The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1974)

Abstract

Jurgen Habermas’ key contribution to understanding media comes from his theorising of the ‘public sphere’, and the role of this public sphere in shaping the democratic administration of society. In its ideal form, the public sphere is ‘made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state’. Habermas traces the development of the public sphere from its origins in the bourgeois coffee-houses of the eighteenth century through to the capital-driven, profit-oriented mass media of the present day. Key to the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere was the establishment of a free political press. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body. There is no indication that European society of the high Middle Ages possessed a public sphere as a unique realm distinct from the private sphere.