Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere 9780857455017

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Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Edited by Christian J. Emden David Midgley

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Published in 2012 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

©2012 Christian J. Emden and David Midgley

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Changing perceptions of the public sphere / edited by Christian J. Emden and David Midgley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-500-0 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-85745-501-7 (e-book) 1. Communication--Social aspects—Europe—History. 2. Communication—Political aspects—History. 3. Public opinion—Europe—History. 4. Civil society—Europe— History. 5. Habermas, Jürgen. I. Emden, Christian. II. Midgley, David R., 1948– HM1013.C43 2012 302.2—dc23 2012001676

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN 978-0-85745-500-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-85745-501-7 (ebook)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction: Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere Christian J. Emden and David Midgley

vii 1

PART I—PUBLICS BEFORE THE PUBLIC SPHERE Chapter 1. A Public Sphere before Kant? Habermas and the Historians of Early Modern Germany Joachim Whaley Chapter 2. Kunigunde of Bavaria and the “Conquest of Regensburg”: Politics, Gender, and the Public Sphere in 1489 Sarah Westphal Chapter 3. Publicizing the Private: The Rise of “Secret History” Peter Burke

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35 57

PART II—THINKING ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT PUBLICS Chapter 4. Private, Public, and Structural Change: The German Problem Nicholas Boyle

75

Chapter 5. The Second Life of the “Public Sphere”: On Charisma and Routinization in the History of a Concept John H. Zammito

90

vi • Contents

PART III—CULTURAL POLITICS AND LITERARY PUBLICS Chapter 6. Probing the Limits: The Contribution of Literary Writing to Defining the Public Sphere David Midgley

123

Chapter 7. Habermas Anticipated: The Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere as “Theater of the World” Martina Lauster

142

Chapter 8. Karl Kraus and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna Edward Timms

164

Bibliography

183

Contributors

200

Index

203

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Without the generous administrative and financial support of a number of institutions this project could neither have started nor have been brought to a fruitful conclusion. At Rice University, we would like to thank the Humanities Research Center, the School of Humanities, and the Department of German Studies; at the University of Cambridge we would like to express our gratitude to the German Department and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. In particular, we are grateful to Ludmilla Jordanova, Caroline Levander, and Gary Wihl, who have supported this project with great enthusiasm right from the beginning, and to Marion Berghahn and her staff for taking this volume on and giving such careful attention to the production of it.

INTRODUCTION Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere

Christian J. Emden and David Midgley



Fifty years have elapsed since Jürgen Habermas’s book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was originally published in German.1 During that time the historical model of the “public sphere” and its development that Habermas described has been taken up and modified in many ways. The specific narrative that Habermas constructed for the political development of western European states—Britain, France, and Germany in particular—since the eighteenth century has been recognized to have its limitations, and other ways of conceiving the operation of the public sphere or spheres (or indeed the “publics” that constitute the more specific and concrete communities in which particular types of communication take place) have been developed to serve inquiries that are focused differently than the one that Habermas was pursuing in postwar Germany. The articles contained in the present volume do not all engage directly with Habermas’s model of the “public sphere,” but some—notably those by Joachim Whaley and Nicholas Boyle—do conduct a direct critique of the validity of that model and of methodological developments related to it; and in their various ways they all examine aspects of the operation of a “public sphere” as it was experienced at particular stages in European history. Together they assess the nature of public communications and the molding of public opinion in historical situations that range from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century, including the role of literary and

2 • Christian J. Emden and David Midgley

other types of publications, and the representation of the “public sphere” in literary writing. Habermas’s account of the “public sphere” dates from a time when post1945 German society was undergoing structural and generational shifts, with the Wirtschaftswunder or “economic miracle” showing its first cracks, the student movements of the late 1960s already on the horizon, and the “medialization” of political publics in full swing.2 In those circumstances it was a remarkable achievement to construct such a broad model of historical transformations in the Western political imagination, and the abiding influence of Habermas’s argument owes a great deal to the fact that it was strongly shaped by a distinctive philosophical liberalism rooted in the Kantian tradition of the Enlightenment, which it helped to carry forward into the final decades of the twentieth century. Although this Kantian dimension might appear obvious only in retrospect—following the publication of Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983), which in many ways echoed a similar reactualization of the Kantian tradition in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1972)3—The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere already sought to present a narrative of the Enlightenment that focused on political communication as a form of consensus-seeking negotiation, emphasizing the importance of a deliberative model of public discourse inserted between private economic life and the arcana imperii of the modern state. In this respect it stood in sharp contrast to Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis (1959).4 While Koselleck, writing very soon after the Second World War and influenced to a considerable degree by Carl Schmitt’s account of the political as inherently conflictual, presented an account of eighteenth-century intellectual history that pointed to a moralization of the political world that was far from disinterested, Habermas opted for a more positive account of Enlightenment public discourse as a realm of intellectual exchange and thus as a corrective to the political interests of the absolutist states of Europe. Indeed, for Habermas the emergence of the public sphere was above all the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere and hence inextricably linked to the social and economic claims of a relatively new but rapidly growing segment of the population in England, Holland, France, the German states, and elsewhere. It was this understanding of the public sphere as a bourgeois, or bürgerlich,5 enterprise that, because of its association with philosophical liberalism, made Habermas’s book relevant both to German society during the early 1960s and to the Western political imagination generally at the end of the Cold War when it was first published in English in 1989. Habermas was not the first to focus on the public and the public sphere as central explanatory models for the ideals as well as the problems of

Introduction • 3

modern democratic societies. Leaving aside the relevant discussions that can be found in Kant’s famous “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784) and Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1822),6 there are precedents for the theoretical concern with the formation of publics and of the public sphere in the first few decades of the twentieth century, whether these support the public sphere as an integral part of democratic society or oppose it as a realm of irrational political hopes. They range from Ferdinand Tönnies’s Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung (Critique of Public Opinion, 1922), Carl Schmitt’s Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 1923) and Walter Lippmann’s The Phantom Public (1925) to what is perhaps the first thorough account of the emergence of the public sphere in the eighteenth century, Ernst Manheim’s Die Träger der öffentlichen Meinung (The Makers of Public Opinion, 1933).7 Habermas’s own account, however, is particularly close to that of Hannah Arendt, who, in The Human Condition (1958) and elsewhere, locates political action, following the ideal type of the ancient Greek polis, in an open-ended public realm that has to be understood in contradistinction to the economic concerns of the private household.8 While Arendt’s account of this public realm was in many ways disengaged from any specific historical context, Habermas’s perspective on the eighteenth century allowed for a more persuasive notion of the public sphere as an arena for debate that emerged between private life and the state at that time. Habermas’s model, then, presupposed a clear distinction between the private lives of the citizenry and the official domain of the state, which was supposedly only overcome by the development of a public forum for effective political communication in the eighteenth century. As Habermas pointed out, Greek antiquity had not conceived of the relationship between society, made up of individuals, and the state as one of opposition, but the rise of the absolutist state in early modern Europe had ultimately led to a separation between society and the state. The growing bourgeois society in the predominantly urban and economically powerful centers of western Europe therefore sought to counter the state’s efforts at social control and political centralization with the formation of public opinion, which itself was seen as the predominant foundation on which the policies of the modern state were to gain legitimacy. On the other hand, it was precisely the economic base of the growing bourgeoisie that ultimately began to undermine the public sphere as a corrective to the interests of the state: the concentration of capital in private property and the privatization of cultural life progressively led to a withdrawal from the public sphere, which itself shifted its focus in the course of the nineteenth century from a democratic legitimation of the state to the manipu-

4 • Christian J. Emden and David Midgley

lation of public opinion through mass media. The decline of the public sphere, in other words, was already an integral structural part of those social and economic elements that made its emergence possible in the first place.9 The fatal “dialectic of Enlightenment” that Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer had already pointed to during the 1940s reappeared in Habermas’s account of the public sphere.10 But within the context of post-1945 societies in Europe and North America—aptly characterized by Guy Debord as “societies of the spectacle”11—the philosophical dimension of Habermas’s book also offered the hope for a political discourse that could live up to the normativity of reason as a guiding principle and, at the same time, presented its readers with a historical point of reference, a historical model, for a democratic political identity. Against this background it is particularly worth noting that Habermas’s model has recently received much attention in the construction of a specifically European public sphere that connects cultural politics, constitutional procedures, and social self-perception, while any serious discussion of the public sphere as an integral element of public policy and public diplomacy is largely absent in the United States.12 It seems, then, that since the end of the Cold War, the European Union and the U.S. have largely gone their separate ways, both in terms of historical imagination and in terms of constitutional as well as political legitimation—a development Habermas discussed in much detail in his The Divided West (2004).13 It is equally noteworthy, however, that in the past two decades the model of the public sphere has also received much attention from political philosophers as well as cultural and literary historians—another development that can be regarded as reflecting the political uncertainties after the end of the Cold War as much as the accelerating geopolitical realignments that rearranged the relationships between North and South, East and West. The link between the historical emergence of the public sphere and the emergence of models of civil society, for instance, raises the question of how such civil society should be conceived when traditional forms of political authority, such as the modern nation-state, are both challenged and mirrored in postnational, transnational, and local forms of political citizenship. These issues have recently been taken up in the work of Craig Calhoun, Nancy Fraser, and James Tully.14 In the German context, too, the variety of potential meanings of the term “public” within a pluralistic conception of society has been brought out in the work of Bernhard Peters.15 There are therefore many reasons for conceiving of the public sphere in the plural, as a multiplicity of competing and interlocking publics that redefine the nature of political action as much as the role of the state visà-vis nongovernmental forms of political articulation. Indeed, such pub-

Introduction • 5

lics can even be seen to serve as a corrective to what Habermas himself, from The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere onward, regarded as the central aspect of constitutional democracy, namely deliberative reasoning. Examples of such alternative views are Chantal Mouffe’s understanding of the political as an inherently conflictual discourse and Nancy Fraser’s emphasis on a more “realist” notion of democracy.16 At the same time, it is obvious that such publics, or public spheres, can only come into existence because they are connected to, and are realized as, specific social imaginaries, to use Charles Taylor’s term.17 In short, the public sphere and the multiplication of competing publics are as much a matter of concrete politics as they are a matter of the imagination, and Michael Warner’s description of publics—and their counter-publics—as cultural forms that establish relations among strangers and thus remain fundamentally ambiguous sheds much light on aspects of democratic society that Habermas, for various reasons, neglected in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.18 Over the last twenty years and more, then, a number of factors have led to the questioning and modification of Habermas’s conception as a model for understanding the generation of public opinion and its influence on political processes. Some of these factors relate to developments in historical research, in particular to the findings of inquiries into the precise operation of public life and political decision making in premodern times, and indeed in the Enlightenment period that is so central to Habermas’s notion of the development of modern societies. The nature of the public sphere in Enlightenment Europe has emerged as more heterogeneous than Habermas originally suggested, but the emergence of the public sphere has also been backdated to early modern Europe and, most recently, even to the Middle Ages.19 Other factors that have prompted a reassessment of Habermas’s model relate to the complexities that have arisen in the course of social, political, and cultural developments since the eighteenth century. These include the proliferation of new technical means of communication, the ever-increasing global reach of communication, and the growing diversity of individual societies and of world societies in general.20 Perceptions of the public sphere have therefore changed significantly in order to take account of both modified historical perspectives and altered social realities since Habermas’s book made its impact. Just as we have become accustomed to think of modern societies as characterized by multiple and diverse subcultures, including cultures of expertise or “knowledge cultures,” so too have we come to think of them as consisting of multiple and diverse “publics” in which the interests and concerns of particular subcultures are transacted. It is very much with that diversity in mind that the present publication has been put together.

6 • Christian J. Emden and David Midgley

This volume focuses primarily on the historical reappraisal of Habermas’s model and on those aspects of public communication in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that continue to lend credence to Habermas’s sociological assumptions. In any given historical situation, the nature and operation of publics is heavily dependent upon the nature and means of communication. Habermas’s own discussion of the notion of a public sphere emphasizes the importance of literacy for the emergence of an arena of public debate between the domain of the state and the private sphere of the citizenry. Amongst other things, the contributions to this volume consider the functions of written texts in the molding of public awareness over a broad historical time span. Examples they discuss include pamphlets, broadsheets, and “secret histories,” which were a common means of promoting unofficial and critical views of regimes in medieval and early modern times; the role of postal systems and the press, which were already helping to mold public opinion in the seventeenth century; and the burgeoning of literary fiction since the eighteenth century. Such a line of inquiry could conceivably be extended further back in time to include the role of reading, and indeed of oral traditions, in the molding of public awareness in the Middle Ages and in the empires of antiquity; and it could, of course, equally be brought forward to the present day. The question of the historical assumptions on which Habermas based his argument is squarely addressed in the opening chapter by Joachim Whaley. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the history of the Holy Roman Empire, Whaley points to important senses in which it was already necessary in premodern times for rulers to cultivate the loyalty of their subjects through public communicative effort. He draws attention to the particular senses in which the Latin-derived term “public” was actually used in the German-speaking world from the fifteenth century onward, and to the distinction between historical uses of the German adjective öffentlich and the meaning of the noun Öffentlichkeit as Habermas uses it, which only became current around 1800. More importantly, he makes a strong case for the view that the earliest publics (in the sense that Habermas would recognize) were formed by the engagement of educated citizens in debates about theological, political, and legal issues, rather than through the expansion of literature, while also arguing that the main implication of the explosion of communication in print in the eighteenth century was that this made it considerably more difficult for governments to control public perceptions of affairs of state. Sarah Westphal examines a particular case of the tensions between a ruler and his subjects being played out in a public medium in a fifteenth-

Introduction • 7

century context. The case is that of Duke Albrecht IV of Bavaria and his marriage to Kunigunde, a daughter of the Habsburg Emperor Friedrich III, an event that was treated in a pamphlet hostile to Albrecht in 1489. The main issue addressed by the pamphlet is the absorption of Regensburg (formerly a free city within the Reich) into the Duchy of Bavaria. Criticisms of Duke Albrecht’s actions are conveyed by allusion or historical analogy, rather than directly, and it is precisely as a parallel to the “stealing” of Regensburg that the Duke’s marriage to the Emperor’s daughter is described. Westphal draws attention to the conventions to which the text adheres in its presentation of the figure of Kunigunde; she analyzes the functions of those conventions in relation to the pamphlet’s implicit appeal to the House of Habsburg for sympathy with its political cause; and she detects signs of a discreet treatment of the relation between public and private spheres in the pamphlet’s fleeting depiction of Kunigunde’s relationships with other members of her family. As well as pointing to indications of the expectations that constrained the public role of women in the late Middle Ages, she discusses the senses in which the manuscript form of the pamphlet can be seen as testimony to specific features of the premodern public sphere. Peter Burke explores the character and function of unofficial histories in the early modern period, particularly those purporting to reveal unsavory truths about official regimes, and their possible significance as evidence of a “public sphere” in pre-Enlightenment Europe. For Burke, public and private, official and unofficial, are closely linked in early modern Europe, and secret histories of events and the lives of princes, mistresses, and diplomats not only bring into the public domain what is normally expected to be private, but also create an alternative history from below—from the “valet’s point of view,” as it were—that corrects the official version of events. Despite their often outrageous claims and occasionally freely invented “facts,” such secret histories serve a direct political function, questioning the legitimacy of political power. Habermas’s perception of post-Enlightenment history is the common focus for the next pair of chapters. Firstly, Nicholas Boyle questions whether Habermas’s assumptions measure up to either the social and political realities of the German states at that time or the subsequent political development of European societies. Boyle argues that Habermas simplifies the nature of the eighteenth-century German reading public; that he views eighteenth-century German society in terms that are more appropriate to England; and that his model of German sociopolitical development overlooks both the differences in the social position of the “learned class” and the bourgeoisie proper, and the historical role of the

8 • Christian J. Emden and David Midgley

state in economic development since the Thirty Years’ War. For Boyle, Habermas’s notion of a “politically functioning public sphere” is less an ideal type, and more a delusion: a dream nurtured historically by those who lacked a direct share in political power, but that evaporated with the achievement of universal adult suffrage. Secondly, John H. Zammito shows how fertile Habermas’s concept of the “public sphere” has been for research in the human sciences since the publication of the English translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989. Given its abstract nature, Zammito notes, Habermas’s term has come to mean different things—and to pose different problems—for different disciplines; but with appropriate adjustments it has been widely used. While historians have found it necessary to amend Habermas’s chronology, and to look beyond his Marxist assumptions about class as the agent of historical change, the notion of structure has retained its validity for analyzing such matters as the cultural origins of the French Revolution. Zammito’s survey of recent publications indicates two significant areas in which Habermas’s lead has remained of abiding importance. Firstly, feminist historians—starting with Joan Landes in 198821—have developed some of their most salient arguments in dialogue with Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, particularly over the extent to which it did or did not exclude women. Secondly, in the field of American cultural sociology, the “interpretive” tradition of social theory represented by Habermas, along with Clifford Geertz and Anthony Giddens, has reasserted itself over other intellectual trends—the poststructuralist and the postmodern—since the 1980s. The final section of this volume focuses on the implications of Habermas’s characterization of the “public sphere” as a reading public, and on the role that literature has performed since the eighteenth century in the molding of public awareness and public attitudes. Firstly, David Midgley finds corroboration in more recent scholarship for some of Habermas’s observations about the role of literature in public life, and illustrates this point with some well-known examples of literary works that have served, historically, to open up areas of subjective experience to public view in new ways. He points to the often long-term process by which literary works that were considered obscure, risqué, or offensive to public standards of morality at the time of writing have eventually come to be accepted as canonical representations of particular aspects of human life. Particularly in the domains of sexuality, the position of women in society, and cultural relations between formerly colonized nations and their colonizers, he argues, literature has provided the medium in which public awareness has been progressively modified and expanded. He also consid-

Introduction • 9

ers two recent instances in which works of fiction in German—by Günter Grass and Martin Walser—have generated public controversy, and asks what these cases show us about the cultural situation in which literary writers now operate and the capacity of literature to hold its own against other, more instantaneous media of public communication, such as television and the Internet. Martina Lauster draws attention to the strong affinity between Habermas’s account of the historical development of the “public sphere” and the image of British political culture that served German liberal authors as a positive constitutional model, especially during the period of 1830 to 1848. She examines the reception in Germany of the writings of the British liberal Edward Bulwer Lytton and the representation of eighteenthcentury British public life in Karl Gutzkow’s play Richard Savage (1839), in which the founding editor of the journal The Tatler, Richard Steele, is a key figure. The cultural memory that Gutzkow’s play can be seen to be celebrating, she argues, is that of a historical transition in eighteenthcentury London from a limited public forum dominated by an aristocratic elite to an open public sphere constituted by middle-class professionals. Lauster also examines the role of discursive language in both Gutzkow’s play and Bulwer Lytton’s novel Devereux (1829), and shows how the transition from the social display of wit to the serious examination of human affairs again anticipates Habermas’s conception of the function of the public sphere as a forum for moral arbitration. Finally, Edward Timms considers the interaction of social, political, and cultural institutions—including the coffeehouse—as a public sphere in Vienna around the time of the First World War. He focuses on the relentless critique of officialdom and the press conducted by Karl Kraus in his journal Die Fackel (The Torch), and also on Kraus’s gargantuan satire of Austrian public life in Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind). It is above all the power of the press to manipulate public opinion, and the resulting corruption of public discourse and public discernment, that is the butt of Kraus’s satire, particularly under wartime conditions. Timms highlights in particular Kraus’s exposure of the sense in which the public statements of diplomats and the rhetoric of journalists form a self-reinforcing cycle of mutually corroborating belief, generating a “counterfeit reality” in which decisions come to be driven by delusions. Drawing a parallel between the use of fabricated documents to foment suspicion of Serbia in the Austria of 1908 and the dossier used by the British government in 2003 to justify the second war on Iraq, he suggests that Kraus’s critique of the manipulation of public perceptions of reality in his time may still carry lessons for our own.

