Hildebrand is pleased that Nolte denies the singularity of the Nazi atrocities ” Hans Mommsen defended Habermas against Hildebrand by writing :“ Hildebrand ’ s partisan shots can be easily deflected ; that Habermas is accused of a “ loss of reality and Manichaeanism ”, and that his honesty is denied is witness to the self-consciousness of a self-nominated historian elite, which has set itself the task of tracing the outlines of the seeming badly needed image of history ” Writing of Hildebrand's support for Nolte, Mommsen declared that: “ Hildebrand ’ s polemic clearly suggests that he barely considered the consequences of making Nolte ’ s constructs the centrepiece of a modern German conservatism that is very anxious to relativize the National Socialist experience and to find the way back to a putative historically “ normal situation ” In another essay, Mommsen wrote that Hildebrand was gulity of hypocrisy because Hildebrand had until 1986 always claimed that generic fascism was invalid concept because of the " singularity " of the Holocaust Mommsen wrote that " Klaus Hildebrand explicitly took sides with Nolte's view when he gave his previously stubbornly claimed singularity of National Socialism ( failing to appreciate that was, as is well known, the standard criticism of the comparative fascism theory )" Martin Broszat observed that when Hildebrand organized a conference of right-wing German historians under the auspices of the Schleyer Foundation in West Berlin in September 1986, he did not invite Nolte, whom Broszat observed lived in Berlin.

Hildebrand defended Hillgruber by attacking Habermas over the “ tried and true higher-ups of the NSDAP ” line created by Habermas, which Hildebrand considered a highly dishonest method of attack Hildebrand argued that Hillgruber was merely trying to show the " tragedy " of the Eastern Front, and was not engaging in moral equivalence between the German and Soviet sides In another essay entitled " He Who Wants to Escape the Abyss " first published in Die Welt on November 22, 1986, Hildebrand accused Habermas of engaging in “ scandalous ” attacks on Hillgruber Hildebrand claimed that “ Habermas ’ s criticism is based in no small part on quotations that unambiguously falsify the matter ” Hildebrand wrote that in his view about Habermas that: “ A citation garbled like this is no way a forgivable exception.

The philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida were inspired to write an article for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which they claimed the birth of a ‘ European public sphere ’.

* Habermas The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

The work of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was central to this emerging social interpretation ; his seminal work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ( published under the title Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit in 1962 ) was translated into English in 1989.

Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida Sens Public International Web Journal.

German social theorist Jürgen Habermas contributed the idea of " Public Sphere " to the discussion of public opinion.

The Public Sphere, or bourgeois public, is according to Habermas, where " something approaching public opinion can be formed " ( 2004, p. 351 ).

* Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1989 ( Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Neuwied 1962 )

* The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society ( 1962 ), by Jürgen Habermas

Most contemporary conceptualizations of the public sphere are based on the ideas expressed in Jürgen Habermas ' book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, which is a translation of his Habilitationsschrift " Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft ".

Based on a conference on the occasion of the English translation, at which Habermas himself attended, Craig Calhoun ( 1992 ) edited Habermas and the Public Sphere – a thorough dissection of Habermas ’ bourgeois public sphere by scholars from various academic disciplines.

# Hegemonic dominance and exclusion: In Rethinking the Public Sphere, Nancy Fraser revisits Habermas ’ historical description of the public sphere, and confronts it with " recent revisionist historiography ".

They are: The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School ; Morality, Culture, and History ; Public Goods, Private Goods ; History and Illusion in Politics ; Glueck und Politik ; Outside Ethics, Philosophy and Real Politics, and Politics and the Imagination, which has just appeared from Princeton University Press.

Recent historiography of the salons has been dominated by Jürgen Habermas ' work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ( triggered largely by its translation into French, in 1978, and then English, in 1989 ), which argued that the salons were of great historical importance.

* Robert Holub ’ s Jurgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere ( Tehran: Nay Press, 1996 ).

), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass.

* Calhoun, C. 1992 ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere ( Cambridge, Mass.

* Eley, G., 1992, “ Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century ,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere ( Cambridge, Mass.

* Ryan, M. P., 1992, “ Gender and Public Access: Women ’ s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America ,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere ( Cambridge, Mass.

* Calhoun, C. 1992 ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere ( Cambridge, Mass.

* Eley, G., 1992, “ Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century ,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere ( Cambridge, Mass.

* Ryan, M. P., 1992, “ Gender and Public Access: Women ’ s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America ,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere ( Cambridge, Mass.

* Whether it is through universal pragmatic principles through which mutual understanding is achieved ( Habermas ).

