The concept of the public sphere is most often associated with Jurgen Habermas, author of “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” (1962)
It is a knowledge into a category of bourgeois society. His work took the position that the public sphere in its simplest and ideal form is a realm where opinions particularly focusing on the needs of society are freely and openly exchanged between people, unconstrained by external pressures. (Habermas 1991: 176) It can be a “virtual or imaginary community” not necessarily existing in any one space.
For Habermas, the basic political question that the public sphere raises is how to promote widespread and more or less egalitarian participation in rational-critical discourse about the proper ends of society. The public sphere, he argues, was created largely for the purposes of addressing the state and the sorts of public issues on which state policy might bear. It is based on a notion of the public good as distinct from private interest; social institutions, like private property, that empower individuals to participate independently in the public sphere; and forms of private life, notably the family, that prepare individuals to act as , rational-critical subjects in the public sphere.
According to Habermas' conception: The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.
Habermas' work relies on a description of a historical moment during the 17th and 18th centuries when coffee houses, societies and salons became the centre of debate, and extends this to an ideal of participation in the public sphere for today.
The development of the fully political