perhaps it is all we can wish for in our debased times.