ABSTRACT
The eighteenth century has generally been considered the age of Enlightenment. According to this view, the inroads that reason made into the various areas of life and, with this, the advancement of education and scholarship in many European countries made the epoch what it was. Based on the analysis of texts, Enlightenment scholarship thus became the domain of theology, philosophy and literary studies. In addition to these approaches, sociologists have constructed a structural transformation of the public sphere, that is, a transformation of a bourgeois-literary sectoral public sphere into an emancipatory bourgeoispolitical general public sphere.1
