Introduction: The Genealogy of the Public Sphere

Abstract

The notion of the public sphere has surged to worldwide significance during the 1990s, in the wake of the English translation of Habermas’s German Habilitation thesis The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989 [1962]). This popularization of the concept of the public sphere on a global level and its understanding as the communicative engine of democratic politics (Calhoun 1992) coincided with the opening up of horizons of democratization in eastern Europe as well as—as it was hoped in the aftermath of the first Gulf War—in North Africa and the Middle East. Not surprisingly, the emerging discussion on the public sphere was tied to the revival of the companion notion of civil society (cf. Hall 1995). During the 1990s the public sphere was increasingly envisioned as the discursive infrastructure and the normative lubricant to a well-functioning civil society (cf. Cohen and Arato 1992; Fraser 1992, 1997). At the same time, parallel discussions interrogated anew the place of religious movements and discourses not only in the social processes of modernization but also in the public sphere (Asad 1993; Casanova 1994).