For sixty years Jurgen Habermas has been a towering presence in sociology and philosophy, always coming from the left in some version or other. Now, into his nineties, we have two new books via Polity: Also a History of Philosophy, Volume One – four hundred pages, forthcoming in review here by John Rundell; and this slim volume, here under review, one hundred pages – which revisits his arguably most influential text, that on the public sphere from 1962 in German (1989 in English). Habermas was always both things – scholar and public actor. This is a rare achievement.

The public sphere book was a belated arrival in English, coming together with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the generalized enthusiasm for civil society, and the then open question of what might possibly come after totalitarianism. It was brilliantly echoed by the monumental volume then edited by Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 1992, which also became a standard reference. Public sphere became a keyword, as well as a watchword.

As Habermas notes in introducing this new volume, the 1962 book was also his biggest seller. In his self analysis, this can be put down to the combination of two factors. That book contained, by his own account, a social and conceptual history of the ‘public sphere’ that attracted a great deal of criticism, but it also provided new stimuli for more wide ranging historical research. Together with the emergence of what were then called new social movements, the enthusiasm for the public sphere offered sources of hope for the left after 1989.

The via media of the Enlightenment was print. Now, sixty years after that first book, the obvious dynamo is digital. Print and democracy came together. Print capitalism, but also print/democracy. And now? The new media is revolutionary, not least because, as Habermas observes, readers now become authors. Barthes was wrong. The Author is not dead. Each is now their own author. Now everybody talks, transmits, and nobody listens. Democracy risks cacophany, and chaos, as in the invasion of the Capitol, just as at the same time it facilitates tribalism in the micropublics of interest groups that now spontaneously reproduce via social media. There is too much white noise, in every sense, and democratic fatigue. Public discussion turns into anger and abuse, or else into enforced silence. (Those trapped within the English language might consult the recent Granta on Deutschland for some glimpses of the unsayable there.)

Habermas’ reputation is for engagement, clarity and analytical precision. This little book is no exception, as it takes on these even more revolutionary transformations of the digital revolution. What does the algorithm do for the project of deliberative democracy?

Democracy offers the in-principle possibility of progress. Traditional modern media acts as a filter for information, views and opinions. There, at least in principle, democracy may be imagined as a learning process.

But now, moreso than in the Golden Years of Postwar capitalism, economies are divided, and so are polities and cultures, into winners and losers who see themselves as such – entitled, or else resentful. The digitalization of public communication is blurring the boundary between public and private life. Opponents become enemies, and the grounds of solidarity between citizens becomes shaky and ill defined. These are stories of lost opportunities and lost hopes. ‘Today, this great emancipatory promise is being drowned out, at least in part by the desolate cacophany in fragmented, self enclosed echo chambers.’ ‘Like’ and “Dislike’ replace ‘Debate’ and ‘Discuss’. We do not appear to be heading toward the rational society. As Habermas is keen to insist, growing inequality and assymetries of life chances are major drivers of this process.

In this moment, it is difficult to imagine, not least in public political discussion, that ‘one should also adopt the perspective of one’s interlocutor and project oneself into her situation’. As bluesman Elvin Bishop sings, half the population want to kill the other half. This is not a good time for talking.

The digital age is also more than this. We are living through, and into a profoundly visual turn. If Barthes was wrong, Debord was right. Ours is the society of the spectacle, now on the cell phone. How can what James Smithies calls digital modernities develop their own democratic feedback loops? How do we learn to collectively step back from the violence that is latent or actual all around us?

Stepping back, from this big picture to the even bigger picture, the critical theory tradition gave us pause to contemplate the rationalization of the world. Today, the biggest question, arguably, from climate change to populism on this grand scale, is this: does modernity have an off-switch? or, are any of these processes, apparently beyond our control, open to reversal or to serious reconstruction?

What would Adorno have said about all this? Echoing David Hockney, perhaps: ‘I am going back to bed’. Habermas still connects to his teachers, Max and Teddy, in these pages, but he also reaches out to us. His great advantage over them, historically, was to insist on holding on to hope, and to the immediacy of the present. Is there hope for the possibility of reversibility? The answer, if not the question, is likely to outlive us.