Page 12 - Democracy and the Public Sphere
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Excavations: The History of a Concept  7

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                                  initiative’.  In that liminal zone between the state and what would
                                  later emerge as ‘civil society’, the press did more to kindle than to

                                  smother the flames of bourgeois revolt.
                                    By the early eighteenth century it had become commonplace
                                  for the pages of journals and periodicals to be taken up not simply
                                  with economic information and state propaganda, but with critical,
                                  openly opinionated articles: ‘In the guise of so-called learned articles,
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                                  critical reasoning made its way into the daily press.’  The press was
                                  implicitly critical because its operations challenged the interpretative
                                  duopoly of church and state. In the early phases such articles were
                                  less likely to attack the activities of state head-on than to plough an
                                  impressively independent line on literary, philosophical or pedagogic
                                  matters. (The early Spectator, for example, focused on the discussion
                                  of literature, morality and etiquette.) For this reason, Habermas

                                  identifies a bourgeois public sphere in the ‘world of letters’ as the
                                  precursor to a more directly political public sphere.
                                    The precursory role that Habermas assigns to the literary public
                                  sphere suffers a certain ambiguity. After all, the literary public
                                  sphere Habermas portrays is, ostensibly, an eighteenth-century
                                  phenomenon, whilst the previous century is characterised by the
                                  emergence of a press more concerned with ‘news’ and information.
                                  In fact, Structural Transformation appears to assign the literary public
                                  sphere a precursory role on three levels. First, the seventeenth-century

                                  press did not, by and large, reflect the ‘critical reasoning’ Habermas
                                  reads into the eighteenth-century public sphere. Pages taken up with
                                  commodity prices, taxes, state announcements and so forth did not,
                                  of themselves, construct a ‘reasoning public’ critically refl ecting upon
                                  matters of state. Second, to the extent that a political public sphere is
                                  linked to active struggles over the levers of state power, the eighteenth-
                                  century literary public sphere prefigures its political counterpart, at

                                  least insofar as the formal enfranchisement of the bourgeoisie serves
                                  as a yardstick. Finally, there is a synchronic consideration: in the
                                  idealistic self-image of the bourgeois public sphere, the literary public
                                  sphere is constituted as a ‘pre-political’ realm of self-clarifi cation,
                                  a zone of freedom in which a putative ‘humanity’ or ‘authentic’

                                  subjectivity could flourish, whose protection must become the raison
                                  d’être of a ‘just’ polity.
                                    The literary public sphere spread beyond the pages of the printed
                                  press and beyond the restricted strata of the pedagogues and
                                  philosophes. ‘Critical reasoning’ occupied the proliferating coffee
                                  houses (especially in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century









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