Reading Habermas

Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

AvMichael Hofmann

Häftad, Engelska, 2025

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Beskrivning

Reading Habermas: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere dissolves Habermas’s monolithic stylization to precisely access his seminal distinction between the purely political polis of antiquity, which excludes the private economy from the res publica, and the modern public sphere with its rational-critical discourse about commodity exchange and social labor in the political economy. Deconstructing the uniform mold of Structural Transformation’s narrative about a rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere in modernity also allows to identify and understand the ideology-critical methodologies of Habermas’s theory reconstruction of Kant’s ideal of the liberal public in the context of the French Revolution. Readers of this guide realize that Habermas’s interpretation of a sociological and political category with the norms of constitutional theory and intellectual history causes the “collapsing of norm and description” he acknowledged in 1989 and thus frequent misunderstandings about the historical validity of Structural Transformation’s ideal-type derived from Condorcet’s absolute rationalism and Kant’s “unofficial” philosophy of history. Specifically, the guide explains that Habermas’s key construct of a “morally pretentious rationality” of the bourgeois public sphere entirely depends on the claim about “natural laws” harmoniously regulating the economy. While neoliberalism still maintains this claim, Hegel “decisively destroyed” it already in 1821.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2025-02-05
Mått:158 x 237 x 18 mm
Vikt:503 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:306
Förlag:Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN:9781498590181

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Michael Hofmann is professor of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University.

Recensioner i media

This important and timely book brings out the centrality of the public sphere to Habermas's overall project and shows how and why he has recently returned to the topic with ever-growing urgency.

Innehållsförteckning

Preface: The Social Media Transformation of the Public Sphere and the Crisis of Neoliberal DemocracyIntroduction: The Unique Significance of Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere for the Theory and Practice of Democratic DeliberationChapter 1: Structural Transformation’s Normative Theses about a Dissolution of Domination in the Bourgeois Public Sphere Chapter 2: Habermas’s Dialectical Use of Ideology Critique to Counterfactually Assert a Moment of Historical Credibility for the Bourgeois Ideal of the Public SphereChapter 3: Structural Transformation’s Cold War Origins: Habermas’s Defense of Kantian Rationality, Human Rights, and the EnlightenmentChapter 4: Participatory Democracy versus Political Manipulation: The Role of Habermas’s “Celebrated Coffee Houses” (Todd Gitlin) in the Modern Public Sphere Chapter 5: Understanding Habermas’s Public Sphere Concept by Dissolving its Monolithic Stylization: Structural Transformation’s Interpretation of a Sociological and Political Category with the Norms of Constitutional Theory and Intellectual History Chapter 6: Structural Transformation’s Tacit Model Case of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: The French Revolution, Kant’s “Unofficial” Philosophy of History, Condorcet Absolute Rationalism, and Schiller’s Expressive Subjectivism Chapter 7: The Achilles’ Heel of Schiller’s Moral Stage and Structural Transformation’s Moral Politics: A Dependency of Smith’s Political Economy and Kant’s Constitutional Law on Mandeville’s Moral Paradox of Bourgeois SocietyChapter 8: Habermas’s Unexplained Methodology: A Complex “Ideology-Critical Procedure”Chapter 9: The Result of Structural Transformation’s Dialectical Use of Schmitt’s “Civil War Topos” and Koselleck’s “Process of Criticism:” A Tension between Developmental History and Ideology-Critical ProcedureConclusion: Renewing the Human Rights Perspective in the Political Public Sphere