Jurgen Habermas

A public sphere is one where people may express ideas freely without their identities exerting too great a control over words or from a fear of violence. For Habermas, these are rooted in the historical experience of the European people. As a state developed its bureaucracy and professionalized armies, public power became a bourgeois phenomena where newspapers permitted criticism of the state and other entities with more or less impunity. That the bourgeois lack power in the state does not stop them from influencing the development of rules that permitted them to exercise free thought and speech directed against it.