The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration

Abstract After a quarter-century delay, Jurgen Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit appeared finally in English translation in the MIT Press series ‘Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought’, edited by Thomas McCarthy. Habermas’s philosophical-historical critique of the concept and function of the public sphere in England, France, and Germany (with some parting glances at the United States) from the Renaissance to the twentieth century served as a direct inspiration for the German New Left and opened up new lines of scholarship and political debate in Germany and Western Europe.