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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.

— Jürgen Habermas

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More quotes by Jürgen Habermas

The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding.

The speaker must choose a comprehensible [verständlich] expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one another.

Habermas (1979)

Reaching and understanding is the process of bringing about an agreement on the presupposed basis of validity claims that are mutually recognized.

The only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests and is based in Ideas—in other words knowledge that has taken a theoretical attitude.

I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jürgen Habermas (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.