Jürgen Habermas’s introduction of the term “public sphere” today provides a fundamental concept for assessing everything from intellectual debate and “public access” criticism, to the function of race, gender and sexual difference in contemporary civil society. As new demands have been made on the concept, so people have refined and extended them, positing the idea of a plurality of “counter-public spheres” and continually addressing the philosophical concept of the public sphere itself. This book takes off from these debates to pose fundamental questions about the function and continued relevance of the public sphere in a range of essays from a distinguished group of writers. Contributors: Stanley Aronowitz, Etienne Balibar, Crystal Bartolovich, Jamie Owen Daniel, Mike Davis, Henry A. Giroux, Michael Hardt, Mike Hill, David McInerney, Warren Montag, You-Me Park, Ted Stolze, Raúl H. Villa, Gayle Wald. Mike Hill is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Albany, New York, the editor of Whiteness: A Critical Reader and author of Whiteness: Identity, Knowledge, Change (forthcoming). Warren Montag is Associate Professor of English at Occidental College, Los Angeles, and the author of Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries and The Unthinkable Swift.	Publication September 2000 288 pages Cloth 1 85984 777 3 US$30 / £20 / CAN$42