The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Yeah.

"The Transformation of the Public Sphere," right?

Public Sphere, that's right.

Or "Modern Transformation," right, of the public sphere, and he said, "You know, all these ideas about, uh, revolutions, about social changes, about revolts, were happening, uh, w-with mostly men, right, meeting in, uh, public spaces, uh, in the coffee house where they could, um, uh, have the free exchange of idea.

Enter Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher from the Frankfurt School.

Born in 1929, shaped by the ruins of fascism, and committed to the idea that democracy requires a public that can reason together, his 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, coined a term for what was happening to coffee's horizontal room, re-feudalization.

Because private enterprises evoke in their customers the idea that in their consumption decisions they act in their capacity as citizens, Habermas wrote, the state has to address its citizens like consumers.

Picture the coffeehouse, a group of people from all walks of life who debate and talk to each other and interact and share ideas.

Then apprenticing to a shaman in the Amazon, she encountered a plant the tradition calls ayahuasca.

This plant teacher spoke to her in a voice loud and clear, but still inside herself, and it gave her the right experiment.

This is from her book Thus Spoke the Plant, published in twenty eighteen.

"The experiment is pretty simple.

It didn't feel like something he'd have said at the podium.

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1962, his seminal work originally published in German, made an argument about something concrete, 18th century coffeehouses, salons and journals, where private citizens began treating the affairs of Stiet as something they had standing to publicly discuss and judge, rather than simply obey.

That habit, Habermas argued, was where modern democratic legitimacy first took root.

The book also identified tendencies that would weaken it, too.

And so that sense, right, he's willing to come back and is pulled back into this precisely by Adorno, who had none of those associations, who had fought against Nazism, at least intellectually, and had decided to come back.

So Habermas then, I think he really rises to prominence after the publication of his first book, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which is still, I think, his most influential and best-selling book.

And that book really for...

For I think a whole generation of students, or for a whole generation, yeah, for a whole generation became almost like a guiding light in the sense that sort of in the second half of the book, which is the part that actually I think At least in the English-speaking world, we tend to read less.

So he really rises to prominence then, and I think maintains that prominence for the rest of his career.

Yeah, good.

Structural transformation of the public sphere in 1962.

I have that here.