ABSTRACT
This chapter draws heavily on a highly influential book by political theorist Jurgen Habermas, entitled “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society”. It focuses on his early materialist understandings of the link between an emergent capitalist class and its inherent need to construct – and then distort and limit – a universal concept of publicness. The chapter presents a review of pre-capitalist conceptions of performative publics, followed by an assessment of the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere, the contradictions that arose within it, the dissolution of a public-private divide and finally the development of a refuedalized public realm. One of the primary reasons that early forms of public services were built and provided in relatively public ways was to create spectacle.
