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Notes
With the exception of two new chapters, the book was identical with Habermas’s Habilitationsschrift.
The German bürgerlich can mean both bourgeois and civil, a problem that was somehow one-sidedly resolved in the English translation of the book (i.e. ‘bourgeois’ instead of ‘civil’). For some of the problems of translation of such key terms, see Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995) Translating the Enlightenment.
Ten years later, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge used this Habermasian distinction to introduce a further sphere somewhat neglected in Habermas’ study—the proletarian public sphere (Negt and Kluge 1973). Since then, many other attempts have been made to historicise and conceptualise this complex phenomenon. See, for example Van Horn Melton (2001) The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe and the two essay collections Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (eds.) (1997) Public and Private in Thought and Practice and Craig Calhoun (ed.) (1993) Habermas and the Public Sphere. For a more ambitious theoretical attempt, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (2006). A pioneer in all matters of the modern public was of course John Dewey (1927) The public and its problems.
The jury is still out when and where exactly the beginning of the theory of communicative action lies. Thinking about public reasoning is not necessarily the only (early) root and (later) branch here. An argument could well be made that the earliest ideas of what would later become one of the founding elements of Habermas’s grand theory were first expressed in a spin on Hegel’s idea about the differentiation between labour and interaction (Habermas 1967 [reprinted in Habermas 1988]).
Interesting here is that the idea of a European public sphere does not appear—a point that Habermas had elaborated upon almost to the point of obsession in the 1990s and 2000s. The silence in his latest book could be simply an omission. However, it also might be seen as both a realisation and resignation: realisation referring to the international social media networks and relations that transcend borders and continents; resignation because such private networks might even be less inclined or interested in public reasoning and contributing to the common weal.
References
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Hess, A. Editor’s Introduction to Rethinking the Public Sphere: Theoretical Critique and New Applications. Soc 60, 839–841 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-023-00930-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-023-00930-0