In a commercial economy, the power of disposition over property has become

The medium of public discussion is unique and without historical prototypes. Previously the estates of religion and nobility had negotiated contracts with their princes in which claims to power were defined on a case-by-case basis. As we know, this development followed a different course in England, where princely power was relativised through Parliament more than on the continent. The third estate then broke with this mode of equalizing power, for it could no longer establish itself as a ruling estate. Given a commercial economy, a division of authority accomplished through differentiation of the rights of those possessing feudal authority, liberties belonging to the estates, was no longer possible; the power under private law of disposition of capitalist property is non-political. The bourgeois are private persons; as such, they do not rule. Thus their claims to power in opposition to public power are directed not against a concentration of authority that should be divided but rather against the principle of established authority. The principle of control, namely publicness, that the bourgeois public opposes to the principle of established authority, aims at a transformation of authority as such, not merely the exchange of one basis of legitimation for another. In the first modern constitutions the sections listing basic rights provide an image of the liberal model of the public sphere; they guarantee society as a sphere of private autonomy, and opposite it stands a public power limited to a few functions.