The debates about the public sphere from social systems theory

The purpose of this paper is to present the initial debate that generated the main contributions to the discussion of the public sphere from the perspective of systems theory. Although Luhmann consolidates himself as the main reference of this theoretical branch, he is not its only supporter, and other authors of this line also presented arguments for thinking about the concept of public sphere. Several of these authors' contributions were, in some way, incorporated by Luhmann or departed from Luhmann. Considering that we are working with social systems theory, we made a division based on a criterion that has heuristic purposes to map the argumentative field: On the one hand, we have the authors who consider the public sphere as a system and, on the other hand, authors who do not consider it as a system.