Abstract :
Jurgen Habermas's book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has
attracted considerable attention in recent discussions regarding the relationship between the
public and private spheres. The book was first published in the 1960s atmosphere of political
radicalism. In the foreword to the new edition published in 1989,1 Habermas considers his work
a natural outcome of recent tendencies toward democratization. According to Habermas, the
structural transformation of the public sphere is a development from the bourgeois public, which
takes the "homogenous" and "abstract" individual as the focal point, to a "differentiated" public
created by civil society in social life.
