Craig J. Calhoun

Donald Light

Suzanne Keller

Sociology

Culture and Action as Problems for Historical Sociology

What Social Theory Needs from History Now

Table of Contents Preface 1 Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere 1 2 Practical Discourse: On the Relation of Morality to Politics 51 3 Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jurgen Habermas 73 4 The Public Sphere: Models and Boundaries 99 5 Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy 109 6 Was There Ever a Public Sphere? If So, When? Reflections on the American Case 143 7 Political Theory and Historical Analysis 164 8 Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas 181 9 Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Spheres in Seventeenth-Century England 212 10 Habermas, History, and Critical Theory 236 11 Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth-Century America 259 12 Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century 289 13 The Pragmatic Ends of Popular Politics 340 14 The Media and the Public Sphere 359 15 The Mass Public and the Mass Subject 377 16 Textuality, Mediation, and Public Discourse 402 17 Further Reflections on the Public Sphere 421 18 Concluding Remarks 462 Contributors 481 Index 485.

Habermas and the Public Sphere

Michael Warner

Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect. In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a prominent and varied group of scholars chart the conversations in which A Secular Age intervenes and address wider questions of secularism and secularity. The distinguished contributors include Robert Bellah, José Casanova, Nilüfer Göle, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age succeeds in conveying to readers the complexity of secularism while serving as an invaluable guide to a landmark book.

Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age

John McGowan

Is politics really nothing more than power relations, competing interests and claims for recognition, conflicting assertions of "simple" truths? No thinker has argued more passionately against this narrow view than Hannah Arendt, and no one has more to say to those who bring questions of meaning, identity, value, and transcendence to our impoverished public life. This volume brings leading figures in philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary theory into a dialogue about Arendt's work and its significance for today's fractious identity politics, public ethics, and civic life. For each essay -- on the fate of politics in a postmodern, post-Marxist era; on the connection of nonfoundationalist ethics and epistemology to democracy; on the conditions conducive to a vital public sphere; on the recalcitrant problems of violence and evil -- the volume includes extended responses, and a concluding essay by Martin Jay responding to all the others. Ranging from feminism to aesthetics to the discourse of democracy, the essays explore how an encounter with Arendt reconfigures, disrupts, and revitalizes what passes for public debate in our day. Together they forcefully demonstrate the power of Arendt's work as a splendid provocation and a living resource.

Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics

Craig J. Calhoun

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