Habermas and democratic theory: The threat to democracy of unchecked corporate power

In this article I explore the distance traveled by Jürgen Habermas from the pessimism expressed about the prospects for democracy in contemporary society in his early work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, to the optimistic resuscitation of democracy in a most recent work, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. I also discuss what I consider to be an inadequate treatment in the later work of the threat to democracy posed by the influence of the modern mass media allied with unchecked corporate power.