The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)

Abstract

1. The Concept. By we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a body.1 They then behave neither like business or professional people transacting private affairs, nor like members of a constitutional order subject to the legal constraints of a state bureaucracy. Citizens behave as a body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion--that is, with the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to express and publish their opinions-about matters of general interest. In a large body this kind of communication requires specific means for transmitting information and influencing those who receive it. Today newspapers and magazines, radio and television are the media of the sphere. We speak of the political sphere in contrast, for instance, to the literary one, when discussion deals with objects connected to the activity of the state. Although state authority is so to speak the executor of the political sphere, it is not a part of it.2 To be sure, state authority is usually considered authority, but it derives its task of caring for the well-being of all citizens primarily from this aspect of the sphere. Only when the exercise of political control is effectively subordinated to the democratic demand that information be accessible to the public, does the political sphere win an institutionalized influence over the government through the instrument of law-making bodies. The expression public opinion refers to the tasks of criticism and control which a body of citizens informally--and, in periodic elections, formally as wellpractices vis-d-vis the ruling structure organized in the form of a state. Regulations demanding that certain proceedings be (Publizitdtsvor-