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The Three Models
Thistooktheforminitiallyofnewsletterscirculatedmoreorlessprivately
among merchants. In Habermas’s account the circulation of news began
to take a truly public form (subject of course to the qualification that
“the public” was still a small part of the population in this era) and the
press in the modern sense to develop, as a modern administrative state
was created to regulate the emerging market. The development of the
press,inotherwords,wasconnectedwiththeemergenceofrational-legal
authority, whose significance in the Democratic Corporatist countries
we will take up later in this chapter.
In Germany the first periodicals or Messrelationen, containing sum-
maries of the most important events, started to appear as early as the
sixteenth century, though the first to appear regularly date from 1609
with Aviso in Wolfenbuttel and Relation in Strasbourg. The first daily in
Germany, Einkommende Zeitungen, was founded in Leipzig in 1650. In
the German-speaking part of Switzerland, meanwhile, an early daily
Ordinari Wochenzeitung started publication in 1610, and what may be
thefirstprototypeofthemodernqualitypaper,theNeueZ¨urcherZeitung,
appeared in 1780, eight years before The Times of London. In 1798 the
booksellerJohannFriedrichCottafoundedhisAllgemeineZeitung,which
was a leading paper through the first half of the nineteenth century. This
early establishment of the press in Northern and Central Europe was
followed in the nineteenth century by a dramatic expansion of circula-
tion that would end with the Democratic Corporatist countries leading
the world in newspaper readership.
The birth of a mass market of the press was based on several structural
elementsthatdistinguishthesecountriesfromothers.Onekeyfactorwas
clearly the early growth of mass literacy. Historians of literacy note that
prior to 1800 Europe could be divided into three groups of countries
in terms of the diffusion of literacy. The first group included Sweden,
Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Scotland, Geneva, the Netherlands, part of
France, England, and Germany, which had already reached a sort of mass
literacy. Another group of countries, geographically proximate to these,
hadlower,butstillrelativelyhighliteracyrates,whilethelowestrateswere
foundinSouthernandEasternEurope.Theearlydevelopmentofliteracy
inNorthernEuropewascloselyconnectedtotheProtestantReformation,
which stressed the principle that every person should “learn to read and
seewiththeirowneyeswhatGodbidsandcommandsinhisHolyWord,”
in the words of a Swedish Church Law of 1686 (Johansson 1981: 156–7).
Organized literacy campaigns were common in much of Northern
Europe during this period, generally supported both by the Church
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