Habermas’s Discussion On The Feudal Representative Public Sphere

Jiirgen Habermas is the representative figure of Modern Western Philosophy, his idea of public sphere is very important through his philosophical theory. For a long time, western and oriental academia, researching on Habermas’s idea of public sphere, always focus on his thoughts about the bourgeois public sphere, and relational theoretical achievements are also very plentiful. But in Habermas’s thoughts of public sphere, his idea of feudal representative public sphere gets less concern. Even if people talked about it, also see it as a less important stage of the public sphere’s development.Indeed, the feudal representative public sphere is not typical public sphere, and it closely related to the social reality. Under the system of the Western European feudal suzerain, feudal seigneurs got all the public power based on their private estates, radically, the social structure of the isolation between public power and private areas did not exist. At the same time, the competing between feudal suzerain power and unified kingship, between secular power and religious power, they were also rooted in the plurality of social structure. Neither the United Nation State, nor organizational government system was easy to be established.The feudal representative public sphere was based on feudal aristocracy, the publicity of it is appearances of feudal aristocracy, and it’s representativeness is simply represent the seigneurs’s ownership, rather than the people’s opinion. It appeared to be all the the unnecessary and overelaborate formalities what can show the feudal aristocracy’s power and identity, the grand occasions and activities, some individual markers and so on, in order to reflect the power and the rationality of their domination, and their status of nobility. Thus, the ffeudal representative public sphere was not a pattern of typical public sphere.However, as a "prehistoric" pattern of the bourgeois public sphere, the feudal representative public sphere had arose in Western Europe feudal society, and han been lasted for a long time. It not only gave birth to the bourgeois public sphere from its subsequent resolution, but also be meaning to form the mature the comprehension on the important elements of the public sphere, through the critical analysis about its "false-publicity" and "false-representativeness". Through the analysis and discussion on the feudal representative public sphere, we find the new way to understand Habermas’s public sphere theory,from the negative aspects,when the critical principle of publicity was abandoned, the Public sphere lost its open, fair, rational discussion about truth, and evolved into the forum seeking for Private interests, the mature bourgeois public sphere was " refeudalized" and lost its value and Significance.