The Public Sphere

This book is a theory-informed, comparative and historical exploration of the notion of the public sphere within Western and Islamic traditions. It situates the emergence of the modern public sphere in a wider historical and theoretical context than usually done in conventional analyses. The work traces cross-cutting genealogies spanning conventional borders between tradition and modernity, and in particular between the Western and the Islamic world. This approach unsettles received, evolutionary views of the public sphere as an exclusive legacy of Western political cultures. The public sphere is finally reconceived as a complex platform for the modern cultivation of culturally diverse, competing, yet intersecting discourses.

This book is a theory-informed, comparative and historical exploration of the notion of the public sphere within Western and Islamic traditions. It situates the emergence of the modern public sphere in a wider historical and theoretical context than usually done in conventional analyses. The work traces cross-cutting genealogies spanning conventional borders between tradition and modernity, and in particular between the Western and the Islamic world. This approach unsettles received, evolutionary views of the public sphere as an exclusive legacy of Western political cultures. The public sphere is finally reconceived as a complex platform for the modern cultivation of culturally diverse, competing, yet intersecting discourses.

Armando Salvatore is Reader in Comparative Historical Sociology and Social Theory at Humboldt University, Berlin. His Ph.D. thesis was granted the 1994 Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences by the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA). It was later published as Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity (1997). He has edited several volumes, including Public Islam and the Common Good (with Dale F. Eickelman, 2004), Religion, Social Practice, and Contested Hegemonies (2005, with Mark LeVine), and Islam in Process: Historical and Civilizational Perspectives (2006, with Johann P. Arnason and Georg Stauth). He is editor of the Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam.