The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society@@@The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate

and theoretical concerns of his later work arose out of the concrete issues raised in this study. The Structural Transf ormation of the Public Sphere is a historical-sociological account of the emergence, transformation, and disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere. It combines materials and methods from sociology and economics, law and political science, and social and cultural history in an effort to grasp the preconditions, structures, functions, and inner tensions of this central domain of modern society. As a sphere between civil society and the state, in which critical public discussion of matters of general interest was institutionally guaranteed, the liberal public sphere took shape in the specific historical circumstances of a developing market economy. In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergen I bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler's power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people. Habermas traces the interdependent development of the literary and political self-consciousness of this new class, weaving together accounts of the rise of the novel and of literary