ABSTRACT
The category of the "public sphere" is conceived by Habermas "as a category that is typical of an epoch", for only a brief period: from the late-seventeenth to the eighteenth century. This very transitoriness dictates the structure of Habermas's study. The first part traces the development of mercantile and early industrial capitalism and thus of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere itself. The final part charts the decline of the public sphere in the face of the ascendancy of the interventionist social welfare state. These two parts pivot about a critical account of the development of the idea of publicity and public debate in Western political philosophy. The methodology of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere thus divorces itself from the structural functionalism that is characteristic of positivistic sociology. Student und Politik is a report and analysis of an empirical study of the attitudes to politics of 171 students attending the University of Frankfurt.