10 • Christian J. Emden and David Midgley

Notes 1. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1990; orig. Neuwied, 1962); translated as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, UK, 1989). 2. Bernd Weisbrod, ed., Die Politik der Öffentlichkeit—die Öffentlichkeit der Politik: Politische Medialisierung in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen, 2003). 3. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, 1984–87); Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, with an introduction by Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA, 1990); and John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1972). 4. Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Freiburg, Germany, 1959); translated as Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford, 1988). 5. As Habermas uses this term, it is not straightforwardly identical with the Marxist notion of the bourgeoisie. The social strata that he sees as bearers of the public sphere are bürgerlich in the sense that their status is somewhat like that of the traditional Bürger of German city states, i.e., the craftsmen and merchants, but more diverse in nature. See Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 81. 6. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1991), 54–60; and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, 1991), 352–55 and 358–59. 7. Ferdinand Tönnies, On Public Opinion: Selections and Analyses, eds. and trans. Hanno Hardt and Slavko Splichal (Lanham, NJ, 2000); Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA, 1985); Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York, 1925); and Ernst Manheim, Die Träger der öffentlichen Meinung: Studien zur Soziologie der Öffentlichkeit (Leipzig, 1933). 8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed., with an introduction by Margaret Canovan (Chicago, 1998), 22–78. 9. Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s essay “Critical Theory, Public Sphere, and Culture: Jürgen Habermas and His Critics” in his volume The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 242–80, remains a helpful guide to the intellectual debates in the Germany of the 1970s that were stimulated by Habermas’s conception of the historical “disintegration” of the public sphere. 10. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam, 1947); translated as Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA, 2002). 11. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York, 1994). 12. See, most recently, the contributions in John Erik Fossum and Philip Schlesinger, eds., The European Union and the Public Sphere: A Communicative Space in the Making? (London, 2007); and Liana Giorgi, Ingmar von Homeyer, and Wayne Parsons, eds., Democracy in the European Union: Towards the Emergence of a Public Sphere (London, 2006). 13. Jürgen Habermas, Der gespaltene Westen (Frankfurt am Main, 2004); translated as The Divided West, ed. and trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, 2006).

Introduction • 11

14. Craig Calhoun, “Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Sphere,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 147–71; Craig Calhoun, “Civil Society and the Public Sphere,” Public Culture 5 (1993): 267–80; Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York, 2009); and James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, 2008). 15. Hartmut Weßler, ed., Bernhard Peters, Der Sinn von Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main, 2007). 16. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London, 2005); and Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 109– 42. 17. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC, 2004). 18. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, 2002). 19. James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public Sphere in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001); Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, eds., The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007); Anthony Pollock, Gender and the Fictions of the Public Sphere, 1690–1755 (New York, 2009); and Leidulf Melve, Inventing the Public Sphere: The Public Debate during the Investiture Contest, c. 1030–1122 (Leiden, 2007). 20. See, for example, Margaret R. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge, 2008), and the contributions in Mark J. Lacy and Peter Wilkin, eds., Global Publics in the Information Age (Manchester, 2005). 21. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1988).

Part I

PUBLICS BEFORE THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Chapter 1

A PUBLIC SPHERE BEFORE KANT? Habermas and the Historians of Early Modern Germany

Joachim Whaley



The master narrative of the emergence of modern civil society that Habermas set out in his Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit in 19621 has been one of the few big theories that has remained perennially influential. Secularization and modernization come and go, but Habermas, it seems, remains continually relevant. This is perhaps all the more surprising in view of the fact that what he said was fundamentally not that new. Ernst Manheim had, for example, studied the sociology of Öffentlichkeit in the 1920s and had outlined an account of the evolution of successive forms of the public sphere in Germany since the seventeenth century, culminating in the emergence of a politically active public in the late eighteenth century.2 Similar ideas are found in Reinhart Koselleck’s Kritik und Krise of 1959, though combined with a profound skepticism about the utopian nature of Enlightenment ideas.3 Habermas was more radical in his politics, but he was just as conventional in his historical perspective. In fact he restated a narrative of German history that had already been established in the nineteenth century: the birth of bourgeois society in the eighteenth century, which in turn spawned German modernity in the following century. Habermas reformulated this view in a classic Marxist framework and combined it with

16 • Joachim Whaley

a critique of ideology developed within the framework established by the Frankfurt School.4 The enduring influence of Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit over nearly half a century owes much to the circumstances of its reception. The original German edition was intended as a contribution to a wider political debate about the future of the Federal Republic in the last years of Konrad Adenauer’s chancellorship.5 Its translation into English in 1989 coincided with the debate about how to create a civil society in eastern Europe.6 From the start, however, it has exerted an influence on approaches to the study of German history and increasingly on approaches to aspects of British, French, and US history as well. Habermas’s bold conceptualization of Western history since the Middle Ages, his emphasis on the critical and emancipatory vision of the late eighteenth century, as well as his analysis of the degeneration of the public sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all infused with a political slant that many progressive academics found congenial, made research into the public sphere seem acutely relevant. Habermas’s main interest lay in the period since the eighteenth century.7 The real objective of his study was to identify the “social conditions … for a public debate about public issues conducted by private persons willing to let arguments and not statuses determine decisions.”8 This was to be done by combining the study of actual developments in England, France, and Germany before 1800 with theoretical reflections on them from Thomas Hobbes onward, with a particular focus on Immanuel Kant and his German successors. Underlying the whole project, and fully in tune with the thinking of the Frankfurt School generally, was a concern with the reasons for the incomplete formation of the public sphere in Germany specifically and with its degeneration there during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Where Habermas differed from Adorno and Horkheimer was in his more optimistic assessment about the potential for redressing this problem, to which much of his work has been devoted, albeit with increasing distance from his early Marxism, from the early 1960s to the present.9 The differences between Adorno and Horkheimer on the one hand and Habermas on the other essentially reflect their differing generational experiences. The negative account that Adorno (1903–69) and Horkheimer (1895–1973) gave of the potential for a true public sphere in The Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947 reflected their own personal experience of the rise of fascism and their experiences as exiles of commercialized high capitalism in the US.10 Habermas (born in 1927), by contrast, emerged from the fascist period as a young man who came to believe that the creation of a true public sphere was perhaps now possible for the first time.

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If the ideological focus and intent of Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit was contemporary, his account of the historical genesis of the idea of the public sphere also provided a stimulating account of the history of early modern society that many have found beguiling. The essence of his account of developments before 1800 is simply stated. From the Middle Ages onward, European society was dominated by the rise of nation-states. These initially knew no distinction between public and private, because there was no such thing as private property. Those who dominated these states—monarchs, nobles, and prelates—both exercised power and represented it symbolically through insignia, clothing, gesture, and rhetoric.11 As the power of the state grew, so its claims to sovereignty, to public power, became more absolute. That in turn was represented or communicated in ever more elaborate forms of court ritual and display. At the same time the establishment of public authority presupposed a private body of subjects under royal rule. The construction of the impersonal sovereign state thus creates society as a private realm that is distinct from it. The modern public sphere develops from this private realm. The fundamental motor of change is the development of capitalism.12 The increasing exchange of goods and the creation of larger markets enhanced the flow and exchange of information and further stimulated the demand for knowledge. At the same time, economic development led to the emergence of a new commercial class, the bourgeoisie. On the one hand, this new class developed new ways of living. The family was increasingly viewed as a sphere of intimacy and affection, a realm of pure humanity that was shielded from the state and the world of power. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie began to make claims against the state on the basis of the knowledge that it accumulated. Firstly, the human values developed in the family were projected onto literature and the engagement of the bourgeoisie in a literary culture and in the burgeoning sociability of clubs and associations began, first in Britain and then in France and Germany. Secondly, there was a turn toward political issues, which finally led to the confrontation of the public sphere with the state. This occurred in Britain as early as the late seventeenth century, in France from the middle of the eighteenth century, and in Germany, in a much more incomplete fashion, in the later decades of the eighteenth century.13 The intellectual reflection of the growing desire of the bourgeoisie to assert its autonomy was the emergence of the science of political economy, which represented the theory of a market society subject to its own laws.14 This in itself explains the relative backwardness of Germany. Even so, it was there that the idea of the public sphere was developed most fully. In particular, this was the achievement of Kant, who visualized a public

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sphere formed by private citizens who debate issues of public concern.15 They agree that the only valid authority in their deliberations is the better argument, and because they agree to be impartial they are capable of reaching a common, rational judgment. Education and property ownership were criteria for admission to the public sphere, but its members in fact presented themselves as simply human, as the representatives of society as a whole. This in turn provides the starting point for the critique of the public sphere by Hegel and Marx after 1800.16 Firstly, Hegel exposed it as mere ideology, an anarchic amalgam of individual opinions or at best common sense that only became operational through the state itself and could have no independent existence or function. Then, secondly, Marx saw that the public sphere was merely a mask for the class interests of the bourgeoisie. This critique presaged the structural transformation of the public sphere and ultimately its disintegration into a mass of passive consumers of culture and opinion. Habermas’s account of the construction of the public sphere (and of Kant’s idealized vision of what it might become) was originally intended as an ideal-typical model rather than as empirical history. Indeed, in the subsequent development of his theory of the public sphere, Habermas has moved progressively away from any reliance on historical models.17 Yet he remains intrigued by the historical debates stimulated by his book. In 1989 he suggested that historical research had subsequently proved his model to be accurate.18 On the other hand, the historians he cites, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Geoff Eley, are primarily interested in German history after 1800. Wehler’s account of the eighteenth century, published in 1987, the extended prelude to his monumental history of German society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in fact cited Habermas himself as a key source.19 Eley found that Habermas’s ideas on the period before 1800 were broadly supported by the work of Raymond Williams, Karl Deutsch, J. H. Plumb and his students John Brewer and John Money, and German scholars such as Franklin Kopitzsch and Otto Dann.20 All of them had taken a broad approach to the study of politics in their widest possible social context. This permitted the contours of a developing public sphere in England to become more distinct, while underlining the political significance of the apparently delayed or later development of such phenomena in Germany. Eley’s own criticism focused on what he saw as the limitations of Habermas’s notion of the nineteenth-century public sphere.21 In fact, Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit poses a number of key problems of definition for historians of Germany before 1800. Firstly, the concept of Öffentlichkeit itself has evolved. Habermas originally described the public sphere as a kind of collective person, formed by ratio-

A Public Sphere before Kant? • 19

nal beings coming together and harmonizing their arguments to form a single voice expressing pure reason. Although the notion of the public sphere was originally universal in its aspirations, it was always socially exclusive in that access to it was restricted to the educated and the propertied. Much subsequent historical discussion insisted on the necessity of recognizing the contribution of nonbourgeois groups to the evolution of modern society. This has produced a rather different view of the public sphere, which Habermas himself seems to have endorsed.22 The public sphere is now often portrayed simply as a public space, an arena within which any individual or group can present their ideas or promote their interests. The shift from a mass subject to a pluralist space fundamentally alters the original conception. But even if one insists on the original definition, then how can one search for the origins of something that is recognized to be an ideal type, or even a fiction that never was, and never could be, a real institution?23 Secondly, the term Öffentlichkeit, in the sense that it is employed by Habermas, simply did not exist before 1800. Though it is first recorded in a work by Joseph von Sonnenfels in 1765, it was employed there simply to denote public documents or artifacts, whether they were state documents, decrees, and the like or things published by private individuals.24 Habermas himself grounded his conception of the public sphere on the appearance of the term Publikum, whose first usage he ascribed to Gottsched (writing about an audience or “public” for literature) in 1760.25 In fact, the origins of the term were much more complex. Until the sixteenth century the word öffentlich simply meant something that was known, clear, and self-evident. The spread of Roman law to Germany from the late fifteenth century onward brought the Latin publicus, meaning sanctioned by proper authority, which then increasingly came to denote rights and qualities that pertained to government and the sovereign.26 Roman law brought public law. The Latin term was, however, also flexible in that it could also refer to the public, the people, and it survived into the early eighteenth century in so far as it denoted “those who receive state decrees.” But the terms assumed a different meaning in German usage under the influence of the French le publique, which had become established in the first half of the seventeenth century as the term denoting the audience of the theater. During the course of the eighteenth century the German term Publicum came to be employed almost exclusively in the literary and publishing context: those who had access to art and literature, to the educational possibilities of the new media. The term öffentliche Meinung occurs after 1789 as a simple translation of the French opinion publique. Öffentlichkeit first appears around 1800 as a German equivalent of Publizität, a translation of the French publicité, in the sense

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of making something widely known.27 It was only in the first decades of the nineteenth century that both Öffentlichkeit and öffentliche Meinung acquired an explicitly political meaning, denoting a power that assumed independent authority and made demands of the state, with Öffentlichkeit also denoting a space in which öffentliche Meinung could form. Öffentliche Meinung as a single view arrived at by debate among rational and critical individuals was then clearly distinguished from allgemeine Meinung, the sum of individual opinions.28 To an extent, the profusion of meanings both past and present has been quite helpful in exploring the forms of Öffentlichkeit before 1800. On occasion it has encouraged a very broad approach; the existence of some kind of public sphere in the sense of public opinion is simply assumed. This is often justified with reference to the theories of the public opinion researcher Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who sees Öffentlichkeit not as an elite phenomenon in the way that Habermas conceived it but rather as the opinion of all that exercises social control.29 This is a socially inclusive public sphere to which all belong whenever they express an opinion outside the purely private realm. On the other hand, others have attempted recently to define specifically early modern forms of Öffentlichkeit. Two of the most ambitious are Michael Giesecke’s study of the impact of printing and Wolfgang Behringer’s account of the early modern communications revolution. Each is inspired by the analogy of the Internet. Giesecke sees the Gutenberg galaxy as the precursor of the Turing galaxy and his work is clearly influenced by predecessors such as Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Elizabeth Eisenstein.30 Printing, technology, the commercial networks generated by the early print trade and, finally, authors are for him the hardware of a new communications system; knowledge is the software.31 Hardware and software together created new ways of thinking and behaving. Above all, he suggests that printing, and the behavior-influencing system that came into being with it, ultimately generated a demand for standardization, reliable and verifiable knowledge, and openness and accountability. This is admittedly highly speculative: Brendan Dooley, for example, uses the same kind of evidence to argue that the commercialization and manipulation of news contributed to the seventeenth-century crisis of skepticism.32 Wolfgang Behringer seems to be on more certain ground with his suggestion that the mechanics and infrastructure of communication were even more fundamental.33 In his view, the real hardwiring of what he calls the early modern “mother of all communications revolutions” was provided by the systems that accelerated communication.34 The postal service that developed in the Reich by about 1600, he says, was the first

