ABSTRACT
Habermas’s social theory is often interpreted as moving over the years from a Hegelian-Marxist orientation to a sort of Kantian orientation. Though not without truth, this view underestimates the unity in his intellectual project. Kant occupies a central place in Structural Transformation as the theorist who offered the fullest articulation of the ideal of the bourgeois public sphere. The importance of the public sphere lies in its potential as a mode of societal integration. Public discourse is a possible mode of coordination of human life, as are state power and market economies. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century notion developed alongside the rise and transformation of the modern state, as well as on the basis of capitalist economic activity. The public sphere, like civil society in general, could only be conceptualized in this full sense once the state was constituted as an impersonal locus of authority.
