Night School: The Sphere of Reason

“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.” This is the formulation of the notion of the public sphere by 20^th century German social theorist Jurgen Habermas. A notion that has drawn a substantial debate.