The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Habermas's first major book, a historical and sociological study written as his habilitation thesis. It traces the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in eighteenth-century Britain, France and Germany: a space between private life and the state in which private persons gathered as a public in coffee houses, salons and reading societies, and through newspapers and journals, to debate matters of common concern. In principle this debate admitted anyone and judged arguments by their reasons rather than the rank of the speaker, and it came to check state power through public opinion. The second half describes how the public sphere decayed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the state and the market merged, mass media, advertising and public relations turned a culture-debating public into a culture-consuming one, which Habermas calls a refeudalisation of the public sphere. Critics, such as Nancy Fraser, argue that he idealised a sphere that excluded women and workers, a point Habermas later partly accepted.

It gave the world the concept of the public sphere, and remains the basic text for anyone asking how media, money and power affect democratic debate.