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Internet. The seventeenth century then saw a further acceleration of change, which, he suggests, transformed perceptions of space and time much more dramatically than did any of the changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.35 The magnitude of the change wrought by the early postal system was not lost on contemporaries. Indeed, in 1752 Johann Jacob Moser could claim confidently that the invention of the postal system “had poured the world into a new mould.”36 The development of the postal system facilitated the more rapid communication of news and it played a decisive role in the development of newspapers. News became regular, up-to-date, universal, and public.37 The first printed newspaper appeared in 1609; within 100 years some 200 newspapers had been founded in more than 70 German cities.38 Print runs varied: around 400 copies seem to have been average, but some printers apparently produced as many as 1500 per issue, and a single press was certainly capable of printing 600 copies in a day. Indeed, newspaper printing was by far the most profitable form of activity available to book printers, with profit margins easily exceeding 500 percent.39 By the end of the seventeenth century commentators such as Caspar Stieler took printed news for granted as a source of information about the political world.40 The newspaper reader was not simply a passive consumer. Newspapers generated discussion. As Christian Weise observed in 1676, just as in the theater the audience that buys tickets feels entitled to judge the strengths or weaknesses of the actors, so people who buy newspapers feel entitled to judge those who manage the affairs of state.41 The idea of the Reich as a discrete Kommunikationsraum, or space of communication, from the sixteenth century onward ties in with findings in other areas.42 Humanist writers projected the idea of a nation constituted by the educated. Pamphleteers of the Reformation period voiced the concerns of the community, sometimes defined locally and sometimes in terms of Christianity or, following the humanists, as the nation.43 The political crises of the Reich during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the reinforcement of a realm of communication and debate. The Thirty Years’ War and then the threats posed to the Reich by France and the Ottoman Empire in the 1670s and 1680s marked a high tide of publication. These crises generated an extensive pamphlet literature that enabled readers to follow events and to form views on the motivations and performances of political actors.44 Pamphlet writers appealed to their readers as the nation. Most obviously, they were aimed at members of the extensive political class: at counselors, agents, lawyers, and the like. Yet they were also sold openly for profit, and contemporary accounts frequently emphasize the discussion of newspapers and pamphlets in inns and alehouses. Almanacs, flysheets,

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broadsheets, and printed songs further extended the range of the print medium and also its social reach. The medium also shaped the responses of governments. Territorial governments had begun to use pamphlets for propaganda purposes during the sixteenth century. To an extent this was really a discourse between governments rather than anything that could meaningfully be described as a public sphere in the sense envisaged by Habermas.45 On the other hand, by the early eighteenth century there is clear evidence that news manipulation, and the careful presentation of an official point of view, were given high priority by those who formulated policy.46 In this sense one can speak of communication within a public sphere, in the sense of a reasoning public, at a time long before that identified by Habermas.47 The universities also contributed to the public sphere of the early modern Reich. Their prime function was territorial, to provide training for the personnel of government and church. Yet they also formed part of a wider network. The division between Catholic and Protestant universities (roughly twenty of each around 1700) makes it impossible to speak of a national system.48 Furthermore, the Catholic universities were integrated into a quite strictly disciplined network, largely in the hands of the Jesuits, and much more narrowly devoted to supplying the needs of state and church.49 The situation of the Protestant universities was rather different. They too occupied a central theological role in the Lutheran (sixteen universities) and Reformed (five universities) diasporas, which extended to the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and eastern central Europe.50 However, in the Protestant universities, the much less clearly defined nature of the Protestant faith meant that the habit of debate and argument had been a characteristic from the outset and generated a different academic culture.51 The Protestant universities developed particularly important supraregional functions in theology and law. They were the main source of legal and theological opinions, for which demand escalated dramatically as the territorial governments consolidated their administrative structures and sought to extend their competence over both society and church from the 1530s onward. The Protestant legal faculties developed the principles of the public law of the Reich in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.52 Academic legal experts also played a role both in the Imperial courts of justice and the Reichstag, where they were frequently called upon to participate in policy or arbitrate and pass judgment on the actions of princes. Theological faculties also played a role in government: providing opinions on political arrangements, government decrees, and treaties was a significant element in the activities of the average theology faculty.

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The Thirty Years’ War was accompanied by such extensive printed propaganda that Johannes Burkhardt has described it as the first major media event.53 Some thirty thousand to forty thousand copies were printed of the Peace of Westphalia.54 In the century after the end of the war, furthermore, a huge literature—legal, political, and theological—was generated by the interpretation of the Peace and its implications for state, church, and society in the Reich.55 Public law became so important that in the new-style university represented by Halle from the 1690s, the legal faculty took precedence over the traditionally dominant theology faculty: law became the kind of all-embracing subject relevant to all dimensions of life that theology had previously been.56 Cumulatively, all this had important implications for the extension and consolidation of the public sphere of the Reich. By the early 1680s the press was beginning to discover the universities and the world of learning as a source of news.57 Scholars such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz began to conceive of the public as extending beyond the lecture halls of the universities to the courts and the world outside, even to women: to all who have “a desire for and love of wisdom and virtue.”58 It is difficult to be precise about the extent of the reading public in Germany at the end of the seventeenth century. However, it has been estimated that the literary public comprised perhaps some 60,000 Germans out of a population of perhaps 16 to 17 million, while newspapers may well have been read by up to 250,000.59 It was this public, largely outside the universities but often university educated, with which Christian Thomasius and others were beginning to make serious attempts to communicate around this time. The introduction of teaching in the German language was a decisive step toward greater openness.60 From that time on, the appeal to the general, educated public became a standard feature of academic and learned controversy. It is significant that toward the end of his life Thomasius presented his life work in collected form as a series of controversies. His four-volume Außerlesene Juristische Händel (1720–23) and the threevolume Gemischte Philosophische und Juristische Händel (1723–26) were in effect both his autobiography and an affirmation of the objective value of debate and controversy as such.61 Shortly afterward the more general acceptance of this principle was reflected in Gerlach Adolph Freiherr von Münchhausen’s statutes for the University of Göttingen in 1736. Academic freedom (in teaching and publication, subject only to the laws of the Reich) was justified on the grounds that “all teaching for the sake of which the academic universities are established aims to promote the public good.”62 Thinking about the Reich as a whole as a public sphere has often been inhibited by a deep ambivalence in Germany about any approach to the

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Holy Roman Empire that seeks to bring it into contact with concepts such as the nation or the state. Regardless of the wider issues raised by that, however, there is one important implication for the original conception of the public sphere as formulated by Koselleck and Habermas. Both emphasized that the public was first formed by virtue of its engagement in literature, and only later did that lead to political engagement. The evidence in fact suggests that this sequence should perhaps be reversed. The first public was formed by an engagement in theological, political, and legal issues. The most prevalent forms of reading matter before 1700 were newspapers and pamphlets. That was what created a nation or public, which was later extended (perhaps, deepened or refined) by literature. Much of what has been said about the Reich as a whole can be replicated at the level of the territories. In particular, two important studies by Esther-Beate Körber and Andreas Gestrich have illuminated a range of possibilities. Both focus on a reinterpretation of the term absolutism and on the significance of a considerable degree of communication between rulers and ruled in the early modern period. Both also explicitly reject Habermas’s assumption that the early modern period was characterized by the existence of nothing more than a representative public sphere. Körber, for example, discerns three types of Öffentlichkeit in the sixteenth-century duchy of Brandenburg-Prussia (i.e., the secularized duchy of Prussia rather than the Electorate of Brandenburg).63 The first is constituted by rulers and ruled, with rulers in constant communication with their estates. Representation was not played out in front of the people as a passive audience; the people themselves participated in representation through acts of homage, and government had to negotiate its policies with a whole spectrum of public individuals, from powerful nobles to urban representatives to village headmen. Attempts to bypass such communication by enhancing the powers of the rulers invariably met with stiff and successful resistance. Second, the clergy formed a public sphere in the sense of a body of opinion separate from government. They were centrally concerned with public issues, and government had to take their opinions into account. They fulfilled Habermas’s criteria for a public or a public sphere that could legitimate or censure government. This public also included nonclerics in so far as they were educated and capable of participating in the published discourse on any given issue. Of course, Bürgerlichkeit is an anachronistic term for the sixteenth century; what united these public persons was their commitment to a common “religious-educational ideal.”64 In its broadest sense this meant Bildung, participation in a Christian society and the promotion of its Christian objectives, which also provided the yardstick against which the actions of government could be judged.

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The third type of public or public sphere was constituted by “what is generally accessible, what can be known or used by all, regardless of whether in fact all do make use of this possibility.”65 Obviously there was no “nation” in sixteenth-century Prussia; the duchy included speakers of a whole variety of different languages, and Latin was the professional language of the educated. Nor was more than a small minority literate, still less in command of a basic stock of general knowledge—the unspoken assumptions of much modern thinking about the public sphere.66 Here, Körber suggests, the picture needs to be much more differentiated, depending on the kind of information available (for example, pamphlets, early newsletters, pictorial information communicated via flysheets, etc). There was no single public sphere of knowledge, but such a thing existed to different degrees for different kinds of information. Andreas Gestrich has examined the relationship between absolutism and Öffentlichkeit. The growing popularity of notions of ratio status around 1600 brought with them a preoccupation with the arcana imperii, the secrets or mysteries of government.67 Their significance was often enhanced by association with the divine mysteries, which once more reinforced the idea of the ruler as privy to quasi-divine “mysteries of state” and encouraged the notion that arcanum est divinum. The literature on the arcana imperii flourished during the first half of the seventeenth century and can be associated with the elaboration of the kinds of royal ritual that reached their apogee at the court of Louis XIV. It might therefore seem that this is the representative sphere that Habermas started from: rulers communicating their absolute power to their subjects by means of both words and symbols. Gestrich suggests two important qualifications. Firstly, in the German territories the doctrine of the arcana imperii came under increasing attack from about 1650.68 The deployment of cultural power, even in conjunction with hard military power, was not in itself enough to banish criticism of an obviously self-serving ruler with a corrupt court and administration. Indeed, the cult of secrecy was often criticized precisely because it was perceived to be nothing more than a veil for the selfish interests of rulers. The word “political” itself came to assume pejorative connotations. A dictionary of 1728 defined it as “distorted, fraudulent, clever, cunning, false, hypocritical,” and in 1777 Johann Christoph Adelung’s Grammatischkritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart, the most comprehensive German dictionary of the time, gave “wily, sly, clever.”69 The cult of secrecy, in other words, rapidly generated opposition. That opposition may have been powerless to overthrow the state or seriously undermine a ruler, but it often served to moderate political behavior: rulers felt constrained to take account of (public) opinion. The demand for openness—printed

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laws and accountability of rulers—played a key role in urban disturbances from Hamburg down to Basel and Zurich from the late seventeenth century onward. Secondly, it seems clear that the cult of secrecy coincided with a considerable extension of both the methods of government communications with subjects and their volume and intensity.70 The intensification of government, the aspiration to govern more and more aspects of human existence, necessitated more effective and more frequent communication between central administration and local communities. Governments promoted improvements in the communications system and profited from it. They sought to regulate the explosive growth of the printing trade and at the same time began to exploit it to communicate with their subjects and with other governments. Laws and edicts were printed and disseminated. Foreign policy and military conflicts were explained and justified in pamphlets, and efforts were made to secure the insertion of helpful, or even favorable, notices in the press. The lives of ruling dynasties—births, marriages, coronations, deaths—were communicated at length, both in elaborate public rituals and in pamphlets, broadsheets, and newspapers. And this was not merely communication de haut en bas. It was driven by the perception of a real need to secure the loyalty of subjects, to get them on the side of whatever cause was currently being pursued, or to convince them of its moral or legal righteousness. That was surely why much communicative effort was also directed at other rulers and governments.71 Like modern governments, rulers of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century wanted to be able to claim the moral high ground and to be in good standing with international opinion. At the same time, however, the simultaneous expansion in government activities with a concomitant elaboration of administrative and bureaucratic structures in effect created a new realm of arcana imperii. Governments and their bureaucratic agencies began to collect and collate information to which the public had no access but which increasingly formed the basis of policy. The kind of transparency that the modern public demands of its governments was still a long way off. In Prussia, for example, the convoluted “chancellery style” of writing, fully accessible only to insiders, was only abandoned in favor of the less ornate “common style” in 1810. When the Prussian archives were opened to scholars for the first time in the early nineteenth century, Hardenberg restricted access to anything written after 1500. Open access was only granted in the 1880s.72 It seems clear that Habermas’s model simply does not fit the German world in the two centuries before Kant. The representative public sphere involved numerous kinds of two-way communication between rulers and ruled that intensified and diversified during the course of the early modern period.73 However, the enumeration of medieval and early modern Kom-

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munikationsräume, multiple arenas or channels of communication, cannot disguise the fact that something new and different really did emerge during the eighteenth century. The print media expanded so rapidly that the aspiration to control became all but hopeless.74 It is true that individuals such as Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubarth could fall spectacularly foul of the authorities. In 1777 the Duke of Württemberg incarcerated him in the Hohenasperg prison near Stuttgart for having publicly demanded equality for the Jews, the abolition of slavery and the European soldier trade, and for having praised Joseph II’s abolition of torture and serfdom. Ten years of solitary confinement was an exceptionally brutal punishment for speaking one’s mind—but Schubarth was the exception rather than the rule.75 Others may have avoided Schubarth’s fate by moderating or disguising their views, exercising self-censorship. Yet there is also little doubt that the public grew in size and that its sense of itself strengthened over the eighteenth century. When a writer such as Johann Georg Schlosser declared that “all my writings are simply conversations conducted before or with my public,” he was both describing a new public sphere and a new kind of public career.76 Indeed, in the last two decades of the eighteenth century the extension and growing confidence of this public showed signs of undermining or at least sidelining the universities as the source of public opinion in the Reich.77 The debate about Popularität, about whether philosophy could or should reach out beyond the confines of lecture halls to society at large, was at one level a response to the highly technical systems of Kant and his successors.78 Yet it was also a response to the perceived decline of universities and their diminishing attractiveness to the young. The structural change was reinforced by a fundamental shift in emphasis in the Aufklärung. The early Aufklärung had been characterized by a positive view of the state and its functions based on a traditional understanding of natural law. According to Samuel Pufendorf, Christian Thomasius, and Christian Wolff, the individual relinquished his natural rights, the iura connata, on entering society; with certain restrictions, largely self-policed by the ruler, the prerogatives of the state took precedence over the rights of the individual. From the 1760s that view was gradually superseded by the notion of inalienable human rights or Menschenrechte, which the state was in no circumstances entitled to infringe upon.79 The prerogatives of the state were increasingly limited and criticism of the abuse of power by absolutist princes, even enlightened ones, became commonplace. The old equivalence of state and society gave way to the assertion that society was independent of the state and that the state had a duty to respect its freedom.

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On the other hand, the suggestion that something like a single public sphere might have emerged by the late eighteenth century must be qualified. Firstly, the term bürgerlich cannot be taken to mean bourgeois. Indeed, Habermas’s reliance on a purely economic foundation for his categories simply distorts the reality of both German society and German economic development in the eighteenth century.80 Bürgerlichkeit implied a view of life or an educational ideal that was not tied to a particular class. Nobles and even princes could be bürgerlich as much as non-nobles. Not all Bürger were necessarily bürgerlich in the new Enlightened sense of the term. The distinction is nicely illustrated in Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). Both Werther and his competitor Albert could be described as bürgerlich: Werther in the modern sense and Albert in the sense of a narrow-minded philistine. It is significant that the word Philister, denoting a pedantic, blinkered individual with no sense of the liberating potential of education, came into currency during the 1770s.81 Secondly, Bürgerlichkeit did not necessarily imply opposition to the state. On the contrary, many who thought of themselves as bürgerlich were functionaries or representatives of the state, either state servants, court officials, or even princes. One of the most critical late eighteenth-century assessments of princes and their courts, Über den Umgang mit Menschen of 1788, was written by the Lower Saxon nobleman Adolph Freiherr von Knigge.82 It is true that Habermas recognized the contribution made by noblemen to the early public sphere. However, his assumption that the rise of an autonomous Bürgertum on the basis of the early capitalist commercial economy meant a radical confrontation with or rejection of the aristocratic state simply does not correspond to the reality of eighteenthcentury Germany. In fact, it would be more accurate to speak of collaboration between the gebildete Stände and the state; when criticism of the state did develop it was a question of demanding a different kind of state. Those who thought of themselves as bürgerlich wanted enfranchisement, not revolution. Thirdly, the theoretical debate about a public sphere was more complex than Habermas suggested. There is no simple straight line linking Kant with Hegel and Marx. The terminology they used had fundamentally different sources and meanings. Kant’s idea of bürgerliche Gesellschaft was based on Scottish political economists’ idea “of a continually progressing and advancing civil society.”83 Marx’s vocabulary owed more to the early criticism of capitalist society by French socialists. Furthermore, the debate about the public sphere was fundamentally affected by the events of the French Revolution, which led many to a pessimistic assessment of the potential of an enlightened public.84

