For Habermas, a key feature of the feudal is that small numbers of individuals embodied the public state: a king or similar officer "was" the realm (what Habermas called 'representative publicity'). Habermas saw the eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere as a positive contrast to this situation. But in the twentieth century, he perceived the rise of advertising, marketing and 'public relations' trying to manipulate the public and discourage critical thought, and he perceived the state, political parties, and interest groups increasingly using the same approaches to win votes. This is 'refeudalization' because 'the public sphere becomes the court "before" whose public prestige can be displayed─rather than "in" which public critical debate is carried on'.