The 1960s and 1970s were a period of major social movements, public protests and rallies around the world against the Vietnam War in the United States and elsewhere, student protests in May 1968 in France, the 1974 Carnation Revolution that ended Salazar's dictatorship in Portugal, the fall of the Franco dictatorship in Spain in 1975 and the rise of popular reform movements for socialism with a human face in Eastern Central Europe after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Although political-sociological theorists have used related concepts to understand and explain political processes and outcomes, and despite all these obvious manifestations of public opinion and isolated attempts to rehabilitate it as a critical concept (Splichal 1999), scholars have largely dismissed public opinion as a significant factor in social and political life in sociological studies on issues such as collective action and democratic governance (Manza and Brooks 2012) and/or questioned its legitimacy and efficacy as a national and transnational phenomenon (Fraser 2007). With the rise of administrative opinion polls, public opinion research, in general, was associated with the functionalist sociological paradigm and abandoned by critical scholars interested in issues of economic and political power, classes, ideology and manipulation. The decline in attention to public opinion is clearly confirmed by an analysis in Google Books Ngram Viewer (Figure 3), which shows a quite dramatic decline in the frequency of the phrase ‘public opinion’ in English books from the 1970s onwards and in French books after 2000 (note that the Öffentlichkeit curve in Figure 3 is multiplied by 100).

In such circumstances, the 1989 English translation of Habermas's book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, originally published in 1962 – which followed an earlier translation of his encyclopaedia article ‘The Public Sphere’ in New German Critique (1974) and the French translation of the book in 1978 – came as a manna from heaven at a time when public opinion was deprived of a critical momentum. After the tragic loss of the critical concept of public opinion – which lost its critical epistemic value and was buried in administrative research because of the widespread reduction of public opinion to opinion polls – a new construct, the public sphere, canonised in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, became the saviour of critical theory in publicness studies.