Image by Ivy Sanders Schneider
When the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died in mid-March, the contentious debates about his ideas and influence that had stalked his career reappeared in posthumous assessments. Some recognized Habermas’s role in keeping Frankfurt School critical theory alive and defending the values of “democratically organized social life,” as Matt McManus wrote in Jacobin, against reactionaries. Others condemned Habermas’s own rightward drift, especially his “long history of being deliberately unquestioning of Israel,” per Thomas Meaney, writing in the New Left Review. (Habermas had reaffirmed this position five weeks after October 7, 2023, by which point Israel had already killed over ten thousand Palestinian people.) Still others sounded both notes at once. “Habermas first lit my path as a critical theorist,” Nancy Fraser wrote. “But over the years the light he cast flickered and waned — until, with his stance on Gaza, it seemed to go out.”
Of all Habermas’s intellectual contributions, perhaps the one that has drawn the most sustained argument is his theory of the public sphere: the arena where individuals “come together to form a public” and “compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion,” according to Habermas’s landmark 1962 book on the subject. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, he argued that such a phenomenon arose in the eighteenth century alongside the social institutions (salons, coffeehouses, widespread literacy, and print media) generated by the ascendant bourgeoisie. Through these “means for transmitting information and influencing those who receive it,” citizens of a state were able to express opinions about the activities of their government and collectively hash out what constituted the “general interest.”
According to Habermas, this earlier model of the public sphere was no longer functioning in modern capitalist societies. Some thinkers criticized him for failing to develop “a new, post-bourgeois” understanding of the concept, as Fraser put it in an influential 1990 article. For decades, theorists have argued about how, in the wake of Habermas’s ideas, a liberated society ought to organize public opinion.
For our Dispatches section, we asked nine writers to consider the state of the public sphere today. With our billionaire-captured media, algorithmically mediated and intensely surveilled social media feeds, censorious universities, and ever-diminishing cohort of independent publications, does a space for public, democratic consideration of ideas exist? Did it ever? Focusing on venues from Substack to social media to the streets, these Dispatches consider how views get formed, expressed, and contested under our present conditions, and what those processes have to do with political change.