A Public Sphere before Kant? • 29

It is clear that Habermas’s historical projection of the origins of the public sphere needs to be amended. Yet at least some of what he claimed for the eighteenth century still holds true. But to what extent does any of the debate about his views yield insights that are relevant to any general discussion of the public sphere today? Three points seem particularly relevant. Firstly, the discovery of a long history of spheres of communication has shed light on the ways in which most societies have engaged in communicative discourse within distinct communal groups, laterally between communal groups and vertically (in both directions) between rulers and ruled. Indeed, it seems fair to conclude that the existence of such multiple communicative spheres has been a prerequisite of any successful (that is, stable and durable) society or polity. Until the twentieth century, European governments simply did not have the power to control the corporate and communal structures of society. They had no option but to communicate with them, or pay the price of revolution and downfall. Secondly, the theoretical possibility of a single public sphere was undoubtedly conceived in Europe in the eighteenth century, and it was based on an optimistic assessment of what the new print media and communications networks might achieve for society as a whole. In that sense the analogy between the early modern print and communications revolution and the contemporary electronic or Internet revolution is appropriate. At the same time, however, both the model of the print media and the model of the Internet seem to create false hopes, as neither has really created a single public sphere so far. Thirdly, however, one might ponder the outcome of those eighteenthcentury aspirations. Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant clearly believed that at some future point, however distant, society might come to comprise a single estate or class. This was to be made possible by the educational and developmental potential of the public sphere, which would come to embrace growing numbers of individuals over time. The real point of Habermas’s enquiry was to show why this ideal of a universal class (and its Marxist successor) failed. When he wrote Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit he believed that the ideal might still be realized in a final dialectical twist. Since then Habermas has moved away from his early Hegelian-Marxist fascination with totality.85 He remains constant in his Marxism, but that was increasingly combined with his growing fascination with Kant: his discourse ethics was essentially a Kantian project that linked politics to reason rather than to material conditions and productive forces. At the same time, while he has retained his fundamental commitment to the

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possibility of realizing a true public sphere, he has apparently abandoned any idea of straightforward historical legitimation in favor of a normative theory of the public sphere that does not depend on any philosophy of history.86 However, the question of the historical antecedents of the modern public sphere remains and should be at the core of the debates about the nature and validity of “Western” traditions that are so central today. Habermas’s theoretical narrative from Locke to Mill via Kant, Hegel, and Marx is only part of the full historical record. The focus on that theoretical progression led him to underestimate the communicative structures of both the early modern societies that preceded them and, perhaps, of the modern world that has unfolded since. Indeed, Habermas’s own embrace since the 1960s of more polyphonic notions of the public sphere of the late twentieth century suggests that he perhaps might not disagree with that view of his early work.87

Notes 1. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1990). 2. Manheim, Die Träger der öffentlichen Meinung. 3. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis. On Koselleck’s links with Carl Schmitt, see Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven, CT, 2003), 105–15, and William E. Scheuerman, “Unsolved Paradoxes: Conservative Political Thought in Adenauer’s Germany,” in Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology: Political and Social Theory from Nietzsche to Habermas, ed. John P. McCormick (Durham, NC, 2002), 234–40. There is an excellent exposition and critique of Koselleck’s ideas in Anthony J. La Vopa, “Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” Journal of Modern History, 64 (1992): 83–98. 4. Jürgen Habermas, “Concluding Remarks,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 463. 5. Rolf Wiggershaus, Jürgen Habermas (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2004), 38–55; and Chris Thornhill, Political Theory in Modern Germany: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2000), 130–46. 6. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, 1989). A French translation had appeared in 1978. An account of the early reception of the work is Hohendahl, “Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture: Jürgen Habermas and His Critics,” 242–80. More recent discussions of the continuing debate are Maren Richter, “‘Prädiskursive Öffentlichkeit’ im Absolutismus? Zur Forschungskontroverse über Öffentlichkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 59 (2008): 46–75, and Torsten Liesegang, Öffentlichkeit und öffentliche Meinung: Theorien von Kant bis Marx (1780–

A Public Sphere before Kant? • 31

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

1850) (Würzburg, 2004), 22–52. Also useful are Andrej Pinter, “Public Sphere and History: Historians’ Response to Habermas on the ‘Worth’ of the Past,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 28 (2004): 217–32, and Jürgen Schiewe, Öffentlichkeit: Entstehung und Wandel in Deutschland (Paderborn, 2004), 253–66. See La Vopa, “Conceiving a Public,” 98–115; Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, 1–15; T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford, 2002), 5–14; Andreas Gestrich, “The Public Sphere and the Habermas Debate,” German History 24 (2006): 414–17. Craig Calhoun, “Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 1. See interview with Detlef Horster and Willem van Reijen in Jürgen Habermas, Kleine politische Schriften I–IV (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), 516–18). Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 58–67. Ibid., 69–85. Ibid., 116–41. Ibid., 142–60. Ibid., 178–95. Ibid., 195–209. Calhoun, “Introduction,” 32; and Pinter, “Public Sphere and History,” 218. Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 423–25. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1700–1815 (Munich, 1987), 303–31. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York, 1958); Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, MA, 1953); J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London, 1967); John Brewer, “Party Ideology and Popular Politics, and ‘Commercialization and Politics,’” in The Birth of a Consumer Society, eds. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (London, 1983), 197–262; John Money, Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760–1800 (Manchester, 1977); Franklin Kopitzsch, Grundzüge einer Sozialgeschichte der Aufklärung in Hamburg und Altona (Hamburg, 1982); and Otto Dann, “Die Anfänge politischer Vereinsbildung in Deutschland,” in Soziale Bewegung und politische Verfassung: Beiträge zur Geschichte der modernen Welt, eds. Ulrich Engelhardt, Volker Sellin, and Horst Stuke (Stuttgart, 1976), 197–232. Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 294–304. Harold Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 164. Ibid., 168. Schiewe, Öffentlichkeit, 44. See also Liesegang, Öffentlichkeit und öffentliche Meinung, 22–52. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 101; and Ursula Goldenbaum, Appell an das Publikum: Die öffentliche Debatte in der deutschen Aufklärung, 1687–1796, eds. Frank Grunert, Peter Weber, Gerda Heinrich, Brigitte Erker, and Winfried Siebers (Berlin, 2004), 109. Schiewe, Öffentlichkeit, 28–34. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 47–57.

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29. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion—Our Social Skin (Chicago, 1984), 64 and 94. For a historical application of this idea, see Simone Schinz, Sitte, Moral, Anstand und das Phänomen “Öffentliche Meinung” im England des 18. Jahrhunderts (Remscheid, 2004). 30. Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der frühen Neuzeit: Eine historische Fallstudie über die Durchsetzung neuer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (Frankfurt am Main, 1991). A fourth edition appeared in 2006. 31. Ibid., 21–23 and 560. 32. Brendan Dooley, The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture (Baltimore, 1999), 114–54. 33. Wolfgang Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur: Reichspost und Kommunikationsrevolution in der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen, 2003). 34. Ibid., 687. See also Wolfgang Behringer, “Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept,” German History 24 (2006): 333–74. 35. For example, between 1615 and 1695 the travel time between Hamburg and Augsburg decreased by 1.5 hours per annum; between 1800 and 2000 the decrease was only just over 35 minutes per annum. See Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur, 664–65. 36. Wolfgang Behringer, “‘Die Welt in einen anderen Model gegossen’: Das frühmoderne Postwesen als Motor der Kommunikationsrevolution,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 53 (2002): 424–33. 37. Ibid., 428; and Gestrich, “The Public Sphere,” 419–24. 38. Thomas Schröder, “The Origins of the German Press,” in The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe, eds. Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron (London, 2001), 123–50. There were numerous handwritten antecedents of the printed journals. 39. Ibid., 133. 40. Holger Böning, Welteroberung durch ein neues Publikum: Die deutsche Presse und der Weg der Aufklärung. Hamburg und Altona als Beispiel (Bremen, Germany, 2002), 134– 35 and 152–87. 41. Andreas Gestrich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit: Politische Kommunikation in Deutschland zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1994), 108–9. 42. Maximilian Lanzinner, “Kommunikationsraum Region und Reich,” in Kommunikation und Medien in der Frühen Neuzeit, eds. Johannes Burkhardt and Christine Werkstetter (Munich, 2005), 227–37; and Michael North, “Das Reich als kommunikative Einheit,” in Kommunikation und Medien in der Frühen Neuzeit, eds. Johannes Burkhardt and Christine Werkstetter (Munich, 2005), 337–47. 43. Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der frühen Neuzeit, 377–89. 44. Georg Schmidt, “Das Reich und Europa in deutschsprachigen Flugschriften: Überlegungen zur räsonierenden Öffentlichkeit und politischen Kultur im 17. Jahrhundert,” in “Europa” im 17. Jahrhundert: Ein politischer Mythos und seine Bilder, eds. Klaus Bußmann and Elke Anna Werner (Stuttgart, 2004), 119–48; and Martin Wrede, “Der Kaiser, das Reich, die deutsche Nation—und ihre ‘Feinde’: Natiogenese, Reichsidee und der ‘Durchbruch des Politischen’ im Jahrhundert nach dem Westfälischen Frieden,” Historische Zeitschrift 280 (2005): 90–92. Axel Gotthard, “Vormoderne Lebensräume: Annäherungsversuch an die Heimaten des frühneuzeitlichen Mitteleuropäers,” Historische Zeitschrift 276 (2003): 49, sounds a salutary note of caution regarding the limits of literacy. 45. Wolfgang Burgdorf, Reichskonstitution und Nation: Verfassungsreformprojekte für das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation im politischen Schrifttum von 1648 bis 1806 (Mainz, 1998), 35–37. 46. Gestrich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit, 201–34.

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47. Böning, Welteroberung durch ein neues Publikum, 186–87. 48. Anton Schindling, Bildung und Wissenschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit, 2nd ed. (Munich, 1999), 49–62. 49. Harald Dickerhof, “Die katholischen Universitäten im Heiligen Römischen Reich deutscher Nation des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Universitäten und Aufklärung, ed. Notker Hammerstein (Göttingen, 1995), 22–25. 50. Anton Schindling, “Die protestantischen Universitäten im Heiligen Römischen Reich deutscher Nation des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Hammerstein, Universitäten und Aufklärung, 11–13. 51. Goldenbaum, Appell an das Publikum, 11–12. 52. The best introductions are Hanns Gross, Empire and Sovereignty: A History of the Public Law Literature in the Holy Roman Empire, 1599–1804 (Chicago, 1973), and Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland, I: Reichspublizistik und Policeywissenschaft 1600–1800 (Munich, 1988). 53. Johannes Burkhardt, Der Dreißigjährige Krieg (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), 225–44. 54. Konrad Repgen, “Der Westfälische Friede und die zeitgenössische Öffentlichkeit,” Historisches Jahrbuch 117 (1997): 80–82. 55. Bernd Matthias Kremer, Der Westfälische Friede in der Deutung der Aufklärung: Zur Entwicklung des Verfassungsverständnisses im Hl. Röm. Reich Deutscher Nation vom Konfessionellen Zeitalter bis ins späte 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1989). 56. Notker Hammerstein, “Universitäten und gelehrte Institutionen von der Aufklärung zum Neuhumanismus und Idealismus,” in Res publica litteraria: Ausgewählte Aufsätze zur frühneuzeitlichen Bildungs-, Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte, eds. Ulrich Muhlack and Gerrit Walther (Berlin, 2000), 218–19. 57. Böning, Welteroberung durch ein neues Publikum, 87–91 and 188–219. 58. Schiewe, Öffentlichkeit, 37 and 79–84. 59. Alberto Martino, “Barockpoesie, Publikum und Verbürgerlichung der literarischen Intelligenz,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 1 (1976): 111; and Martin Welke, “Gemeinsame Lektüre und frühe Formen von Gruppenbildungen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert: Zeitungslesen in Deutschland,” in Lesegesellschaften und bürgerliche Emanzipation: Ein europäischer Vergleich, ed. Otto Dann (Munich, 1981), 29–30. On population figures and their uncertainties, see Christof Dipper, Deutsche Geschichte 1648–1789 (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), 42–46. 60. Schiewe, Öffentlichkeit, 136–37. 61. Goldenbaum, Appell an das Publikum, 165. See also Martin Gierl, Pietismus und Aufklärung: Theologische Polemik und die Kommunikationsreform der Wissenschaft am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1997). 62. Hammerstein, “Universitäten und gelehrte Institutionen,” 222. 63. Esther-Beate Körber, Öffentlichkeiten der frühen Neuzeit: Teilnehmer, Formen, Institutionen und Entscheidungen öffentlicher Kommunikation im Herzogtum Preußen von 1525 bis 1618 (Berlin, 1998). 64. Ibid., 13. 65. Ibid., 15. 66. Ibid., 18. 67. Anja Victorine Hartmann, “Arcana Imperii und Theatrum Mundi: Überlegungen zur Bedeutung des Geheimnisses in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 53 (2002): 434–43; Michael Stolleis, Arcana imperii und Ratio status: Bemerkungen zur politischen Theorie des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1980); and Gestrich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit, 34–54. 68. Gestrich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit, 63–74.

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69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

The quotations appear in Hartmann, “Arcana Imperii und Theatrum Mundi,” 438. Gestrich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit, 135–200. Burgdorf, Reichskonstitution und Nation, 35–37. Cornelia Vismann, Akten: Medientechnik und Recht, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 2001), 204–66. Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2005), 252–93. If one includes all forms of nonverbal communication or symbolic communication, the same point could be made about the Middles Ages. See Gerd Althoff, “Zeichen, Rituale, Werte: Eine Einleitung,” in Zeichen, Rituale, Werte: Internationales Kolloquium des Sonderforschungsbereichs 496 an der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster, ed. Gerd Althoff (Münster, 2004), 9–16. For the widest possible definition of public spaces, see Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds., Zwischen Gotteshaus und Taverne: Öffentliche Räume in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Cologne, 2004). Holger Böning, Periodische Presse: Kommunikation und Aufklärung—Hamburg und Altona als Beispiel (Bremen, 2002), 158–62. Dieter Breuer, Geschichte der literarischen Zensur in Deutschland (Heidelberg, 1982), 134–39. Johan van der Zande, Bürger und Beamte: Johann Georg Schlosser, 1739–1799 (Stuttgart, 1986), 44. Hammerstein, “Universitäten und gelehrte Institutionen,” 230–32; Stolleis, Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland, I, 331–33; and Andreas Frei, “Die publizistische Bühne der Aufklärung: Zeitschriften als Schlüssel zur Öffentlichkeit,” in Kant als politischer Schriftsteller, ed. Theo Stammen (Würzburg, 1999), 29–42. Christoph Böhr, Philosophie für die Welt: Die Popularphilosophie der deutschen Spätaufklärung im Zeitalter Kants (Stuttgart, 2003), 86–104. Joachim Whaley, “The Transformation of the Aufklärung: From the Idea of Power to the Power of Ideas,” in Cultures of Power in Europe During the Long Eighteenth Century, eds. H. M. Scott and Brendan Simms (Cambridge, 2007), 158–79. Howard Williams, Kant’s Political Philosophy (Oxford, 1983), 238; Blanning, The Culture of Power, 11–12; and Ute Daniel, “How Bourgeois was the Public Sphere of the Eighteenth Century? Or: Why it is Important to Historicise Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit,” Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert 26 (2002): 9–17. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 7 (Leipzig, 1889), cols. 1826–28. Daniel, “How Bourgeois was the Public Sphere,” 15. Williams, Kant’s Political Philosophy, 238. Williams’s criticism of Herbert Marcuse’s view of Kant is also applicable to Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Liesegang, Öffentlichkeit und öffentliche Meinung, 238–50. Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” 435–36. Pinter, “Public Sphere and History,” 218. Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere.”

Chapter 2

KUNIGUNDE OF BAVARIA AND THE “CONQUEST OF REGENSBURG” Politics, Gender, and the Public Sphere in 1489

Sarah Westphal



Archduchess Kunigunde of Austria, Duchess of Bavaria-Munich through marriage, was born in Wiener Neustadt in 1465.1 She was the fourth of five children born to the Habsburg Emperor Friedrich III and his consort Eleonore, the sister of the reigning king of Portugal. Kunigunde and her older brother, Maximilian, were the only siblings to survive to adulthood. Maximilian became one of the most celebrated personages of the era, first as the German king and then as Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. To literary and cultural historians Maximilian is especially known for his Gedechtnus, a concept he himself used to refer to the massive literary, historical, genealogical, and image projects to memorialize and exalt his reign and his Habsburg ancestors.2 Included in the Gedechtnus were three autobiographies. One of them, known as the Weisskunig, narrates the marriage of Maximillian’s parents, his birth and boyhood years, his education, and his marriage to the heiress of Burgundy; but the subject’s sister had no place in Weisskunig’s “dynastic-genealogical tradition,” focused on the male lineage.3 Only the tomb memorial that Maximilian created for himself in Innsbruck offered such a place. It includes an over-life-sized statue of Kunigunde holding an open book. As in Maximilian’s autobiographies,

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the representation of her is an intriguing mixture of the real and the ideal: Kunigunde’s facial features are recognizably her own but her body is slim and youthful in conformity with romance canons of ideal female beauty.4 Surprisingly enough, events in Kunigunde’s life were noted by her contemporaries in Flugschriften or pamphlets, a medium that is often discussed in connection with the emergence of an early modern public sphere. Maximilian himself pioneered the use of pamphlets to justify and explain his governmental actions and policies to affected constituencies.5 But the pamphlets containing fragments of Kunigunde’s life, though sympathetic to the Habsburgs, did not originate with Maximilian or his government.6 They arose from Regensburg, one of the dynamic southern German cities where new media, or new applications of traditional media, brought about what might be called the first information revolution. Hans Weiss, who identifies himself as a Gerichtsschreiber, or notary, in Regensburg, probably wrote the pamphlet with which I am concerned.7 Dated to July 1489, it was composed when Kunigunde was only about twenty-four years old (she died in 1520).8 The pamphlet text is a poem in couplets that its editor, Rochus von Liliencron, called Ein Spruch wie Herzog Albrecht Regensburg eingenommen hat. Modern scholarship cites it simply as Eroberung Regensburgs (The Conquest of Regensburg). As the title indicates, it mainly concerns actions taken by the Bavarian duke, Albrecht IV, to wrest the imperial city of Regensburg from the Reich and bring it under Bavarian sovereignty. Albrecht IV was also Kunigunde’s husband, and the unusual circumstances of their marriage are recounted as part of the much longer political narrative. The marriage episode takes up little more than 100 lines of this 1,034-line poem, but as the first public account, it constitutes a remarkable, contemporary witness to the life of a secular female personage in contrast to more numerous and more conventional narratives of the lives of saints or holy women.9 A pamphlet is hardly the first place one would expect information about the life circumstances of an early modern noblewoman. Pamphlets were written to inform and fuel public debate on political or theological issues. Johannes Schwitalla defines their content or subject matter as immediately relevant to the lives of the addressees. They deal with pressing, current issues, often in the midst of ongoing events that they seek to influence. Pamphlet authors engage controversy and make their political standpoint clear in the way they present facts or events. Their rhetoric is often sophisticated and always tendentious. Pamphlets are intended to change people’s minds and incite them to act or strategically refrain from action.10 Rolf Wilhelm Brednich refers to “das publizistische Anliegen,” or the intention to inform a circle of recipients as quickly as possible concerning events or developments.11 Though typically aimed at

