《公共领域的结构转型》的目的是分析“资产阶级公共领域（burgerlicheOffentlichkeit）。研究对象特别难以把握，这就对研究方法提出了挑战。首先，由于研究对象比较复杂，用单一某个学科的方法是难以奏效的。因此，我们必须把公共领域范畴放到传统“政治学”曾经关注的那样一个比较开阔的视野里加以探讨；①研究对象就其自身而言打破了社会科学各学科之间的界限。社会学和经济学、宪法学和政治学以及社会思想史等各学科一体化所带来的难题是很清楚的：从目前社会科学学科分化和专业化水平来看，没有谁能“掌握”多门学科，更不用说“掌握”所有学科了。

现在才来翻译出版此书，无疑是有点晚了，因为哈贝马斯的原著是1985年出版的，如今20年过去了，当时看起来激烈的言辞，现在已经多少失去锋芒，尤其是考虑到哈贝马斯晚年已经与他的批判对象之一德里达达成了某种程度上的和解。 当然，即便如此，它依然是德国知识界对法国后结构主义理性批判所作的最有影响的回应。而哈贝马斯的地位也决定了，当我们寻找与法国后结构主义相异的声音时，自然就会想到这本书。《现代性的哲学话语》一方面梳理了德国自己的哲学遗产———黑格尔、尼采、海德格尔、霍克海默与阿多诺，另一方面也批判了巴塔耶、福科、德里达和卡斯托里亚迪斯所代表的法国思潮。但我们的疑问或许是：哈贝马斯真的看懂了他的法国同行们在干什么吗？他将“巴塔耶精神子嗣”的头衔硬派给福科，难道是恰当的吗？

This is Jurgen Habermas's most concrete historical-sociological book and one of the key contributions to political thought in the postwar period. It will be a revelation to those who have known Habermas only through his theoretical writing to find his later interests in problems of legitimation and communication foreshadowed in this lucid study of the origins, nature, and evolution of public opinion in democratic societies.

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is a tour de force that has theimmediacy and accessibility of the lecture form and the excitement of an encounteracross, national cultural boundaries. Habermas takes up the challenge posed by theradical critique of reason in contemporary French poststructuralism.Tracing theodyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity, Habermas's strategy is toreturn to those historical "crossroads" at which Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche and Heidegger made the fateful decisions that led to this outcome. His aimis to identify and clearly mark out a road indicated but not taken: the determinatenegation of subject-centered reason through the concept of communicativerationality. As The Theory of Communicative Action served to place this conceptwithin the history of social theory, these lectures locate it within the history ofphilosophy. Habermas examines the odyssey of the philosophical discourse ofmodernity from Hegel through the present and tests his own ideas about theappropriate form of a postmodern discourse through dialogs with a broad range ofpast and present critics and theorists.The lectures on Georges Bataille, MichelFoucault, Jacques Derrida, and Cornelius Castoriadis are of particular note sincethey are the first fruits of the recent cross-fertilization between French andGerman thought. Habermas's dialogue with Foucault - begun in person as the first ofthese lectures were delivered in Paris in 1983 culminates here in two appreciativeyet intensely argumentative lectures. His discussion of the literary-theoreticalreception of Derrida in America - launched at Cornell in 1984 - issues here in along excursus on the genre distinction between philosophy and literature. Thelectures were reworked for the final time in seminars at Boston College and firstpublished in Germany in the fall of 1985.J?rgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophyat the University of Frankfurt. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is includedin the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by ThomasMcCarthy.