Public Sphere: Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century History

The development of institutions and practices of open communication concerning affairs of common interest is basic to democracy. This is analyzed as involving transformations of public space from the Athenian agora to the metaphorical space of electronic communications. These spaces provide for communication among strangers as well as those joined by bonds of community; they are arenas for the expression of individual and collective identities as well as for the making of collective decisions. Analytic attention focuses largely on questions of access to publics, which is often restricted on bases such as gender, ethnicity, or citizenship. It focuses also on institutional supports for public communication, on the relationship between rational-critical communication and other forms of action in public, and on the differentiation of public communication into multiple partial publics.