Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy

At its heart, the article presents a thoughtful exercise in stasis theory, carefully dissecting Habermas’s conception of the public sphere in an attempt to make it simultaneously broader and more accurate. Specifically, Fraser shares what she calls “revisionist historiographies” that problematize Habermas’s account of the historical development and transformation of the public sphere. These historiographies suggest that problems such as gender and class exclusion were always built in to the bourgeois public sphere, thereby undermining its utopian potential right from the start.

Publisher: Duke University Press