ABSTRACT
The combination of critical and monumental historical sociology of the public sphere that Habermas’s work represents is based on a presumed radical break between the medieval, theatrical and modern, rational types. In contrast to this approach that will be shown as factually untenable, the genealogy of the modern public arena offered in this book focuses on the fundamentally theatrical features of the modern public arena. Central to such an undertaking is to identify the exact manner in which, after a gap lasting for well over a millennium, the theatre was reborn in Europe. One might think that this should be a relatively simple matter; certainly less complicated and controversial than the birth of tragedy was in classical antiquity. Unfortunately and strikingly, this is not the case.
