Christian J. Emden is Professor of German Intellectual History and Political Thought at Rice University. He is the author of Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (University of Illinois Press, 2005) and Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Introduction: Beyond Habermas? From the Bourgeois Public Sphere to Global Publics
Christian J. Emden and David Midgley

Part I: Public Opinion in the Democratic Polity

Chapter 1. Public Sphere and Political Experience
Lord (Richard) Wilson

Chapter 2. Public Opinion and Public Sphere
Gordon Graham

Chapter 3. The Tyranny of Majority Opinion in the Public Sphere
Gary Wihl

Part II: Knowledge and the Public Sphere

Chapter 4. Epistemic Publics: On the Trading Zones of Knowledge
Christian J. Emden

Chapter 5. The Public in Public Health
Anne Hardy

Chapter 6. Geeks and Recursive Publics: How the Internet and Free Software Make Things Public
Christopher Kelty

Part III: Democracy, Philosophy, and Global Publics

Chapter 7. Mediating the Public Sphere: Digitization, Pluralism, and Communicative Democracy
Georgina Born

Chapter 8. Critique of Public Reason: Normativity, Legitimation, and Meaning in the Public Sphere
Steven G. Crowell

Chapter 9. On the Global Multiplicity of Public Spheres: The Democratic Transformation of the Public Sphere?
James Tully

Contributors
Bibliography
Index

During the 1960s the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas introduced the notion of a "bourgeois public sphere" in order to describe the symbolic arena of political life and conversation that originated with the cultural institutions of the early eighteenth-century; since then the "public sphere" itself has become perhaps one of the most debated concepts at the very heart of modernity. For Habermas, the tension between the administrative power of the state, with its understanding of sovereignty, and the emerging institutions of the bourgeoisie-coffee houses, periodicals, encyclopedias, literary culture, etc.-was seen as being mediated by the public sphere, making it a symbolic site of public reasoning. This volume examines whether the "public sphere" remains a central explanatory model in the social sciences, political theory, and the humanities.