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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