Habermas begins his book, The Structural Transformation, with a detailed investigation of the historical and legal uses of the terms “public” and “private.” The discussion ranges from the practices of antiquity, through the feudal ages, and into the bourgeois period. However, the discourse of public and private is inadequate to explain the bourgeois “public use […]

Marie Fleming Jiirgen Habermas’s first major work was a study of the historical emer­gence of the European liberal public sphere at the end of the eighteenth century and its subsequent transformation under the pressure of working — class politics.1 Though published as long ago as 1962, the book remained virtually unknown on this side of […]

Of all Habermas’s feminist critics, Benhabib is perhaps most optimistic that “the discourse model, precisely because it proceeds from a fundamental norm of egalitarian reciprocity and precisely because it projects the democ­ratization of all social norms, cannot preclude the democratization of famil­ial norms and of norms governing the gender division of labor. Once this is […]

Revisionist historians of the Revolution have sketched an equally disturb­ing portrait of how revolutionary politics strove toward absolute consen­sus, monitoring and expelling all instances of division within the revolutionary public. Rather than a contest over interests, revolutionary politics became the site of symbolic legitimations.48 Benjamin Nathans aptly relates the challenge that recent historiography poses to […]

According to Habermas, the modern bourgeois public sphere came into exis­tence when private persons joined together to exercise their reason in a public fashion. Public opinion is the end product of all the dialogues between discoursing individuals, each one of whom is capable of reflexive self-ques­tioning and successful at internalizing the rules of rational discourse. […]

By Habermas’s own account, then, the oppositional bourgeois public sphere only partially achieved its stated goals of equality and participation. But he sees this as a limitation of actually existing society, not of the model of a universal public according to which pre-existing social inequalities are bracketed. Within the region of social discourse, he believes, […]

Defense of Modernity? Construed as a narrative of modernity, Strukturwandel reads as a tale of the rise of the public sphere (against great political obstacles posed by censor­ship and other forms of political despotism practiced by the absolutist state); its triumph (in the vibrant institutions of a free press, clubs, philosophical societies, and the cultural […]

Joan B. Landes After a quarter-century delay, Jurgen Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit appeared finally in English translation in the МГГ Press series “Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought,” edited by Thomas McCarthy. Habermas’s philosophical-historical critique of the concept and function of the public sphere in England, France, and Germany (with some parting glances at the […]

I am now in a position to present an alternative to Habermas’s interpretation of the dualistic logic of contemporary feminist movements. I have argued that the primary targets of the new social movements are the institutions of civil society. These movements create new associations and new publics, try to render existing institutions more egalitarian, enrich […]

While I believe that all contemporary social movements are amenable to analysis in these terms, I am going to focus on the feminist movement to make my point. Several interesting discussions of the relevance of Habermas’s dualistic social theory to the contemporary women’s movement have already appeared.14 In the most comprehensive article on the subject […]