Politics, Gender, and the Public Sphere • 37

the “extensive political class” consisting of “counselors, agents, lawyers, and the like,” pamphlets circulated beyond their primary readership and were “sold openly for profit,” posted in public places, and discussed in gathering places such as inns or taverns.12 This unrestricted availability corresponds to the astonishing incidence of pamphlets in the German lands. Specialists speak of a tidal wave of pamphlets in the reformation and revolution years from 1520 to 1525. By then, printing had become the norm and print media could be used by just about anyone literate enough to publicize a solution to a religious or social problem. Pamphlets in handwritten form preceded and coexisted with printed ones. If one assumes a minimum number of about three thousand pamphlets from these years, multiplied by one thousand copies per printing, the yield is 3 million pamphlets. The entire population of the German lands at that time was about 13 million.13 In his essay in this volume, Joachim Whaley discusses the importance of pamphlets and related media, such as almanacs, flysheets, broadsheets, and printed songs, as evidence for an early modern form of the public sphere, on the levels of both the Reich and the territories. The theme of a contemporary noblewoman’s life does not fit naturally with the up-to-the-minute subject matter or quarrelsome tone of the pamphlets. It is at odds with media that was in (literate) public hands in the years before 1525. In the early modern world, women’s public roles were limited and publicity was avoided all together. The absence of Kunigunde from the official life stories of her brother Maximilian is a result of this avoidance. Of course, royal women were in the public purview in carefully controlled ways, discharging official roles and duties, for example; or at special times, such as major life transitions. Marriage was one such public event. The marriages of women of the ruling elite were major diplomatic undertakings entailing exchanges of vast wealth, the alliance of lineages and the governance of territories, and the formation of political networks among families involving particularly the male members.14 They were transacted with public acts and proclamations by a multitude of players. But everything was orchestrated from the top down. For a woman to lose control of her representation in a medium that could penetrate all the way to the tavern was to lose control of herself—her honor, her political agency, or her credibility. Kunigunde’s marriage to Albrecht IV, however, deviated from this normal, top-down pattern and for that reason was subject to a kind of publicity that neither she nor her guardians could control. Thus the questions this pamphlet text poses are significant for understanding the more general problem of the significations of gender in the early modern public sphere (especially in urban settings) and indeed for the early records of secular women’s lives. What

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was the author’s “publizistisches Anliegen,” that is, his “journalistic partisanship or issue of public concern,” and what circle of recipients was he trying to reach?15 Why did an episode from the life of a noble personage who had no “official” biography make its way into pamphlet media? How did gender and class figure in a discourse of crisis in the year 1489? To answer these questions we must first focus on the main part of the text, its actual political argument. Eroberung Regensburgs meets all of the criteria of tone and subject matter for a pamphlet text. It narrates the circumstances in which the city of Regensburg elected to stop being a free city, answerable only to the Reich, and come under the jurisdiction of the Bavarian duke, Albrecht IV, whose territory completely surrounded it. Or, to state it another way, the poem tells of how Albrecht succeeded in taking Regensburg away from the direct control of Emperor Friedrich III, soon to be his father-in-law, without firing a shot. The text has extraordinarily detailed information about Albrecht’s strategy to assert control over the office of the Schultheiß, or judge-administrator of the city, by stating that it had been on loan from his ancestors to the city and that he was redeeming the pledge.16 The city received much-needed cash from this transaction. The Schultheiß office entailed important legal powers as well as control of the police.17 Albrecht’s next step was to build up the city’s secular court system, at the same time diminishing the extensive jurisdiction of the law court of the bishop of Regensburg. As in many German cities, the ecclesiastical court was in demand for “every imaginable kind of sinful behavior,” including matters relating to marriage, usury, breaking of oaths, property, or money.18 The narrator in fact refers to the Regensburg Probstgericht, or bishop’s court, as “a great secular law court.”19 In addition, there were internal tensions between the city council and the average residents over access to markets and the heavy taxes imposed by the Reich. Albrecht and his agents in Regensburg knew how to appeal to both sides of the issues, with the result that the council, newly expanded to include representatives from the guilds, voted to submit entirely to Albrecht’s rule.20 At the time of the pamphlet’s writing, Emperor Friedrich was refusing to accept the loss of Regensburg to the Reich; the Church would not permit city officials to take the sacrament; and the mood in the city was fitful and anxious—which is well reflected in the tone of the text. The residents feared a siege. The moment of composition is no later than 1489, in the middle of the standoff, which would not be resolved until 1492 when Albrecht backed down in order to avoid a full-blown war.21 Albrecht’s attempt to rationalize his territory by seizing what the narrator calls “the heart of Bavaria” from the Reich and bringing it under his administrative control makes good sense from the standpoint of early modern statecraft.22 In the judgment of history, Albrecht—called “the

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Wise”—was a forward-looking and effective ruler. But the narrator is bitterly opposed to it. He sees no merit or truth in Albrecht’s claims to the Schultheißamt or city judgeship.23 He is particularly offended by Albrecht’s restructuring of the justice system and affirms what he believes to be the impeccable legitimacy and reliable fairness of the bishop’s Probstgericht.24 He is even more incensed by the alleged corruption of the duke’s appointed mayor and chief judge, Hans Fuxstainer.25 The narrator presents a detailed, carefully observed account of what he considered to be the unscrupulous actions of Albrecht’s right-hand man. His shrewd perceptions and honed skepticism suggest a man with legal experience. He accuses Fuxstainer of laundering bribes and improper gifts by channeling them through his wife,26 compromising the objectivity of the bench by advising the parties in a lawsuit, especially the ones he favors,27 and eliminating the right of appeal to the Kammergericht, which he refers to as the emperor’s court, something that had been possible in the formerly dominant canonical system.28 The narrator also depicts the punishments, aptly called wandel or catastrophic change of fortune, inflicted by Fuxstainer’s enforcers on those who attempted to stand on the rights that had been guaranteed in the days before the change of system.29 For example, a woman has her household goods seized when she tries to appeal a judgment from Fuxstainer’s court. To get them back she is forced to pay a fine, most of which she must borrow from Jewish lenders.30 The issue of appeal became so acute that Albrecht was compelled to intervene by allowing his own ducal council to act as a higher court.31 The narrator, however, exposes the lack of objectivity in the process by pointing out that Fuxstainer, as an advisor to the ducal Rat, has improper influence even over the appeals.32 The narrator’s criticism of Fuxstainer and the other agents of the duke charged with bringing the ecclesiastical institutions and urban administration under their control is severe and unremitting. When writing about Duke Albrecht’s own person or direct actions he is more circumspect, at least superficially. He seems to stay within the conventions of speaking out against a ruler who shows poor judgment. Early in the text the narrator wishes that Albrecht had drowned in his first bath. But he instantly restrains himself, as “I, too, am an average man [one with no political power] of his territory [Bavaria]”—which at the time of the pamphlet’s writing included Regensburg.33 He further states that he dare not talk about the city’s submission to Albrecht, indicating some kind of restraint on public discourse, even though it is public knowledge.34 His complaints about Albrecht encompass symbolic actions, such as taking a bell from St. Emmeram’s (Benedictine) monastery for the Munich Frauenkirche,35 and unfair financial burdens imposed on the monasteries,36 the peasants

40 • Sarah Westphal

of the Regensburg bishop,37 and even Albrecht’s own Bavarian nobility.38 Albrecht’s plan to construct a new palace in the city comes under attack for reasons of social justice: the duke is wrong to require Fronarbeit or unpaid labor and does not offer compensation for houses demolished in the leather workers’ district.39 The narrator’s most damaging lines are reserved for the context of Albrecht’s taxes and tolls on the monasteries and entail a historical allusion. To him, Albrecht recalls the last pagan emperor, Julian (the Apostate), “who inflicted great crimes on Christendom” by trying to reinstate the false gods of antiquity; the narrator fears for the duke’s soul. A reader familiar with the medieval legends of Julian would have perceived a painful sting. Yet the author deftly turns even this criticism in a positive direction by expressing the pious wish that God will send Albrecht an angel for his betterment.40 The narrator tells the story of the marriage of Albrecht and Kunigunde early in the text, before he begins the narration of the crisis in Regensburg. He legitimates his argument about the marriage with a variation on what Joan Wallach Scott calls “the marriage analogy” in political discourse: Albrecht’s “taking” of Kunigunde against the will of her father is analogous to his taking of Regensburg from the Reich.41 Many other pamphlet writers compare the taking of a city in a military sense to the “taking” of a woman through rape or abduction or trickery.42 But this author moves beyond metaphor to observe the analogy in real life, and he does not like what he sees. Thus, the earliest telling of the story of Kunigunde’s marriage frames the journalistic partisanship of the text as a whole. In the eyes of the narrator, the story of the marriage boils down to theft through deception, with the naive compliance of the stolen bride compared to the naive residents of Regensburg in the implicit logic of the analogy. The chronological arrangement of the narrative makes the rhetoric of the marriage analogy especially clear. The earliest events the narrator mentions occurred in Regensburg in 1485; the vote of the city council to submit to Albrecht happened in October 1486; and one of the latest actions of which the narrator was aware was Maximilian’s visit to Munich in the early summer of 1489. But even though the wedding ceremony took place on 2 January 1487, in the middle of this time line, the narrator places it near the opening of the poem to frame and foreshadow the entire political story. The marriage story establishes the legitimacy of the narrator’s case against Albrecht, despite the actual chronology of events, which otherwise are carefully, even minutely observed. The story, according to the author, goes like this: Albrecht and his brother, Duke Georg of Bavaria-Landshut, are anticipating the death of Emperor Friedrich and both hope “to increase their possessions” at the expense of the empire.43 Albrecht “got up and danced over to Innsbruck

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where he knew he would find Kunigunde staying with Duke Sigmund.”44 He marries her there, although they are not social equals, as the narrator sees it. She is an exalted lady and the daughter of an exalted emperor and, moreover, she is intended for a king in foreign lands, a much higher man than Albrecht. The author is the first source for one of the stories about Kunigunde that would become a traditional element of her biography, namely, that Friedrich intended to marry her to the Turkish sultan, “thereby to increase Christendom / and the greater part of the world / would henceforth be counted as Christian / Duke Albrecht prevented it all.”45 This plan to convert the Turks through marriage fits with Friedrich’s grandiose visions of the role of his lineage in the history of Christendom and has been regarded by some historians as factual.46 According to an early modern biography of Kunigunde, the sultan in question was Mehmed the Conqueror, the perceived archenemy of the Christian faith, who shook the Empire to its foundations when he conquered Constantinople in 1453.47 This identity may seem doubtful, as Kunigunde was only about nine years old when Mehmed died in May 1481, probably a victim of poisoning by his son Bayezid.48 And yet, the years of planning required for the transitional moment of a daughter of a great dynasty were already under way when she was still an infant.49 Bayezid, though reigning when Kunigunde was more mature, seems an unlikely candidate for conversion through marriage to a Christian princess, due to his zeal for his religion and his ascetic way of life. Babinger pointedly contrasts “the freethinking father” and “the mystical, bigoted son.”50 But the exact identity of the desired Turkish bridegroom is less important here than the journalistic project of the author who accuses Albrecht of subverting the cherished goal of the Empire and of preventing the spread of Christianity “to the majority [of people] in the world” by crossing up Friedrich’s marriage plans for Kunigunde—a serious accusation indeed because, as the author states, Albrecht will have to answer not only to the Empire but to God.51 A subtler goal is achieved by the tacit parallel between Kunigunde as the hoped for agent of the conversion of the Turks and Maximilian as the hoped for agent of the reconquest of Jerusalem, a destiny created for Maximilian in the many political songs and pamphlets that make his deeds their subject matter. A second accusation is brought against Albrecht in what would become another standard story about the marriage. It is that he forged a document—ein brieflein—giving Friedrich’s permission for the marriage to occur. Within the political journalism of the text, this allegation sets down the damaging theme of Albrecht’s educated craftiness that he used so well in redeeming the city judgeship from pawn.52 Albrecht had some years of university training in Italy, as he was a younger son and originally

42 • Sarah Westphal

destined for the Church. The author, himself an educated man, faults Albrecht for his “craftiness and book learning”—his list: “He acquired her through craftiness / since he is an educated man / by fabricating a letter and writing it down / to manage the marriage himself / as if the Emperor had done it personally / that is no way for a prince to act!”53 Though hardly an unknown method of late medieval and early modern statecraft, forgery is a serious accusation when made in public. But more significant is the author’s whistle-blowing, his embrace of his right to censure based on a literal rhetoric of the archive, his suspicion of forgeries and fakes in written instruments, and his eagerness to bring it to public attention.54 The marriage to Kunigunde confirms the indictment of Albrecht as a forger, a thief, and an apostate—terms that express what the narrator is not willing to say outright in his direct comments on Albrecht’s person and actions. By contrast, the efforts of Maximilian to reconcile Albrecht and his father-in-law, Emperor Friedrich, are presented in a positive light. Kunigunde is constructed in the text as not only the trophy, along with Regensburg, in Albrecht’s high-stakes political game; once married, she also signifies the bond between the opponents Maximilian and Albrecht—the Reich and Bavaria. Married noblewomen’s potential to muster the influence or interventions of men in their natal family or family networks to advance husbands’ political or economic goals is a well-understood topic in early modern women’s history. For the central European territories, it is documented in the Czech and German letters of the Rožmberk sisters from fifteenth-century Bohemia.55 This narrator thus affirms his culture’s assumptions about married noblewomen’s political capabilities arising through familial roles. Yet his way of doing so is more symbolic than representational. He reports the historical fact that in 1489, not long after the wedding, Albrecht traveled to Ulm to meet Maximilian and negotiate a resolution to the complex situation in which he found himself. The narrator gives no hint that Kunigunde herself promoted or facilitated this or any meeting between her brother and her husband. Nor is she shown as an actor in the scenes they share. Rather, she is the signifier by means of which the two rulers maneuvered for advantage over each other without actually engaging the issues that divided them. In a short, dramatic dialogue the narrator constructs what he believes the two would have said to each other. The narrator has Albrecht open the dialogue by presenting himself as the husband of Maximilian’s sister—sotto voce, someone who might expect a substantial dowry: “He spoke first: / [saying that] he was his royal majesty’s brother-in-law.”56 Maximilian, however, does not take the cue, or, as the poet says: “The King paid little attention to his point.”57 But he does promise to come to Munich in the near future to visit not Albrecht

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but his own sister: “The king said he would not have to wait for him long / he would ride to Munich himself, to his sister.”58 Maximilian also stands firm on the issue of Regensburg, requiring Albrecht to return it to the Reich, adding that “and for the sake of his sister the matter would be ended,” meaning there would be no reprisals or punishments.59 This threat or concession closes the dialogue in which Kunigunde triangulates the relations of power between her husband and her brother but plays no direct role. The text discloses that the anxious residents of Regensburg looked upon the meeting of the brothers-in-law as a sign that their differences would be settled and that they would be safe under the banner of Bavaria. The narrator, however, points out that these hopes are false.60 He underscores his pessimism by stating what he regards to be the authentic reasons for Maximilian’s visit in Munich based, as he tells us, on information he had gathered in Innsbruck, presumably through a Habsburg information network.61 First, Maximilian was enjoined by Emperor Friedrich to make peace between Albrecht and his younger brothers over a contested inheritance. Thus, Maximilian is presented as the peacemaker in the internal or heimlich affairs of Albrecht’s own territory.62 And second, the king was on a wholly private mission—heimlich in another sense—to visit his sister, whom he had not seen “in eighteen years / or more.” 63 And in fact, the narrator creates his concept of the visit in Munich from this second, familial sense of the word, focusing exclusively on the private meeting between Kunigunde and Maximilian. In so doing he attempts to unlink the public sphere of politics and the private realm of the family in a world in which family power and political power were still commensurate. The scene gives us a final glimpse of Kunigunde, now as the center of a reductive private sphere consisting of the mother-child dyad along with the brother who had been absent since her own childhood.64 As the narrator frames it, Maximilian stayed in Munich. These lines can be translated as: “King Maximilian and his courtiers were in the ancient castle for five days with Lady Kunigunde and her child; together they did many things which were not in the public eye.” 65 The child mentioned by the narrator is historically factual. She was Kunigunde’s firstborn, Sidonia, who was about one year old at the time of Maximilian’s visit. What the narrator does not say—perhaps it was not public information in far off Regensburg—is that at the time of the visit, Kunigunde was in the last month of pregnancy with her second child, Sybilla, born on 16 June 1489.66 Unlike the scene between Albrecht and Maximilian, the narrator does not imagine what they did or said; the private family grouping is an iconographic moment in the text that functions as a screen beyond which the public cannot peer. The royal entourage, however, seems conceptually misplaced

