Reviewers could not escape the public sphere book’s diagnosis of postwar democracies.

Evidence

The only consolation that the reviewers could offer, both to themselves and to their readers, was the observation that the author had set himself an extremely high standardone that was too utopian, in Dahrendorf’s view. But no matter what one’s view of this standard, nothing changed the decisive diagnosis. One might, like Dahrendorf, emphasize that domination was never unlimited, and that the existence of `countervailing powers’ was decisive. But there emerged no other diagnosis than that the dominant conditions in the post-war European democracies were far from what they claimed to be and far from what was desirable. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2379