# Lyotard himself has ironically spoken of " the great narrative of the end of great narratives ", a point taken up against him by such thinkers as Alex Callinicos and Jürgen Habermas, who argue that Lyotard's universal skepticism toward metanarratives is itself a contemporary metanarrative, and thus self-refuting.

A viable, more sophisticated consensus theory of truth, a mixture of Peircean theory with speech-act theory and social theory, is that presented and defended by Jürgen Habermas, which sets out the universal pragmatic conditions of ideal consensus and responds to many objections to earlier versions of a pragmatic, consensus theory of truth.

The term " universal pragmatics " includes two different traditions that Habermas and his collaborator, colleague, and friend Karl-Otto Apel have attempted to reconcile.

Habermas is emphatic that these claims are universal — no human communication oriented at achieving mutual understanding could possibly fail to raise all of these validity claims.

The fundamental orientation toward mutual understanding is at the heart of universal pragmatics, as Habermas explains:

It should also be said that the results of systematized reconstructions claim to explicate “ universal capabilities and not merely the particular competencies of individual groups ” ( Habermas, 1998a ).

“ When the pre-theoretical knowledge to be reconstructed expresses a universal capability, a general cognitive, linguistic, or interactive competence ( or sub-competence ), then what begins as an explication of meaning aims at the reconstruction of species competencies ” ( Habermas, 1998a ).

In particular, it is tied to the philosophy of Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, and their program of universal pragmatics, along with its related theories such as those on discourse ethics and rational reconstruction.

Thus, Habermas can compare and contrast the rationality of various forms of society with an eye to the deeper and more universal processes at work, which enables him to justify the critique of certain forms ( i. e., that Nazism is irrational and bad ) and lend support to the championing of others ( i. e., democracy is rational and good ).

In Habermas ' deliberative paradigm, law stabilizes society, but only through the universal voice of democracy.

Jürgen Habermas argues, in his On the Logic of the Social Sciences ( 1967 ), that " the positivist thesis of unified science, which assimilates all the sciences to a natural-scientific model, fails because of the intimate relationship between the social sciences and history, and the fact that they are based on a situation-specific understanding of meaning that can be explicated only hermeneutically ... access to a symbolically prestructured reality cannot be gained by observation alone.

Jürgen Habermas argues, in his On the Logic of the Social Sciences ( 1967 ), that " the positivist thesis of unified science, which assimilates all the sciences to a natural-scientific model, fails because of the intimate relationship between the social sciences and history, and the fact that they are based on a situation-specific understanding of meaning that can be explicated only hermeneutically ... access to a symbolically prestructured reality cannot be gained by observation alone.

Habermas argued that the public sphere was bourgeois, egalitarian, rational, and independent from the state, making it the ideal venue for intellectuals to critically examine contemporary politics and society, away from the interference of established authority.

Among these schools are the tradition of practical reason extending from Aristotle through Kant to Habermas, which asserts that they can, and the tradition of emotivism, which maintains that they are merely expressions of emotions and have no rational content.

As Habermas argues, in due course, this sphere of rational and universalistic politics, free from both the economy and the State, was destroyed by the same forces that initially established it.

She writes on public spheres as affect worlds, where affect and emotion lead the way for belonging ahead of the modes of rational or deliberative thought ( Habermas ) that attach strangers to each other and shape the terms of the state-civil society relation.

Habermas distinguishes explicitly between factual consensus, i. e. the beliefs that happen to hold in a particular community, and rational consensus, i. e. consensus attained in conditions approximating an " ideal speech situation ", in which inquirers or members of a community suspend or bracket prevailing beliefs and engage in rational discourse aimed at truth and governed by the force of the better argument, under conditions in which all participants in discourse have equal opportunities to engage in constative ( assertions of fact ), normative, and expressive speech acts, and in which discourse is not distorted by the intervention of power or the internalization of systematic blocks to communication.

Habermas would claim that this obligation is a rational one:

Recall that, for Habermas, rational reconstructions aim at offering the most acceptable account of what allows for the competencies already mastered by a wide range of subjects.

For Habermas, rational reconstruction is a philosophical and linguistic method that systematically translates intuitive knowledge of rules into a logical form.

The type of formal analysis called rational reconstruction is used by Jürgen Habermas to name the task that he sees as appropriate for philosophy.

Habermas sees rational reconstruction as a similar, but less grandiose, undertaking:

Habermas, whose work emphasizes the importance of rational discourse, democratic institutions and opposition to violence, has made important contributions to conflict theory and is often associated with the radical left.

Habermas speaks of the mutual recognition and exchanging of roles and perspectives that are demanded by the very structural condition of rational argumentation.