Expanding the Public Sphere through Computer ... - ResearchGate

CHAPTER 2. THE PUBLIC SPHERE 18
1. the shift in political and economic systems from an absolutist to a capitalist
state;
2. the development of print as the dominant mode of communication;
3. the rise of institutions to allow individuals in the newly capitalist systems to
meet and deliberate with each other; and
4. the transition of these deliberating individuals into a public.
To fully appreciate these developments, it is necessary to briefly recount the emergence
of the earliest form of what could be called a public sphere in early absolutist
states. The “representative public sphere” was the vehicle used by the
monarch to “represent” his authority to the populace. There was no sense of
representation in the modern sense, of delegates or members of an assembly representing
others:
When the territorial ruler convened about him ecclesiastical and worldly
lords, knights, prelates and cities, this was not a matter of an assembly of
delegates that was someone else’s representative. As long as the prince and
the estates of his realm “were” the country and not just its representatives,
they could represent it in a specific sense. They represented the lord not for
but “before” the people (Habermas 1989, 7-8).
The function, then, of the representative public sphere was to “provide an arena for
the spectacle and display of authority” (Nathans 1990, 621). The “public sphere”
Habermas (1989, 7) discusses here is not a social category but a “status attribute,”
as “a public sphere in the sense of a separate realm distinguished from the private
sphere cannot be shown to have existed in the feudal society” that characterized
the early absolutist states.
The earliest elements of a public sphere as a social category, distinct from the
private sphere, appear as a result of the simultaneous emergence of early capitalism
and the development of techniques for regular information exchange between
commercial centers. The transition of the economy from a system dominated by
feudal agricultural production to first finance and trade capitalism and later mercantile
capitalism required a system of taxation, and the bureaucracy to support it,
in order to generate the capital necessary for expanded trade. For the first time,
the personal holdings of the monarchy were separated from the revenues of the