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This publicness of representation was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute, if this term may be permitted.

This quote is Habermas’s clearest explanation of the concept of representative publicity. Representative publicity involves the display of status before an audience, rather than rational-critical debate by a public. Therefore it does not exist as a social construction, because concepts of the social and private did not yet exist, but merely as an action or quality associated with status. Representative publicity was associated only with higher status levels. Only the King and nobility displayed themselves before the people.

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