The Opinion System: Impasses of the Public Sphere from Hobbes to Habermas (2008)
This book revises the concept of the public sphere by examining opinion as a foundational concept of modernity. Indispensable to ideas like “public opinion” and “freedom of opinion,” opinion—though sometimes held in dubious repute—here assumes a central position in modern philosophy, literature, sociology, and political theory, while being the object of extremely contradictory valuations.