Habermas is a hugely influential thinker, yet his writing can be dense and inaccessible. This critical introduction offers undergraduates a clear way into Habermas’s concept of the ‘public sphere’ and its relevance to contemporary society. Luke Goode’s lively account also sheds new light on the ‘public sphere’ debate that will interest readers already familiar with Habermas’s work. For Habermas, the 'public sphere' was a social forum that allowed people to debate -- whether it was the town hall or the coffee house, maintaining a space for public debate was an essential part of democracy. Habermas’s controversial work examines the erosion of these spaces within consumer society and calls for new thinking about democracy today. Drawing on Habermas’s early and more recent writings, this book examines the ‘public sphere’ in its full complexity, outlining its relevance to today’s media and culture. It will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. 'This is an excellent, useful book' -- Don Mitchell, Department of Geography, Syracuse University 'For readers who are seeking a clear and critical overview of the Habermasian public sphere, this is a valuable and timely book' -- David Sullivan, Political Studies Review 'This is an excellent, useful book' 'For readers who are seeking a clear and critical overview of the Habermasian public sphere, this is a valuable and timely book' Luke Goode is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland. Jürgen Habermas Democracy and the Public Sphere By Luke Goode Pluto Press Copyright © 2005 Luke Goode All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-7453-2088-5 Contents Acknowledgements, vi, Introduction, 1, 1 Excavations: The History of a Concept, 3, 2 Discursive Testing: The Public Sphere and its Critics, 29, 3 Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere since Structural Transformation, 56, 4 Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café, 89, 5 Unfinished Projects: Reflexive Democracy, 120, Notes, 142, Bibliography, 157, Index, 163, CHAPTER 1 Excavations: The History of a Concept In this book I hope to make the case for seeing The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere as a work that still resonates with some of the urgent questions facing the 'democratic project' today. In privileging this work and the category 'public sphere', I'm suggesting that if we want to enrich our grasp of the problems facing the democratic imagination, we would do well to read Habermas's later works through the lens of Structural Transformation and its key concerns. Structural Transformation invites us to reflect closely on the nature of public deliberation and the democratic process at a time when the rhetoric of 'citizenship' has become such common currency – especially, though not exclusively, in Western democracies – against a backdrop of striking developments: increasingly sophisticated political marketing techniques; changes in media culture that implicate the very institutions which aspire to connect citizens with the powerful; an ascendant politics of ethnicity and ethno-nationalism which can sometimes displace and sometimes appropriate the discourse of citizenship; and patterns of political behaviour, such as staggeringly low voting rates, which highlight widespread disaffection with the official institutions of democracy, especially in the younger generations. A historicist reading of Structural Transformation could read off the present and future in terms of an unfolding historical dialectic: either a negative dialectic in which the potential for a truly democratic and rational public sphere has been irreversibly squandered, or a positive dialectic that gestures towards a radical–democratic endgame in which the rationality of the undemocratic bourgeois public sphere and the democracy of the irrational mass society might finally be reconciled. But what I propose instead is to read Structural Transformation as the sort of encounter between theory and history that offers a useful counterweight to the drift into abstraction characteristic of more recent critical theory. It is this kind of historically grounded attention to the evolution of discourses, practices and institutions that, I suggest, does more to energise and stimulate our thinking about democracy than either a philosophically abstract preoccupation with the relationship between law, morality and reason, or an institutionally abstract preoccupation with constitutional norms and human rights, both of which have been at the centre of the Habermasian project in recent years. The point of Structural Transformation is not to provide a history to feed our nostalgic aspirations, and Habermas himself has never idealised the eighteenth-century public sphere to quite the degree that his critics have charged. Instead, it offers us a frame of reference which ma