ABSTRACT
In 1962, a relatively unknown scholar published a contribution to democratic theory destined to generate something of a sensation in the still rather staid intellectual universe of postwar Germany. Appearing a mere thirteen years after the reestablishment of liberal democracy in Germany, the 33year-old Jürgen Habermas’ landmark Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere focused on precisely those features of contemporary democracy that the young author’s more conservative scholarly peers tended to downplay.1 Infl uenced signifi cantly by the neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School, Habermas argued that contemporary democracy exhibited a number of troublesome tendencies: A catastrophic fusion of state and society, unforeseen by classical liberal theory, had resulted in the disintegration of the very core of liberal democratic politics, a public sphere based on the ideal of free and uncoerced discussion. In Habermas’ scathing account, mounting evidence suggested that liberal democracy was evolving towards a new and unprecedented form of authoritarianism, a mass-based plebiscitarianism in which privileged organized interests linked hands (by means of what Habermas polemically described as “neo-feudal” institutions fusing public and private power) in order to perpetuate social and political domination. Relying on the most advanced empirical American social science, Habermas argued that an ossifi ed and infl exible political system, in which decisions increasingly were “legitimated” by means of subtle forms of mass persuasion, functioned alongside a profi t-hungry mass media that trivialized public life in order to thwart democratic aspirations. The autonomous “bourgeois public sphere” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had been jettisoned for the “manipulated public sphere” of organized capitalism.
