Reading Habermas: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere dissolves Habermas’s monolithic stylization to access his seminal distinction between the purely political polis of antiquity, and the modern public sphere. Deconstructing the mold of Structural Transformation’s narrative about a rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere in modernity allows us to understand the ideology-critical methodologies of Habermas’s theory reconstruction of Kant’s ideal of the liberal public in the context of the French Revolution. Readers 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.
