The Public Sphere

Habermas's conception of a domain of social life in which private people come together as a public to engage in rational-critical debate, mediating between civil society and the state. It emerged historically in the coffee houses, salons and print culture of the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie and depends on specific architectures of assembly and circulation. Treated here as an imaginary — a shared idea of legitimate, reasoned public discourse — paired with its instituted forms; complements the existing 'public-sphere' theory node and the existing work 'The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere'.