Habermas’s Public Sphere

Michael Hofmann teaches multimedia studies at Florida Atlantic University.

• Preface 1Introduction: Reassessing Habermas’s Public Sphere Concept1.1. After Fifty Years: The Public Sphere, Reason, and Democracy 1.2. The Concept’s Lasting Contribution to Critical Theory and Practice 1.3. The Concept’s Key Challenge 1.4. The Concept’s Contradictory Sources 1.5. The Concept’s Interdisciplinary Structure 2Public Reason and Popular Sovereignty: Habermas’s Stylization of the French Revolution2.1. Revolutionary Dialectic: Synthesizing Rousseau and the Physiocrats? 2.2. Revolutionary Philosophy: Uncoerced or Predetermined Opinion Publique? 2.3. Revolutionary Mythology: Conservative / Liberal Uses of de Tocqueville’s Ambivalence as an “Aristocratic Liberal” in The Old Regime and the Revolution 2.4. Revolutionary Romantic: From Moral Theater to Aesthetic Utopia (Schiller) 3The Third Estate, the Two Nations, and the Sovereignty of Reason: Kant’s Public & Say’s Law After the French Revolution 3.1. Establishing the Third Estate as the Nation in England in 1832: Transcending History through a Unique Critique of Ideology?3.2. The English Century: One Nation under Say’s Law and a Vast Secular Boom? 3.3. Early Challenges to the Bourgeois Public: Hegel on Class Antagonism, Ricardo on Victims of Machinery, and Carlyle on the Callous “Cash Nexus” 3.4. Property and Reform in Parliament: The Dialectics of Corn & Factory Legislation 4From the Dutch Republic to the Fiscal-Military State of the Modern Whigs: Bourgeois Morality and Moral Censure of the Political Public Sphere Before the French Revolution4. 1. Crisis and Critique: The Origins of Political Economy in the Political Public Sphere of the Seventeenth Century 4.2. The Fiscal-Military State of the Modern Whigs and its Critique in the Political Public Sphere 4.3. The Moral Public Sphere and the Rise of Civilized Barbarism 4.4. Moral Censure of the Political Public Sphere in the Eighteenth Century Conclusion Selected Bibliography Index About the Author

Hofmann’s book is a historically minded, revisionist, critical companion to Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Assuming potential readers already know and teach the book, Hofmann spends the bulk of his energies on the historical record, e.g., the debates in English Parliament or trade in the 17th-century Dutch Republic. Does Habermas’s “model case” of 19th-century England fit the bill for a genuine public sphere? (No.) Hofmann also engages with an array of Habermas’s influences, among them Schiller, Say, Rousseau, Marx, and Kant. Hofmann corrects and sometimes scolds Habermas for errors of omission and commission, for misunderstanding or ignoring important historical or intellectual sources, and for inconsistently disowning and yet appropriating what Hofmann calls the “stylized” account of the rise of intimacy, the Enlightenment, and the modern state in Reinhart Koselleck via his teacher, Carl Schmitt. Though in a later essay, Habermas acknowledges the early pluralization of public spheres, Hofmann usefully goes some way toward showing just what such an account might look like. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students through faculty.