Armenian translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Jürgen Habermas
The second book of the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Series “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society”(Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft) by Jürgen Habermas was published in Armenian translation.
The book can be found at the bookstores in Yerevan.
Translator – Hrachya Stepanyan
Publisher – Ankyunaqar
Read below biographies of the translator, as well as short information about the author and the book.
Hrachya Stepanyan
Hrachya Stepanyan is a translator and lecturer. He graduated from the Faculty of Russian and Foreign Languages of the Yerevan State Pedagogical University after V.Brusov, studied at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Afterwards, he took the postgraduate course of the Institute of Philosophy and Law of the Academy of Sciences of Armenia, while also lecturing. Hrachya worked as a teacher and lecturer of German language at a number of schools and universities. He is the author of a number of articles. His translations includes such works as “The story of Father Matthias” by Hermann Hesse, “The Flower of Fragments” by Novalis, “The Philosophy of Freedom” by Rudolf Steiner (with Ara Gurzadyan), “The Task of the Translator”and “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin, “ Modernity as an Incomplete Project” by Jürgen Habermas, as well as Christian Oriental Carpet by Volkmar Gantzhorn.
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas, (born June 18, 1929, Düsseldorf, Germany), the most important German philosopher of the second half of the 20th century. A highly influential social and political thinker, Habermas was generally identified with the critical social theory developed from the 1920s by the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, also known as the Frankfurt School. Habermas was prominent both outside academic circles for his influential contributions to social criticism and public debate and within them for his voluminous treatises and essays in which he fashioned a comprehensive vision of modern society and the possibility of freedom within it. His work powerfully influenced many disciplines, including communication studies, cultural studies, moral theory, law, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, political science, religious studies, theology, sociology and democratic theory.
Source https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jurgen-Habermas
About the book
“The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society” was published in 1962 and is considered an important contribution to modern understanding of democracy and is notable for “transforming media studies into a hard-headed discipline”. The book shows how modern European salons, cafés and literary groups contain the resources for democratizing the public sphere. In his 1965 inaugural lecture at Frankfurt University, “Erkenntnis und Interesse” (1965; “Knowledge and Human Interests”), and in the book of the same title published three years later, Habermas set forth the foundations of a normative version of critical social theory, the Marxist social theory developed by Horkheimer, Adorno, and other members of the Frankfurt Institute from the 1920s onward.
He did this on the basis of a general theory of human interests, according to which different areas of human knowledge and inquiry—e.g., the physical, biological, and social sciences—are expressions of distinct, but equally basic, human interests. These basic interests are in turn unified by reason’s overarching pursuit of its own freedom, which is expressed in scholarly disciplines that are critical of unfree modes of social life. In his rethinking of the foundations of early critical social theory, Habermas sought to unite the philosophical traditions of Karl Marx and German idealism with the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the pragmatism of the American logician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jurgen-Habermas/Philosophy-and-social-theory