 In his view, the French Revolution was in large part caused by the collapse of "representational" culture, and its replacement by "Öffentlichkeit" culture.Though Habermas's main concern in "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere" was to expose what he regarded as the deceptive nature of free institutions in the West, his book had a major effect on the historiography of the French Revolution.According to Habermas, a variety of factors resulted in the eventual decay of the public sphere, including the growth of a commercial mass media, which turned the critical public into a passive consumer public; and the welfare state, which merged the state with society so thoroughly that the public sphere was squeezed out.