The Opinion System Impasses of the Public Sphere from Hobbes to
Habermas Publication Year: 2008 Published by: Fordham University
Press Title Page, Copyright Page Download PDF (34.9 KB) Preface:
The Opinion Machine Download PDF (69.2 KB) ‘‘Tankstelle’’
(Filling Station), the first aphorism of Walter Benjamin’s One-
Way Street, highlights the changed role of opinion in modern
societies through a structuring opposition between conviction
(Überzeugung) and opinion (Meinung).1 Starting with the latter:
the closing sentences of this... Introduction and Overview
Download PDF (89.1 KB) The epigraph to Laurence Sterne’s Life
and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as well as to Herder’s
philosophy of history, Epictetus’ innocent observation may also
be a battle cry of radical relativism. The things themselves,
the epigraph says, their order, natural order, or total lack of
order, are not problematic... Excursus I: Fama and Fatum in
Virgil's Aeneid Download PDF (60.9 KB) Fama, a Latin translation
of the Greek doxa, carries man