Page 11 - Democracy and the Public Sphere
P. 11

6 Jürgen Habermas

                               them. The press emerged as an outgrowth of the increasing traffi c
                               in merchant newsletters. Already, under feudalism, these newsletters
                               had ‘unleashed the very elements within which this power structure
                               would one day dissolve’. 7
                                 Habermas paints the second half of the seventeenth century as
                               a critical period during which something approaching a publicly

                               accessible ‘press’ emerged, feeding off and filtering the news conveyed
                                                                                  8
                               in the private correspondences of the merchant capitalists.  This
                               marked the emergence of regularised printed communication

                               addressed to unspecified recipients. Of course, the ‘audience’ was
                               largely confined to bourgeois and intellectual strata. But crucially,

                               the press departed from the principle of immediacy: a piece of news
                               was no longer a private affair, something of interest only to those
                               whom it directly implicated, but was part of a larger communicative
                               environment premised on a putative general interest. This ‘general
                               interest’ was more than simply a novel ideological construct: it
                               also reflected the very material forces which progressively eroded

                               localised economic self-sufficiency and integrated the bourgeoisie

                               (and, of course, their workers who were not generally privy to the

                               new communication flows) into regional and national networks
                               of interconnection and interdependency. They became expanded
                                                              9
                               ‘communities of fate’, in other words,  or, to use Benedict Anderson’s
                                                                         10
                               well-known formulation, ‘imagined communities’.  This period saw
                               the emergence of what were called ‘political journals’ (produced with
                               increasing regularity until, eventually, daily publication became the
                               norm) containing information on taxes, commodity prices, wars,
                               foreign trade and the like.
                                 For Habermas, two supply-side drivers were critically important for
                               the growth of the press. First, news had become a commodity and
                               there were economies of scale to be harnessed by producing news for
                               expanded readerships. Second, state authorities rapidly cottoned on to
                               the power of the printed word. As power migrated from the localism
                               of the estates to a centralising state, print offered an effi cient means
                               of communicating decrees, proclamations, royal news and other
                                                                 11
                               symbols of authority across the territory.  But the effectiveness of
                               this propaganda tool and the extent to which the medium provided a
                               new forum for the old functions of ‘representative publicness’, ran up
                               against obvious limits. On the demand side, there was a fundamental
                               tension between the self-image of an emergent ‘reasoning’ public
                                                            12
                               and the principle of rule by decree.  In mercantilism the state had
                               set in train a ‘peculiar ambivalence of public regulation and private








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