The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration

After a quarter-century delay, Jürgen Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit appeared finally in English translation in the MIT Press series “Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought,” edited by Thomas McCarthy. Habermas’s philosophical-historical critique of the concept and function of the public sphere in England, France, and Germany (with some parting glances at the United States) from the Renaissance to the twentieth-century served as a direct inspiration for the German New Left and opened up new lines of scholarship and political debate in Germany and Western Europe. In this chapter, the author approaches "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere" from the interrelated standpoints of critical theory, political thought, and intellectual history, with a special interest in questions of gender. The author reviews the model of the public sphere that Habermas derives from eighteenth-century philosophy and society, as well as his account of the rise of democratic social institutions, 'universalistic' cultural practices, and the structure of 'bourgeois representation' during the age of Enlightenment and Revolution.