History and legitimacy in the West: public relations aesthetics from Hippocrates to Luis Buñuel

Xifra, Jordi; Jiménez, Maurici

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781351245340-4

History and legitimacy in the West: public relations aesthetics from Hippocrates to Luis Buñuel

Citation

Xifra J, Jiménez M. History and legitimacy in the West: public relations aesthetics from Hippocrates to Luis Buñuel. In: Brown RE, John B 3rd, Hou JZ, editors. The global foundations of public relations: Humanism, China and the West. London: Routledge; 2021. 15 p. DOI: 10.4324/9781351245340-4

Abstract

Lucien Matrat considered public relations to be an anthropological discipline because it is based on humans. This chapter provides examples as different and distant in time from one another as Hippocrates and the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel to show that behind the idea of building a public image or an environment of trust there have always been aesthetic elements that have taken precedence over ethics, and that ethics have often been justified in aesthetic terms. The case of the Corpus Hippocraticum constitutes the most evident proof of our argument and is yet another example of what we now know as public relations being nothing more than today’s manifestation of very ancient social concerns. The cases of Hippocrates and Luis Buñuel are two examples, distant both in time and in elements employed, that highlight the importance of aesthetics in the construction of an ethical image throughout history. Aesthetic processes are based on the creation of meanings.