Reading Habermas: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Reading Habermas: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere dissolves Habermass 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 Transformations narrative about a rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere in modernity also allows to identify and understand the ideology-critical methodologies of Habermass theory reconstruction of Kants ideal of the liberal public in the context of the French Revolution.

Readers of this guide realize that Habermass 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 Transformations ideal-type derived from Condorcets absolute rationalism and Kants unofficial philosophy of history. Specifically, the guide explains that Habermass 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.