BOOK REVIEWS Massimo Rospocher (ed.), Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe. Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento/Jahrbuch des italienisch-deutschen historischen Instituts in Trient 27. Bologna and Berlin: Società editrice il Mulino and Duncker & Humblot, 2012. 303 pp. €30.00. ISBN: 978- 8815240286 (pb). Beyond the Public Sphere is a collection of fourteen essays that have originated from two colloquia: a workshop entitled ‘Public Sphere and Public Opinion: Historical Para- digms?’ held in 2008 and a 2010 international conference in Trento, ‘Beyond the Public Sphere’. The collection delineates current thought on the public sphere debate while evaluating the continued relevance of Jürgen Habermas’s seminal text Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962) to modern conceptions. For Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere allowed private men to discourse, debate and thereby regulate the general rules of society particularly those governing the ‘publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labour’, (Section 2, Chapter 4). In his introduction to Beyond the Public Sphere, Massimo Rospocher states that despite recent vociferous attacks on Habermas’s highly influential model of the public sphere the work still has much value, especially for the early modern historian. Moreover, his ideas retain a wider significance due to the ‘persistence and cyclical return to Habermas’s theory today’ (24) within a global community shaped by communication technologies. A central aspiration of the collection is to expose a paradigmatic shift presently occurring through ’historiographical transition’ (27), moving beyond Habermas’s deficiencies on the public sphere to create new interpretations. The work is divided into four sections. The first, ‘Theory and Practices’, contains two essays in which the work of Niklos Luhmann, an opponent of Habermas, is held up as an alternative model for the inadequacies in the latter’s theory. Andreas Gestrich argues that Habermas’s paradigm of a structural transformation of the public sphere is not compelling for early modern historians. Its focus on a bourgeois early modern society fails to recognise the importance of a mixed social basis of the ‘institutions and arenas of public exchange’ (41), running counter to recent research. Gestrich believes that this defective narrative is the result of Habermas’s adoption of a dichotomy between civil society and the state which he inherited from Hegel and Marx. The solution to this theoretical weakness can be found in Luhmann: (also used in the Angela De Benedictis chapter). Luhmann’s rejection of Habermas’s presupposition of an undistorted public discourse to enable rationality in political decision-making, forces the early modern histormodernistian to ‘examine individual sectors or subsys- tems of society more closely’ in determining how public communication has trans- formed ‘societal differentiation’ (51). Habermas’s narrative of European modernity is Renaissance Studies Vol. 28 No. 3 DOI: 10.1111/rest.12021 © 2014 Society for Renaissance Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd