Blog
Matthew Taylor
In my annual lecture I spoke about the need to create a 21st century public sphere, a modern equivalent of the flowering of new spaces for discourse and civic invention which took place in the eighteenth century Enlightenment. This was a time which saw the opening of coffee houses where the growing middle class could talk about philosophy and current affairs, the creation of learned societies like the RSA, and the emergence of mass publishing, especially in the form of newspapers.