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or dramatically unnecessary in this scene of the king relaxing in the familial intimacy of mother and child. Yet the narrator underscores its presence by rhyming the Middle High German words gesind and kind—courtiers and child—in lines 107 and 108. It is as if the narrator, or the discourse of the pamphlet medium, cannot quite grasp Maximilian alone, as a private individual without his courtiers and thus wholly removed from the public sphere of the court. The absence of Albrecht in this setting reinforces the “publizistisches Anliegen,” or journalistic partisanship of the text, as a warning to the people of Regensburg; namely what transpired in Munich with Kunigunde was private and familial, heimlich, not related to issues of public concern. The average people of the city should not look upon it as a hopeful sign that the crisis would come to a peaceful end. What the siblings did or said in Munich is the only evocation of privacy in the text. Everything else in this text is presented as public (open, shared, even performed) knowledge. The text begins with lines in which the author states that his disclosures are public knowledge: “Now hear one and all, what I have to say: / it is not hidden, but clear as day.”67 These first lines of the text evoke an oral performance or recitation and thus underscore the open, public character of what will be reported. Couplet texts such as this one were intended not only for silent reading but also for performance through reading aloud or even chanting from memory in public settings in the traditions of medieval Reimsprecherkunst. Public performance fostered the propagandistic goals of a pamphlet text by making the author’s views known, creating an emotional response among the listeners, or forming a political consensus.68 The text has other indications of a political culture based on oral discourse, for example, the author’s frequent references to what people are saying.69 He sometimes reveals his sources of oral intelligence: his host or tavern keeper in Regensburg;70 a Bavarian nobleman who brings intelligence from far-away Cologne;71 or a witness to the measures taken in the bishop’s court to block Fuxstainer’s legal reforms.72 The narrator himself hears, or hears reports of, two of Fuxstainer’s public orations.73 He concedes that they are instrumental in turning public opinion to favor Bavaria, or as he states it, in taking thousands of people—“vil tausent man”—away from the Reich.74 Writing is also important in the struggle to control public opinion in Regensburg, but, as reflected here, written texts are not always to be trusted. This conviction is implied in relation to Albrecht’s imputed forgery of the Emperor’s letter of permission. Written texts are also depicted in the context of public discourse. In a noteworthy passage in the poem, the narrator describes his own encounter with a broadsheet. As he tells it, he found a brief or broadsheet fixed with four nails to the wall by a table in his Schenkhaus, or tavern. He goes on to reveal its polemical con-

Politics, Gender, and the Public Sphere • 45

tents, namely, that Regensburg should not be the emperor’s subject—lies, he contends, of the sort that only an educated man could make. The source, he concludes, must be Fuxstainer. Moreover, he tells us that the same broadsheet has turned up all over the empire in the “large” public sphere.75 Thus, even the written and publicly visible text is figured almost as the narrator’s adversary in a forensic debate—he talks back to it, condemns its unreliability, assesses its impact, exposes its hidden agenda, and asserts the bad character of its author. The emergence of an early modern public sphere is commonly associated with the rise of print, both word and image. But because of their early date, pamphlets such as the Eroberung Regensburgs had to be circulated in manuscript form if they were to be received as texts. Johannes Schwitalla demonstrates that texts intended to influence public opinion, ones with all of the earmarks of political pamphlets, like Eroberung Regensburgs, were not regularly printed until after 1520. The decade from 1510 to 1520 saw the transition of propagandistic writing into the print medium.76 Schwitalla emphasizes the importance of the handwritten precursors of the printed pamphlet, but he does not discuss in any detail how texts produced in rather small numbers—far smaller than the printings of one thousand he estimates for pamphlets around 1520—could influence people’s thoughts or actions on a broad social or geographical scale.77 One answer, as illustrated by the tavern scene, lies with what can be called the political culture of oral discourse in which writing, reading, and speaking were fluidly interconnected. Thus, the public impact of nonprint texts should be theorized within a large and complex network of oral communications—orations, entertainments, reading aloud, professional and personal contacts, or what people are seeing and saying in the market or alehouse—in which writing played a direct or indirect role. Written texts could be propagated by being posted, read aloud, or recalled from memory in any situation of speaking. Nor did printing eliminate the manuscript reproduction of pamphlet literature. In fact, as Schwitalla notes, “transitional forms between printed and handwritten versions of a single text” were common in the sixteenth century. Manuscripts served as a fallback to disseminate politically sensitive information when printed texts were not available; for example, Ulrich von Hutten’s “Expostulatio” against Erasmus was passed about in numerous handwritten copies in Basel and Zurich when its publication was delayed.78 It is difficult to determine the exact social identity of the intended recipients for Eroberung Regensburgs. Clearly the author was hoping to reach several audiences. The invocation in the first line, “Now hear, one and all,”79 interpolates listeners, an audience who is hearing the text, but their location, both social and physical, is unmarked. The assumption

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that the text was intended for oral delivery is complicated by the fact that similar phrases requiring the attention of an audience abound in medieval writing. They are conventions of textuality as well as traces of oral performance. Therefore the “you” whose attention is required can include a group of readers who were secondary in the sense that they were removed in time from the crisis of 1489. The existing manuscripts of Eroberung Regensburgs give some insight into who these readers were, as I will discuss at the end of this chapter. The identity of the primary audience becomes more distinct at the end of the poem, where the narrator appeals directly to Maximilian and Emperor Friedrich on behalf of “average people, the urban rank and file” in Regensburg. He fashions himself as their apologist and defender, explaining that they regret their actions against the empire.80 We might take these appeals to distant rulers as largely rhetorical and not part of an “authentic” circle of recipients, because there is no evidence the text or its contents ever reached their ears or eyes. Habsburg interests and supporters, however, are implied in this appeal to their visible heads—people similar to the narrator’s informants in Innsbruck who provided the intelligence about Maximilian’s reasons for going to Munich. The city itself is also an intended recipient, as in the account of Maximilian’s Munich visit, with its warning to Regensburg not to be sanguine about the resolution of the crisis.81 In one passage the narrator directly admonishes the average people of Regensburg—“you average people with no political clout, take heed”—to be wary of Fuxstainer’s fiscal and legal tactics.82 In other passages the author speaks in a prophetic voice, using a simple allegory of the lion and the eagle to foreshadow the punishments Bavaria will incur at the hands of the Reich.83 To amplify his admonition, he cites a similar prophecy he heard in a sermon or oratory to “the lords of Bavaria” by one Maister Hanns Wunschelburger of Amberg.84 These “lords of Bavaria” are also among his imagined audience. The audience thus spans a broad social scale, but the narrator’s principal message is the same for one and all. He speaks in forensic tones to accuse and condemn Fuxstainer and his helpers. Ultimately, the poem is his evidence and testimony against them. His audience is the “courtroom” of public opinion, including those who were actually empowered to sit in judgment and inflict punishment for Fuxstainer’s crimes.85 At the beginning of this chapter I observed the paradox inherent in the use of pamphlet media to record incidents from the life of an early modern noblewoman. The author managed this paradox in various ways. Kunigunde is a shadow figure in a political argument that otherwise has complex characterization, dense factualness, and a persuasive narrator’s voice. Her terse representation exemplifies “the obscurity of the visible noblewoman” in early modern sources.86 Still, the account of the mar-

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riage is indispensable to the rhetoric of the poem because it legitimates the political argument against her spouse, the Bavarian Duke Albrecht IV. The references to Kunigunde make sophisticated use of the marriage analogy to execute the journalistic partisanship of the text. There is an implicit parallel between the bride and the city that ultimately implies that the city is worthy of understanding and mercy. Albrecht, however, is condemned as a thief, despite the narrator’s restraint in directly criticizing him. The author’s Habsburg sympathies also shape his construction of the imperial princess, as he walks a thin line between excoriating the husband and honoring the wife. The brevity with which the marriage is handled shields her from any possible criticism. The narrator never openly states that the forged letter fooled her, or that she had any volition in the transaction, or any feelings for Albrecht, or any intention to defy the Turkish marriage scheme of her father. This intentional delicacy is part of the rhetorical and political appeal to Habsburg power. The second way the paradox is handled is through a conservative approach to class and gender, despite the boldly creative partisanship of the argument and the pamphlet medium. Kunigunde’s biographical moments achieve a compelling measure of plasticity, but they are strikingly traditional, based on the transitional moments or defined roles that normally placed noblewomen in the public purview; and these moments are always linked to the needs of powerful men—her father, her husband, her brother—in the imagination of the narrator. Moreover, their trajectory moves Kunigunde out of the public sphere through a series of logical steps. Thus, the figuration of her gender moves from public to private, from visible to invisible, through three life cycle stages. Kunigunde is initially represented as a bride in a high-stakes political strategy, both in the Turkish marriage plan of her father and in the Innsbruck transaction of her Bavarian suitor. As a wife and sister she is discursively exchanged in a political negotiation between important male kinsmen. And finally, as a young mother she is glimpsed in a scene that attempts to construct a familial private sphere of invisibility, although one that is overwritten with political significations and paradoxes (a Habsburg family grouping in the midst of the Munich court; a brother in the place of a husband and father!). For all of these reasons, exposure in a pamphlet medium does not appear to raise issues of female honor or chastity, at least not in this text. Albrecht, however, suffers a certain amount of gender damage. The forceful capture of a bride or a city may be the stuff of heroism in other genres, but here it is condemned in patriarchal terms as an offence against the emperor and against God. The narrator also turns Albrecht’s clerical learnedness against him. The charges that Albrecht is crafty as a forger and dubious in his support for Christian institutions, including the Reich,

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undercut his empowered secular masculinity, or as the author exclaims in the marriage story, “that is not the right way for a prince to behave!” 87 Because the pamphlet was a public medium it is no surprise that the stories about the bride stolen from the Reich with a forged document were eventually retold. By 1537 they had become the nucleus of far more fully plotted, though hardly more objective, tales of Kunigunde’s life told in the prose Puch von den seltzamen Geschichten der edlenn tewren Frauen Chungundne (Book of Little Known Accounts about the Noble, Faithful Lady Chungunde).88 The anonymous author adapts the style of Maximilian’s autobiography, Weisskunig. Sympathetic to the Habsburgs, his intention is to fill in some of the blanks left by the pamphlet author in a way consistent with Kunigunde’s later career as a politically astute mother of princes and an exemplary widow. His strategy is to recast the marriage story as a romance: Kunigunde is now a chaste but determined young heroine in love with the Bavarian prince; Albrecht’s forgery is excused as love service; and Maximilian is the bringer of political peace and the emperor’s forgiveness. With its mixture of romance and reality, it seems to publicize a persona similar to the one figured by the statue of Kunigunde in Maximilian’s tomb memorial. There is no evidence that Eroberung Regensburgs was ever printed. Liliencron was able to consult four manuscripts of the text in the middle of the nineteenth century, but today only two of these can be located. There is a gratifying amount of historical information available for both of them. They were written and owned by citizens of Regensburg, but both manuscripts document a reception of the poem that is far removed from the crisis situation that produced it in 1489. The writing down of the poem, at least as we can observe it, did not take place in the crush of events; it represents a “privatization” of the “public” subject matter in formats intended for personal use. The oldest copy is in Cgm 5919 of the Bavarian State Library, well known to literary historians as the household book of Ulrich Mostl.89 Mostl himself compiled and copied this huge manuscript of 433 folios and numerous individual texts between 1500 and 1510. Facts about his life are few, but it is known that he became a Regensburg citizen in 1491, when the crisis was still ongoing, and might well have experienced its peaceful resolution in 1492. At least in theory he could have known some of the people touched by the crisis. By profession he was a cramer, which can mean anything from a well-to-do merchant to a simple peddler, but the fact that he had a household book that he wrote himself places him nearer the middle or upper end of this spectrum. He may have been a baker, or he may have procured baked goods for an institutional client in Regensburg.90 He was a respectable and trusted citizen, as his name appears on two legal documents as a witness.91

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As the term suggests, a household book is an entire library between two book covers. Household books were an urban phenomenon in the early modern period and their contents suggest the intellectual horizons and world openness of the urban laity, but also the expansions of the “private” household sphere.92 Mostl’s is a typical example in that it encompasses a broad range of useful or appealing topics, including health (many medical recipes for humans and animals), entertainment (narratives, erotic genres including obscenity, magic tricks), technical applications (how to make saltpeter, for example), and spiritual well-being. Imperial politics and recent events belonged to this broad spectrum of content, as Mostl’s manuscript shows. Eroberung Regensburgs appears with a group of texts at the end of the manuscript that reflect the city’s imperial status. They focus on the affairs of the Reich (ceremonial, legal, fiscal) in which the city would have had a direct role or strong interest.93 They represent general knowledge for someone active in business, civic, or professional affairs. The oppositional rhetoric of the text appears to be recuperated as useful information in this context. Assuming that the last texts in the manuscript were copied closer to 1510 than 1501, they also suggest an increasing availability of pamphlets and other political writing in the urban environment, and perhaps even Mostl’s own interest in the charismatic Maximilian, who was still alive in 1510, as was his sister Kunigunde. The second locatable manuscript, Clm 27 360 of the Bavarian State Library, exemplifies the fact that manuscripts continued to be made long after the close of the Middle Ages. Georg Gottlieb Plato (1710–77) wrote Clm 27 360 around 1750 in Regensburg.94 The Regensburg provenance of this manuscript as well as of Mostl’s household book indicates that the text circulated mainly in that city, despite the narrator’s appeal to a geographically broader audience. Plato was the adopted son of Johann Heinrich Plato. His adoption was an act of solidarity between two distinguished Regensburg council families. Plato had no heirs, so Georg Gottlieb’s natural father, Johann Christoph Wild, “gave” his second son to his good friend.95 Georg Gottlieb studied law in Leipzig and, like both of his fathers, made his career in the Regensburg city administration. Ultimately, he advanced to the position of Stadtschreiber, literally the town chronicler.96 He was the third member of his family to do so and he served for thirty-four years. The responsibilities and prestige of this office were considerable. The Stadtschreiber was the head of city administration; he participated on decision-making bodies and every important document crossed his desk. He was the best-informed man in town. Moreover, he was the official historiographer of his city. Plato took this aspect of his public charge seriously, producing a chronicle for the city of Regensburg.97

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Making a handwritten book must have seemed natural for one whose profession involved extensive record keeping. But Plato’s motivation for copying Eroberung Regensburg and the other texts in Clm 27 360 was surely as an accomplished amateur historian. Riezler reports that Plato dedicated himself to history and especially to numismatics “in his hours of leisure,” and in 1760 he was elected to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.98 His success in this amateur realm had a public repercussion: “the imperial city encouraged the research of its top officials because their glory shone on it as well.”99 The texts in Clm 27 360 are the result of patient recovery work in Regensburg archives by one who had exceptional knowledge and access. It is a compilation of eight texts in Latin and German that are ordered thematically and chronologically from beginning to end. The first six texts in the manuscript, dating from the 1420s to the1560s, address the origin of the name “Regensburg” and the history of its ecclesiastical institutions, including lists of the Regensburg bishops and the abbots of the monastery of St. Emmeran. Eroberung Regensburgs is paired at the end of the manuscript with another poem on the city. Hauke calls it a “historic-poetical description of the city of Regensburg” in 2,334 lines with numerous footnotes.100 The author is Jacob Sturm, an obscure, seventeenth-century Austrian writer who is best known for a similar poem about Vienna.101 This pairing of city poems is perhaps the most interesting part of Clm 27 360. It has the feel of literary history. Although the two city poems are not quite a generic pairing in the modern sense—one is a political pamphlet and the other an encomium—they are comparable as distinctive blends of history and aesthetics, facts offered up in poetic language. It is a form of writing that was nearly antiquated in Plato’s day and age. Moreover, they are contrasted as praise and blame for the city, as a set of opposites that resonates with traditional rhetorical argumentation filtered perhaps through Plato’s own legal education. Sturm’s poem closes the manuscript on a high note of praise. Its title alone contains an exuberant etymology for the name Regensburg (a link back to the first text) that compares it to the heavenly city: “Fruitful rain gushing from the heavenly fortification and city of rain to quicken the free city of Regensburg [Rainville] belonging to the Holy Roman Empire.”102 In pointed contrast, Plato’s sober Latin title for the Eroberung Regensburgs highlights the misdeeds it records: “Poem containing the crimes of Regensburg.”103 The villainy is Albrecht’s, as the German subtitle in the manuscript explains; but Plato’s Latin title is disturbingly nonspecific, pointing the finger of guilt in the city’s general direction. Regensburg did, after all, vote to exit the Reich, according to the poem. Originally intended for the court of public

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opinion, the poem now presents the dark side of a contrast staged by the manuscript context. Plato’s decision to copy out the texts rather than simply consult them in the archive shows that he wanted or needed them for use in his professional or scholarly pursuits. Thus, Clm 27 360 stands midway between the silence of the archive and the publicity of the printed text, just as its context of production was midway between amateur and professional pursuits. Plato’s approach to his materials was methodologically aware, in the spirit of the eighteenth-century human sciences. The book he created is nothing like a medieval miscellany. For example, Plato copied or created Latin or German title pages, with information about authorship and contents, for half of his selections; elsewhere he supplied comparable head notes, as in his title for Eroberung Regensburgs. The first selection in the manuscript dealing with the name “Regensburg” has Plato’s own insertion on the identity of the author. Although his assumption about the author was erroneous, Plato initiated the literary-historical recovery of this text and was cited by its modern editor in 1903.104 The cluster of texts numbered two through six lets the history of the ecclesiastical institutions and their leaders emerge as a strand of historical discourse that is distinct from the more comprehensive views of the city in the last two selections. Finally, in producing his version of Eroberung Regensburgs, Plato worked like a philologist, not like a freewheeling medieval scribe. Liliencron discerned that he actually had found two copies of Eroberung Regensburgs, because the version in Clm 27 360 combines readings from two sources, neither of which exist or are locatable today.105 Plato’s effort to achieve a text that was better than the ones in the archives carries out his scientific agenda in a way that anticipates the philological projects of the nineteenth century that made hidden literary treasures available to a national readership.

