Page 11 - Democracy and the Public Sphere
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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
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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
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‘communities of fate’, in other words, or, to use Benedict Anderson’s
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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
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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
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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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