Bernd Fischer is Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. His specializations include literature and thought from the eighteeenth to the twenty-first century, nationalism, transculturality, and aesthetics of recognition. May Mergenthaler is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. Her specialities are Romanticism, contemporary poetry, and theories of literature and poetic language.

• Contents: Dorothea von Mücke: Public Space and the Public: Johann Gottfried Herder’s Approach to Real and Imagined Communities – Susanne Lüdemann: Fraternity as a Social Metaphor – Jade Larissa Schiff: Repressive Democracy: Pathological and Ontological Distortion in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action – Edgar Landgraf: Political Autonomy and the Public: From Lippmann to Luhmann – Christian J. Emden: Constitutionalizing the Public Sphere? Habermas and the Modern State – Juliane Rebentisch: Mass - People - Multitude: A Reflection on the Source of Democratic Legitimacy – Christoph Menke: A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption – Kam Shapiro: Biopolitical Reflections: Cognitive, Aesthetic and Reflexive Mappings of Global Economies – Fernando Unzueta: National Novels and the Emergence of the Public Sphere in Latin America – Ignacio Corona: Gendering the Public Sphere: Literary Journalism by Women in Mexico and Brazil – Oded Nir: Totalizing Imaginaries: Collectivity and Utopia in Modern Hebrew Fiction from Altneuland to Neuland.