Reading Habermas: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Readers of this guide realize that Habermas’s interpretation of a sociological and political category with the norms of constitutional theory and intellectual history causes the “collapsing of norm and description” he acknowledged in 1989 and thus frequent misunderstandings about the historical validity of Structural Transformation’s ideal-type derived from Condorcet’s absolute rationalism and Kant’s “unofficial” philosophy of history. Specifically, the guide explains that Habermas’s key construct of a “morally pretentious rationality” of the bourgeois public sphere entirely depends on the claim about “natural laws” harmoniously regulating the economy. While neoliberalism still maintains this claim, Hegel “decisively destroyed” it already in 1821.