Notes 1. Her first modern biography is Karina Graf, Kunigunde, Erzherzogin von Österreich und Herzogin von Bayern-München (1465–1520): Eine Biographie (Mannheim, 2000). 2. Jan-Dirk Müller, Gedechtnus: Literatur und Hofgesellschaft um Maximilian I (Munich, 1982), 80–82. 3. Ibid., 80. 4. There is ample evidence to suggest that Maximilian had a cordial, personal relationship with his sister, who followed his political fortunes with interest even after she had been widowed and withdrawn herself to a convent (Graf, Kunigunde, 115–28).

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

For example, Graf notes the political influence over Maximilian of Anna Laminit, a putative holy woman (Kunigunde, 205–7). This influence may have motivated Kunigunde to expose her as a fraud in 1512. On Laminit, see Friedrich Roth, “Die geistliche Betrügerin Anna Laminit (ca. 1480–1518): Ein Augsburger Kulturbild vom Vorabend der Reformation,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 43 (1924): 355–417; and Graf, Kunigunde, 203–18. Johannes Schwitalla, Deutsche Flugschriften 1460–1525: Textsortengeschichtliche Studien (Tübingen, Germany, 1983), 228–31. The pamphlet I am going to discuss is Rochus von Liliencron, ed., Ein Spruch wie Herzog Albrecht Regensburg eingenommen hat, in Die historischen Volkslieder der Deutschen vom 13. bis 16. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim, Germany, 1966), 2:185–210. In addition there is a brief but important reference to Kunigunde in Rochus von Liliencron, ed., Von der Vertreibung der Juden und der Kapelle zur schönen Maria zu Regensburg, in Die historischen Volkslieder der Deutschen, 3:319–25. Sigmund von Riezler recognized that the author was educated and believed him to be a Regensburg cleric in “Die Vermählung Herzog Albrechts IV. von Bayern mit Kunigunde von Oesterreich,” Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-philologischen und historischen Classe der k. b. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München (1888), 389. U. Müller simply states that the author of the text is unknown. See “Eroberung Regensburgs,” in Die Deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (Berlin, 1980), 622. Yet the references to Hans Weiß in lines 565–72 and again in lines 977–99 (Liliencron, Ein Spruch) have comments on the making of this and perhaps other poems that suggest the author refers to himself in the third person. The dating is based on the most recent historical event mentioned in the text, the formation of the Löwlerbund (Liliencron, Ein Spruch, line 749 and line 749n). The Löwlerbund was a revolt of Bavarian nobles against Albrecht IV. The marriage episode is in lines 51–152 of Liliencron, Ein Spruch. In addition there is a brief reference to the (then) lack of male issue in lines 1017–22. Schwitalla, Deutsche Flugschriften 1460–1525, 17–22. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Die Liedpublizistik im Flugblatt des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. 1 (Baden-Baden, 1974), 154. See Joachim Whaley’s chapter in this volume. Although the printing of pamphlets came increasingly under the control of Church and chancellery after 1525, there was a second wave in the 1530s and production remained at flood levels through the peace of Augsburg in 1555. See Schwitalla, Deutsche Flugschriften 1460–1525, 7. Jennifer C. Ward, Women in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500 (London, 2002), 113–16. Brednich, Die Liedpublizistik, 154. Liliencron, Ein Spruch, lines 139–44. Rochus von Liliencron, preface to Ein Spruch, wie Herzog Albrecht Regensburg eingenommen hat, in Die historischen Volkslieder der Deutschen, 2:182. “alle nur denkbaren Fälle sündhaften Handelns”; Karl Kroeschell, Albrecht Cordes, and Karin Nehlsen von Stryk, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte: Band 2: 1250–1650 (Cologne, 2008), 16. “ain gross weltlichs gericht”; Liliencron, Ein Spruch, line 404. Liliencron, preface to Ein Spruch, 182–83. Andreas Kraus, ed., Handbuch Der Bayerischen Geschichte, zweiter Band: Das alte Bayern—Der Territorialstaat vom Ausgang des 12. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts, 2nd ed. (Munich, 1988), 313–16, and Sigmund von Riezler, Geschichte Baierns, Band 3: 1347–1508 (Aalen, Germany, 1964), 507–13.

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22. “das herz in Pairenland”; Liliencron, Ein Spruch, line 1009. 23. Liliencron, Ein Spruch, lines 139–44. Riezler notes the historical accuracy of the pawning of the city judgeship/administrator’s office by an earlier duke of BavariaMunich (Geschichte Baierns, Band 3, 509). On fabrications and forgeries as instruments of statecraft during Albrecht’s reign see Jean-Marie Moeglin, “‘Das Geblüt von Bayern’ et la réunification de la Bavière en 1505: Les falsifications historiques dans l’entourage du duc Albert IV (1465–1500),” in Fälschungen im Mittelalter: Internationaler Kongress der Monumenta Germaniae Historica, München, 16.-19. September 1986 (Hannover, 1988), 471–96. 24. Liliencron, Ein Spruch, lines 409–16 and 422–36. 25. Riezler refers to him as Hans von Fuchsstein zu Glaubendorf, “who served the city in the capacity of headman” (der als Hauptmann im Dienste der Stadt stand). Geschichte Baierns, Band 3, 509. 26. Liliencron, Ein Spruch, lines 457–64. 27. Ibid., lines 479–89. 28. Ibid., lines 547–54. 29. Ibid., lines 558 and 607. 30. Ibid., lines 601–14. 31. Ibid., lines 562–70. 32. Ibid., lines 579–94. 33. “Ich pin auch sins landes armer man”; Ibid., lines 78–80, especially 80. 34. Ibid., lines 1–8. 35. Ibid., lines 703–16. 36. Ibid., lines 171–726. 37. Ibid., lines 815–25. 38. Ibid., lines 737–50. 39. Ibid., lines 509–26. 40. “der vil ubels an der cristenhait hat gestift”; Ibid., lines 729–36, especially 735. 41. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 46. 42. For further literature see Brednich, Die Liedpublizistik, 151 and note 12. 43. “ir gut ze meren”; Liliencron, Ein Spruch, line 31. 44. “hub sich auf und tet sich schwingen / da er gund frauen Kunigunden finden / zu Inspruck pei Herzog Sigmund”; Ibid., lines 53–54. Archduke Sigmund of Tyrol, a cousin of Emperor Friedrich III, was deeply entwined in Bavarian power politics. 45. “dadurch gemert waer worden di cristenhait / und der merer tail der ganzen welt / waer hinfur in cristen glauben erzelt. / Das alles hat understanden Herzog Albrecht”; Ibid., lines 57–70, especially 64–67. 46. Riezler, Geschichte Baierns, Band 3, 500; Hermann Wiesflecker, Kaiser Maximilian I: Das Reich, Österreich und Europa an der Wende zur Neuzeit, vol. 1 (Munich, 1971), 251–52. Graf, however, lends the incident “little credibility” and maintains that the author of the pamphlet was simply passing on an interesting rumor about the conversion of infidels (Kunigunde, 39). 47. Josef Benedikt Heyrenbach, ed., Kaiser Friedrichs Tochter Kunigunde: Ein Fragment aus der Oesterreich-Baierischen Geschichte, samt Einem Codex Probationum (Vienna, 1778), 9–11. 48. Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (Princeton, NJ, 1978), 404. 49. Graf, Kunigunde, 32. 50. Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror, 404. 51. Liliencron, Ein Spruch, line 69. 52. Ibid., lines 140–44.

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53. “Er hats erborben durch hochen list, / wann er auch wol geleret ist, / brieflein schreiben und selber tichten / und im di heirat selbs zuerichten / als habs der Kaiser selbs getan; / das stet eim fursten doch nit wol an!”; Ibid., lines 71–76. 54. Historians are divided on whether or not it actually occurred. Albrecht’s defender is the Bavarian scholar Sigmund von Riezler, who argues that he had no need to forge a document of consent since negotiations with Friedrich had in fact taken place. Riezler also notes the tendentious contexts in which this story is recorded (Riezler, “Die Vermählung Herzog Albrechts IV. von Bayern mit Kunigunde von Oesterreich,” 387–92). Maximilian’s biographer regards the incident as authentic (Wiesflecker, Kaiser Maximilian I, 252 and 498, note 15). Graf raises doubts about the reliability of the evidence, including this poem, and concludes that there probably was no forgery (Kunigunde, 87–88 and 91). 55. John M. Klassen, ed. and trans., The Letters of the Rožmberk Sisters: Noblewomen in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia (Cambridge, 2001). 56. “Er tet reden und erstlich vachen an: / er wär seiner koniglichen genaden swester man”; Liliencron, Ein Spruch, lines 85–86. 57. “Der kunig seiner red wenig acht”; Ibid., line 87. 58. “Der könig sagt, er woll im nicht lang beiten, / sondern selbst gen München zu seiner schwester reiten”; Ibid., lines 89–90. 59. “seiner schwester halb het das auch sein end”; Ibid., line 97. 60. Ibid., lines 121–34. 61. Ibid., lines 109–10. 62. Ibid., lines 113–20. 63. “in jaren achtzehen / oder länger”; Ibid., lines 111–12. If the narrator is correct, then Kunigunde and Maximilian were parted when she was only about six years old and he was about eleven. 64. Graf (Kunigunde, 117–18) notes this visit but without reference to the pamphlet. She discusses other accounts of it including one by the Burgundian historian Jean Molinet (1435–1507). 65. “In der alten burg biß an den fünften tag—vil heimlich sach er mit der schwester pflag— / was König Maximilian mit seinem gesind / bei fraun Kunigunten und irem kind”; Liliencron, Ein Spruch, lines 105–8. 66. Liliencron (Ein Spruch, note to line 108) does not give the date of Maximilian’s visit in Munich but does note that by 10 June he had departed. Graf (Kunigunde, 117) dates it to May 1489. 67. “Ir solt horen, was ich euch sag: / es ist nit haimlich, ligt an dem tag”; Liliencron, Ein Spruch, lines 1–2. 68. In his work on Flugblattlieder, “political songs printed on a single folio,” Brednich, Die Liedpublizistik, 154 and 171–78, notes that audiences formed political solidarity through group singing. 69. See, for example, Liliencron, Ein Spruch, lines 110, 667, 743, and 777. 70. Ibid., line 248. 71. Ibid., lines 754–55. 72. Ibid., lines 446. 73. Ibid., lines 275 and 305. 74. Ibid., lines 383–84. 75. Ibid., lines 290–304 and 360–62. 76. Schwitalla, Deutsche Flugschriften 1460–1525, 22–23. 77. Ibid., 7 and 23, note 14. 78. Ibid., 23, note 14 (my translation).

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79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89.

90.

91. 92. 93.

94.

95. 96.

“Ir solt horen” “der gmain man”; Liliencron, Ein Spruch, lines 977–1009. Ibid., lines 121–34. “merk du armer gemainer man”; Ibid., line 472. For example, lines 333–40 and 787–92. Liliencron, Ein Spruch, lines 793–801. In fact, Albrecht secured pardons from the emperor for Fuxstainer and those who had assisted him (Liliencron, preface to Ein Spruch, 184–85). Dyan Elliott, “Women vs. Gender: A Fashion Statement?” paper presented at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 10, 2008. “das stet eim fursten doch nit wol an!”; Liliencron, Ein Spruch, line 76. It was edited and published by Joseph Benedict Heyrenbach with the title Kaiser Friedrichs Tochter Kunigunde: Ein Fragment aus der Oesterreich-Bayerischen Geschichte, samt einem Codex Probationum (Vienna, 1778). On the sixteenth-century dating, see Riezler, “Die Vermählung Herzog Albrechts IV. von Bayern mit Kunigunde von Oesterreich,” 390. An extensive description of Cgm 5919 with an inventory of its contents can be found in Dieter H. Meyer, Literarische Hausbücher des 16. Jahrhunderts: Die Sammlungen des Ulrich Mostl, des Valentin Holl und des Simprecht Kröll, (Würzburg, 1989), vol. 1. The last entry in his household book has led scholars to believe that he was in the food business, because it is a calculation of ingredients needed to produce baked goods ordered by “his lordships” (Meyer, Literarische Hausbücher des 16. Jahrhunderts, 1:37). Christian Forneck provides detailed information on the baking business in fifteenth-century Regensburg in his Die Regensburger Einwohnerschaft im 15. Jahrhundert: Studien zur Bevölkerungsstruktur und Sozialtopographie einer deutschen Grossstadt des Spätmittelalters (Regensburg, 2000), 60–62. Meyer, Literarische Hausbücher des 16. Jahrhunderts, 1:36. Ibid., 2:765. Eroberung Regensburgs is no. 111; no. 113 is Brieflicher Bericht vom Reichstag zu Frankfurt vom 16. Februar 1486; no. 114 is Prosabericht von der Kaiserkrönung zu Achen; no. 115 is Aufstellung der Anwesenden auf dem Reichstag zu Augsburg 1510, which includes Mostl’s note on the correct identity of the sixty-two imperial cities; no. 116 is Spruchgedicht auf den Fall der Stadt Bugia am Dreikönigsabend 1510, copied from an Augsburg imprint from 1510. The manuscript has an additional fascicle at the beginning with Mandat Kaiser Maximilians I. gegen die Türkengefahr, vom 2. Juli 1500 (Meyer, Literarische Hausbücher des 16. Jahrhunderts, 1:130–32 and 139). Imperial cities were required to pay taxes for defense against the Turks. See Eberhard Isenmann, Die Deutsche Stadt im Spätmittelalter, 1250–1500: Stadtgestalt, Recht, Stadtregiment, Kirche, Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft (Stuttgart, 1988), 113. Unless otherwise indicated, this discussion of Clm 27 360 is based on Hauke’s bibliographic description. See Hermann Hauke, “Clm 27 360: Georg Gottlieb Plato (?): Sammlung von Texten zur Regensburger Geschichte,” in Katalog der lateinischen Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München: Clm 27 270-27 499 (Wiesbaden, Germany, 1975), 101–3. It is interesting to note that the theme of financial solidarity among council families comes up in Eroberung Regensburgs (lines 343–58). Sigmund von Riezler, “Plato, Georg Gottlieb,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ed. Historische Commission bei der Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 53 (Leipzig/ Berlin, 1907), 74.

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97. Alois Schmid, “Notarius civium Ratisponensium: Beobachtungen zu den Stadtschreibern der Reichsstadt Regensburg,” in Staat, Kultur, Politik: Beiträge zur Geschichte Bayerns und des Katholizismus. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Dieter Albrecht, ed. Winfried Becker and Werner Chrobak (Kallmünz/Opf., 1992), 56–57. 98. Riezler, “Plato, Georg Gottlieb,” 74 (my translation). 99. Schmid, “Notarius civium Ratisponensium,” 56 (my translation). 100. Hauke, “Clm 27 360,” 103 (my translation). 101. Constant von Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich, vol. 40 (Vienna, 1880), 230–31. 102. “Fruchtbringinder Regen erregend gegossen von der himmlischen Burg und Regens Stadt auf deß H. R. R. freye Stadt Regenspurg” 103. “Dictamen Ratisponensium facinora contiens” 104. Hauke, “Clm 27 360,” 101. 105. Liliencron, Ein Spruch, 208. [Preface to the? or line 208?]

Chapter 3

PUBLICIZING THE PRIVATE The Rise of “Secret History”

Peter Burke



This chapter is a contribution to the history of the shifting frontiers between the public and the private spheres. The title is intended to suggest that, like many other historians, I continue to find Jürgen Habermas’s notion of Öffentlichkeit, or public sphere, useful, although subject to certain qualifications, three in particular: we need to (1) speak of public spheres in the plural, (2) think of the public sphere not as present or absent in a particular culture but as present in a greater or lesser degree, and (3) remember that the line between public and private has been drawn in different places as well as with different degrees of sharpness in different periods and different cultures. In what follows I shall concentrate on the transgression of the frontiers, the publicization and especially the publication of the private in a literary genre that has become known as “secret history.”

