Only about a quarter of the way through this so far but am enjoying it. From the article: "Some sixty years ago, Habermas did pioneering work in this field in

Only about a quarter of the way through this so far but am enjoying it. From the article: "Some sixty years ago, Habermas did pioneering work in this field in The Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). On his—not undisputed—account, the early-bourgeois public sphere could be seen in London’s coffee houses, important locales for the development of emancipatory discourse. Tamed by capitalists, its imperatives were then tied to those of the culture industry and its advertising complex. As a result, pre-modern, private power structures and hierarchies reemerged in what he termed the ‘re-feudalization of the public sphere’, indicating the zigzag dynamics of modernity. While Habermas eventually distanced himself from the concept of ‘refeudalization’, preferring ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ instead, some in Germany have recently recovered it." The acceptance of individual consciousness represented by the emergence of the bourgeois class as it manifested in the 19th and 20th centuries was quickly coopted, in particular, after WWII by the Cold War dialectic. In order to prove you weren't a Communist, you had to be the most Capitalistic, which made it very easy to hide the difference between the Main Street capitalism of small and medium businesses and multinational, monopolistic, crony-Capitalism. The results of that one confusion are readily apparent in the political dialogue of our times.