The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Abstract

One of the first rank authors to define the centrality of public communication for politics and society was J€ urgen Habermas. His discussion with Niklas Luhmann in the 80s and 90s of the 20th century placed communication as a central category within the social sciences. Although there were authors who had been working on communication, mass media, and cultural industry (Lazarsfeld, Lasswell, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Morin, Moles, to name a few), the philosophical weight of the discussion imposed by Habermas was decisive in elevating communication from being a minor category within the social sciences. His earliest book on the subject is: Strukturwandel der € Offentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der b€ urgerlichen Gesellschaft. It was published in German in 1962, and in English in 1989, under the title The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Although Habermas began his academic career in 1956 as an assistant to Theodor Adorno at the University of Frankfurt, the book we are reviewing is Habermas’ habilitation thesis, defended in 1961 at the University of Marburg, under the supervision of Wolfgang Abendroth, a jurist and political scientist of great recognition at the time, whom Habermas explicitly acknowledges. In this study, Habermas sought to understand the structural transformation of the public sphere (an aspect considered in the Catalan edition’s translation) and the principle of publicity from a Hegelian-Marxist perspective, while also taking into account the liberal point of view introduced in the works of Kant, Stuart Mill, and Tocqueville. When delving into the concept of ‘bourgeois publicity’, one encounters a Habermas who is much more liberal than his social context might allow at that time. Especially considering his position within the group of members of the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research, as a research assistant to Theodor Adorno. Interestingly, contrary to what many may think, this first work shows a more evident Kantian influence rather than a Marxist one. Habermas defines the concepts of public opinion and the public sphere under the influence of Kantian ideas of rationality and publicity. Habermas has already begun working on his fundamental work, which many years later will become his theory of communicative action. Under the influence of Kantian and Hegelian-Marxist categories, Habermas cannot explain how to achieve a critical public sphere that remains beyond the reach of the systematic domination of the market and the bureaucratic-absolutist state.