ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the background necessary to navigate this book, whether the reader is familiar with Habermas’s work or not. It opens with a brief history of Habermas’s legacy and influence and a discussion of the concepts he has introduced or employed such as the public sphere, deliberation, consensus, democratic legitimacy, and how they can help us understand many questions raised by contemporary democracy. Finally, it closes by motivating this book and inviting the reader to this more accessible foray into Habermas’s thought as a way to answer pressing questions in each chapter: the protection of basic rights, the value of dialogue and deliberation, “fake news,” tribalism, the role of experts, authoritarianism, new technologies, and racism.
