The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Introduction - preliminary demarcation of a type of Bourgeois Public Sphere: the initial question; remarks on the type representative publicness; on the genesis of the Bourgois Public Sphere. Part 2 Social structures of the Public Sphere: the basic blueprint; institutions of the public sphere; the Bourgois family and the institutionalization of a privateness oriented to an audience; the public sphere in the world of letters in relation to the public sphere in the political realm. Part 3 Political functions of the public sphere: the model case of British development; the continental variants; civil society as the sphere of private autonomy: private law and a liberalized market; the contradictory institutionalization of the public sphere in the Bourgeois constitutional state. Part 4 The bourgeois public sphere - idea and ideology: publicity as the bridging principle between politics and morality, Kant; on the dialectic of the public sphere, Hegel and Marx; the ambivalent view of the public sphere in the theory of liberalism, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. Part 5 The social-structural transformation of the public sphere: the tendency toward a mutual infiltration of public and private spheres; the polarization of the social sphere and the intimate sphere; from a culture-debating (kulturrasonierend) public to a culture-consuming public; the blurred blueprint - developmental pathways in the disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere. Part 6 the transformation of the public sphere's political function: from the journalism of private men of letters to the public consumer services of the mass media - the public sphere as a platform for advertising; the transmitted function of the principle of publicity; manufactured publicity and nonpublic opinions - the voting behaviour of the population; the political public sphere and the transformation of the liberal constitutional state into a social-welfare state. Part 7 On the concept of public opinion: public opinion as a fiction of constitutional law-and the social-psychological liquidation of the concept; a sociological attempt at clarification.

About the Author :
Jurgen Habermas is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He was recently awarded the 2004 Kyoto Prize for Arts and Philosophy by the Inamori Foundation. The Kyoto Prize is an international award to honor those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of mankind.

Review :
"Why is this such a vital study? Its significance rests in its analysis of one of the central notions on which both our political life and our political theories rests: 'public opinion.' Presidential candidates worry about it, the press talks about it, political scientists try to measure it, but Habermas is one of the few people to have actually sat down and tried to think about it to ask what it means to have an 'opinion that is not private, not idiosyncratic, but rather 'public.'" James Schmidt , Boston University "The most significant modern work on its subject... Habermas offers perhaps the richest, best developed conceptualization available of the social nature and foundations of public life. As scholars set out to make sense of the growing wealth of empirical research on the topics related to this theme, this book will form an indispensable point of theoretical departure... We should be grateful that it has finally appeared in English." Craig J. Calhoun , Contemporary Sociology