Historia y crítica de la opinión públicaUna aproximación

Abstract

This paper approaches History and criticism of public opinion, a nuclear piece of the habermasian work that, although published in Germany (Darmstadt, 1962) more than thirty years ago, still arouses great interest and discussion around what, since then, have been considered to be the most valuable contributions of the Frankfurt's School to the scientific study of public opinion. A proof of this interest was the conference that took place in Massachusetts and its immediate edition by Craig Calhoun under the title Habermas and the Public Sphere in 1992. The vision here exposed emphasizes the communicative angle of History and criticism of public opinion, not sufficiently mentioned in political history, as a vantage point from which we can revise the origin and recient evolution (structural transformation, in Habermas' words) of the democratic form of the state in western societies since the end of the nineteenth century.