The Public Sphere and Deliberative Democracy

Habermas's first major book, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), submitted as his habilitation thesis in 1961 and published in 1962, traces the historical emergence in eighteenth-century Western Europe of what he calls the "bourgeois public sphere" (bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit): a discursive space, institutionally embodied in coffeehouses in England, salons in France, and reading and table societies in Germany, together with an expanding periodical press, in which private individuals could gather as a public to engage in critical-rational debate about matters of common concern, formally bracketing status distinctions of birth and rank in favor of the shared, in-principle equal standing of participants as reasoning citizens. Habermas locates the material preconditions of this new public sphere in the expansion of capitalist commodity exchange and the rise of a literate, propertied bourgeoisie possessed of both the economic independence and the cultural resources — literacy, leisure, periodical subscriptions — needed to sustain sustained critical discourse independent of state and church authority.