Secret Histories before “Secret History” Secret history has attracted less attention than it deserves, despite the interest of a few historians of eighteenth-century France and a few scholars working on English literature in the same period.1 Here, on the other

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hand, I shall focus on the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth. I am not completely comfortable with the use of the phrase “the age of the baroque” to refer to everything that happened at this time, but in the context of public and private it seems particularly appropriate, given the widespread contemporary concern with the gap or the conflict between appearance and reality, être and paraître, ser and parecer, Sein and Schein.2 The old metaphor of the world as a stage was used with particular frequency at this time, perhaps in response to the rise of purpose-built public theaters with increasingly elaborate scenery. On one hand, the authors of treatises on arcana imperii or “reason of state” recommended rulers to practice both simulation and dissimulation, in other words to wear a mask. On the other hand, a considerable literature was devoted to unmasking, to showing the public what was happening “behind the scenes.”3 A famous example of the unmasking approach was the Istoria del concilio tridentino published by Paolo Sarpi in 1619. Sarpi, a Venetian friar, was described by the poet John Milton as the “Great Unmasker” because his history claimed to reveal the secret intentions of the popes. In similar fashion a portrait of Sarpi, still on display in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is inscribed “Concilii Tridenti Eviscerator.” In other words, the author was presented as a political anatomist who “disembowelled” the Council, piercing beneath the skin to show its entrails, making its secret workings visible. In public, the popes showed themselves in favor of the Council and Church reform, but in reality, according to Sarpi, they resisted reform and manipulated the Council in order to ensure that papal power would be maintained or even extended. Sarpi’s fascination with simulation and dissimulation is expressed by his favorite metaphors, among them the cloak, the veil, and the mask, as well as by recurrent words and phrases such as “pretext” (pretesto), “excuse” (colore), “hidden designs” (occulti consegli), and “secret methods” (clandestini modi). Incidentally, Sarpi’s history had its own secret history. Written in Italian, this history was smuggled out of Venice via the British embassy and published in London in order to evade ecclesiastical censorship. When the book was published, the author’s name was hidden under the anagram “Pietro Soave Polano.” There were also attempts to unmask Sarpi, to describe him as a heretic in friar’s clothing.4 One favorite technique of seventeenth-century “unmaskers,” as we may call them, was to publish secret documents. A famous seventeenthcentury example of this practise concerns the methods of the Jesuits. The Monita Privata or Monita Secreta purported to be a confidential Spanish manuscript found in Padua instructing Jesuits how to succeed in the world. It was published in 1614 by a Polish ex-Jesuit called Zahorowski.

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Under various titles, this text went through at least forty editions in the course of the seventeenth century.5 A second famous example of unmasking concerns the origins of what was to become the Thirty Years’ War. The war was not fought on battlefields alone. It was also a paper war, or, we might say, a war of propaganda in which the publication of documents played an important role. In 1621, soon after the defeat of the Calvinist prince Frederick V by Habsburg forces at the battle of the White Mountain (Bíla Hora), the papers of his follower Christian of Anhalt fell into the hands of the supporters of Ferdinand II. The Habsburgs instantly produced a pamphlet, called The Anhalt Chancery, in order to pin the “warguilt” on to their enemies. By coincidence, if that is what it was, in the following year one of the generals on the Protestant side, Ernst von Mansfeld, captured an imperial courier. The documents carried by this second courier were published in a second pamphlet, The Spanish Chancery, in order to show that it was the Habsburgs and not the Calvinists who were responsible for the war.6 Whether the couriers and their letters really existed or not, the rise of this technique of persuasion, the rhetoric of the secrets of the archive, deserves to be noted.

The Rise of a New Genre A generation or two later, in the later seventeenth century, came the rise of a new historical genre, the main topic of this chapter. This was the “secret history” (histoire secrète, geheime Historie, historia recondita, etc.). The genre, which included texts in Latin, Italian, French, German, Dutch, and English, mixed history with fiction and politics with sex, often signalled by the term galant in the title. The authors were concerned to go behind the scenes—or at least to appear to do this—in order to reveal the private motives and intrigues that underlie public events. Until quite recently, this genre was passed over by historians of European historiography and received little attention from historians of European literature.7 However, it surely merits the attention of both kinds of scholar. Indeed, secret history is not a Western monopoly. The Secret History of the Mongols, a thirteenth-century text, was given this title because the book was kept in a secret place in the imperial library. Closer to the European genre studied here was the Chinese “secret history” (mi-shih), which offered accounts of the sexual activities of emperors.8 In the Western tradition the first secret historian was perhaps Tacitus, as the shift from a republic to an empire meant that political decisions were increasingly hidden from the public. However, the genre received

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a name only five centuries later, when the Byzantine historian Procopius produced his Anekdota or Apokrypha historia around 550 CE. The term “anecdote” meant a revelation of events previously undivulged. Procopius’s account of the scandalous private life of the empress Theodora was first printed in 1623, soon after the rediscovery of the text. In the late seventeenth century, histories or romances of this kind—for it would be futile to try to classify them in two distinct groups—became a veritable fashion. As Pierre de Villiers remarked in 1699, secret history was “the most fashionable title of the novels published today,” 9 while a critic of Gilbert Burnet’s History of His Own Time (1724) dismissed it as “alamode Secret History.”10 More than seventy texts published between 1658 and 1725 bear the word “secret” or something similar in their title, and some important contributions to the genre appeared under other titles. Famous British examples include Andrew Marvell’s Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677) and Gilbert Burnet’s History of His Own Time.11 In France there was Nicolas Amelot de la Houssaie’s Histoire du government de Venise (1675), which focused on secrecy, claiming in the introduction: “One hardly sees anything in this government, which is not covered by a cloud of appearances and pretexts far removed from the truth.”12 Histories of this type became especially frequent in English and French in the 1690s, including The Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II and K. James II (1690), Secret History of the Duke of Alançon and Queen Elizabeth (1691), The Secret History of Whitehall (1697), L’histoire secrète des plus Fameuses conspirations de la conjuration des Pazzi contre les Medicis (1698), and Les Anecdotes De Pologne, Ou Mémoires Secrets du Regne de Jean Sobieski (1699).13 The genre reached its high point in the early eighteenth century, with Les Intrigues secrètes du duc de Savoie (1705), The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705), The Secret History of Clubs (1709), Secret History of Europe (1712–15), and Les anecdotes de Suede ou l’histoire secrete des changements arrivez dans la Suede sous le regne de Charles XI (1716).14 Between 1734 and 1736 there was even a monthly journal entitled Anecdotes ou lettres secrètes, probably published in Amsterdam. Books of this kind continued to appear throughout the eighteenth century. Relatively marginal in the nineteenth century, the genre has recently been revived; witness book titles such as The Secret History of the CIA (2001), The Secret History of the Iraq War (2004), and Rwanda: l’histoire secrète (2005), expressing and also encouraging a perception that, as in the time of Tacitus or the absolute monarchs of the seventeenth century, the process of political decision making is becoming less and less transparent.15 The genre was defined in 1728 in Chamber’s Cyclopædia, or, An Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences (under “Anecdotes”) as histories that “relate the secret Affairs and Transactions of Princes; speaking with

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too much Freedom, or too much Sincerity, of the Manner and Conduct of Persons in Authority.”16 At the centre of the genre we find a small number of works, often reprinted and translated—the secret history of Charles II and James II, for instance, which circulated in English, French, and Dutch, the secret history of the Medici, or the story of Queen Christina of Sweden, which was current in French, Dutch, English, and German. There was also a large penumbra of less important texts. A typical example refers to intrigues, political and sexual, and also to inside information, claiming either to include original documents (hence the many references to “cabinets” or scrinia), or actually to be the work of an eyewitness, living or dead (including the ghosts of the duke of Alba and the marquis de Louvois). On occasion the court of England or France is transparently disguised as “Caramania,” “Grandinsula,” “Persia,” or “Peking.” The method is generally to tell a succession of anecdotes, in the modern sense of the term. Secret history was anecdotal in its methods as well as in its definition. As in the early seventeenth-century examples discussed earlier, unveiling or unmasking individuals and institutions—Rome, the Jesuits, the Habsburgs, courts in general, the Freemasons, or the University of Oxford—was a central theme of these texts. In the preface to his secret history of the Medici, the French historian Antoine Varillas claimed to present leading members of the family such as Pope Leo X “in undress”17 and to draw the curtain in order to reveal the love affairs of Grand Dukes Cosimo and Francesco.18 He combined the curtain metaphor with that of the cabinet in his book on the house of Austria, describing his purpose as “revealing the secret of politics … bringing into view the cabinet of the House of Austria … tearing away the curtain under which it believes itself to remain invisible.”19 At this time the term “secret history” acquired associations much like that of the “private eye” or the gossip column in Britain today. Gossip has been described as occupying a “liminal position between public and private.” In similar fashion, the secret histories made use of the “idiom of intimacy” and made private information public.20 Their claim to authority was based on their supposed ability to go behind the scenes of the theater of public life, offering an inside story in the form of anecdotes that undermined the elaborate self-presentations of important people. The history of the “secret life” of Queen Christina of Sweden, for instance, contrasted her public greatness with her private weakness. What these texts offered may be described as a form of history from below—sometimes from the valet’s point of view—and it is well-known that no man is a hero to his valet.21 On occasion, they presented “what the butler saw,” in other words: kings, queens, and ministers without their clothes. An

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English secret history of 1761 bears the title, A Peep through the Key-hole.22 Secret historians confidently reproduced the private conversations and even the secret thoughts of their protagonists. The authors of these works took a particular interest in the history of plots and conspiracies—the conspiracy of the Pazzi against the Medici in Florence, for instance, the conspiracy of the Fieschi in Genoa, the revolt of Portugal against Spain, and the plot by the Duke of Osuna—Spain’s viceroy in Naples—to take away the independence of Venice, all described along the model of Sallust’s De coniuratione Catilinae.23 In similar fashion Andrew Marvell wrote of “the Conspiracy against our Religion and Government.”24 One might even say that in the pages of the secret histories, the actions of governments were presented in a “paranoid style” as a succession of plots and “intrigues,” political, sexual, or both.25 In Britain, the revelation of the so-called “Popish Plot” in 1678 doubtless encouraged this vision of the past and the present alike.

Authors, Publishers, and Readers Who wrote the secret histories? This is not an easy question to answer, as so many of the texts were published anonymously or pseudonymously, though attempts were made to unmask them in dictionaries such as Vincentius Placcius’s De scriptis et scriptoribus anonymis atque pseudonymis syntagma (1678) and his follower Peter Dahlmann’s Schauplatz der masquierten und demasquierten Gelehrten (1710).26 Thanks to their research, it is possible to unmask at least some of the unmaskers and to produce a provisional list of some fifty probable authors working in the period 1680–1720. These authors include at least two monks or ex-monks, Casimir Freschot and Vittorio Siri (Antoine Varillas lived in a Carthusian monastery, but as a kind of literary hermit), and three priests or ex-priests, Michel Le Vassor (a former Oratorian), the abbé de Saint-Réal (inventor of the nouvelle historique), and the abbé Vertot. There are five lawyers, among them the German Esaias Pufendorf and the English Whig Lord Somers. There were also five officials or ex-officials, among them Amelot de la Houssaie, formerly a secretary to the French embassy in Venice, and David Jones, the son of a Welsh dissenting minister who became a captain in the British Horse Guards and then secretary-interpreter to Louis XIV’s minister the marquis de Louvois. At this point it may be worth reminding ourselves that Procopius himself had been the secretary of Count Belisarius and, more generally, that secretaries have access to secrets and that the words are related. The group also contained a dozen or more professional writers, a role difficult to define at this time, but surely including the Frenchman Eu-

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stache Le Noble (author of what he called nouvelles historiques as well as histoires secrètes), the Englishmen Daniel Defoe and Nathaniel Crouch, and the Italian Gregorio Leti, notorious for coining the term “nepotism” and for exposing the inner workings of papal conclaves.27 Some of the professional writers were female, and at least eight women, amateurs or professionals, wrote secret histories in fictional form—or fictions in historical form—at this time. Two were in England, Mary de la Rivière Manley and Eliza Heywood, and six were in France: Marie-Catherine Le Jumel, Baronne d’Aulnoy; Catherine Bédacier; Marie-Catherine Desjardins (Mme Villedieu); Charlotte Rose de Caumont de La Force; Marguerite de Lussan; and Louise-Geneviève Gillot de Saintonge. The circumstances surrounding the publication of these texts are often as mysterious as the authors. Some texts appeared in London or Paris, but the majority were printed in the relative safety of the Dutch Republic. A few well-known publishers were involved—Varillas was published in Paris by one of the best-known French houses of his time, Claude Barbin, and in The Hague, apparently without authorization, by Arnout Leers. The pseudomemoirs of Jan Sobieski were published by Henri Desbordes, most famous as the printer of the Nouvelles de la République de Lettres. However, the most common name on the title pages was that of the nonexistent printer “Pierre de Marteau,” who claimed to operate from Cologne. Even London publishers such as Richard Bentley sometimes produced books of this kind under the imprint “Will with the Whisp: Cologne.”28 Even less is known about the readers of secret histories than about their publishers. If we take Varillas as an example, we find that he was discussed (occasionally praised and more often criticized) by a number of men of letters in France, England, and the Dutch Republic, among them famous names such as Guy Patin, Gilles Ménage, Gabriel Daniel, Pierre Bayle, Jacques Basnage, Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Noël d’Argonne (known as Vigneul-Marville), and Gilbert Burnet, while his anecdotes about the Medici were plagiarized by another secret historian, Eustache Le Noble, in his account of the conspiracy against Lorenzo de’ Medici.29 If it is reasonable to assume that the social groups who produce a given genre also consume it, then it may be suggested that secret histories appealed to the clergy as well as the laity and to women as well as men.

Histories, Newspapers, and Novels What is the significance of the rise of this genre at this particular time? To answer this question I should like to discuss the relation of secret history to three other literary genres of the period: official history, newspapers, and novels.

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Secret history may be viewed as a critical response to the weaknesses of humanist history, which was written in a high style and emphasized high motives and the effectiveness of political and military leaders. More precisely, secret history was a response to the weaknesses of official history, at a time when rulers were increasingly commissioning scholars to write histories of their reigns. Philip III, for example, appointed Prudencio de Sandoval his official historian, and the rulers of Brandenburg and Sweden both appointed the jurist Samuel Pufendorf. The emperor Leopold appointed Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato and Giovanni Battista Comazzi, while Louis XIV had a whole team of historians working on the construction of his gloire.30 These scholars were often given access to official documents. On the other hand, they were expected to refrain from enquiring into the real reasons for the fall of a minister or the invasion of a neighboring country. Their job was to present the official version of events. It was obvious that the official historians were not telling the whole truth, and some publishers came to realize that there was a market for alternative histories, unofficial versions of the past. These versions were provided by the secret historians—including, curiously enough, another member of the Pufendorf family—while Leti and Varillas wrote both official history and unofficial history on different occasions. In the spirit of Pascal’s famous remark about Cleopatra’s nose, the secret historians claimed that great events had petty causes. The French nobleman Bussy Rabutin, the author of a secret history of the court of Louis XIV entitled L’histoire amoureuse des Gaules (1665), asserted that “the greatest and most fatal affairs of the world always begin with bagatelles.”31 In similar fashion, the historical novelist Saint-Réal declared that “the most magnificent events often have a cause that is insignificant and little known.”32 Contemporaries sometimes described unofficial or secret historians— with more or less contempt—as mere journalists or gazetteers. For example, one of the French critic Pierre Bayle’s arguments for skepticism about our knowledge of the past was the fact that gazettes were unreliable and that many “bad historians” produced their books simply by stitching together these “poor pieces.” For once Louis XIV and Pierre Bayle were in agreement, as the king also made a malicious comparison between history and gazettes.33 The relation between the two genres was indeed a close one. The official and unofficial newspapers of the seventeenth century offered alternative versions of the present, just as official and secret histories offered alternative versions of the past. Newspapers published with the support of governments, such as the seventeenth-century French Gazette and its imitators elsewhere, from London to St. Petersburg, told readers

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about the events that governments wanted their subjects to know about. However, the seventeenth century was also an age of unofficial journals and journalism. Printed newspapers began to circulate at the beginning of the century, including the Courant, produced in Amsterdam for the export market and so printed in French, German, and English. The newsletters that circulated in manuscript, known as avvisi in Italian and avisos in Spanish, were even bolder in their remarks about governments.34 As we have seen, secret history was also closely related to fiction. If one term of abuse for secret historians was gazetier, another was romancier. For example, the critic Jean Leclerc found fault with the histories of Varillas because they were written in what he called a “style de roman.”35 Gilbert Burnet also condemned Varillas because “his books had too much the air of a romance,” only to be denounced in his turn for the same failing. Again, a reviewer in a learned journal dismissed the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz as “a work more fiction-like than historical.”36 However, “novelist” was occasionally a term of praise for historians. Louis Maimbourg declared his hope that his way of writing history would give his readers “the pleasure of a novel,”37 while Leibniz wished for “un peu du roman” in historical writings, “especially if they deal with issues which one takes care to hide.”38 The authors of secret histories certainly gave Leibniz what he asked for. The late seventeenth century was the time of the rise of the historical novel, not in the manner of Walter Scott but in the sense of a romance that offered interpretations of political events, especially the mysterious ones. The most famous examples came from the pen of the abbé de SaintRéal, whose Dom Carlos, published in 1672, dealt with the greatest scandal of the reign of Philip II, the death of the king’s son in unexplained circumstances. Dom Carlos was published with the subtitle “nouvelle historique,” a term that quickly became fashionable, while Saint-Réal went on to write the Conjuration des Espagnols contre Venise (1674).39 The production of these historical novels was greatest in France. Some of them used the term “secret” in the title, as in the case of Caumont de La Force’s Histoire secrète de Marie de Bourgogne (1694) and Histoire secrète de Henri IV roy de Castille (1696), as well as the Baroness D’Aulnoy’s Mémoires secrets de plusieurs grands princes de la cour (1696) and Mémoires de la cour d’Angleterre (1695), which might be described as fairy stories, like her better-known Contes des fées.40 These texts coincided with a rise of pseudomemoirs of ministers such as Francis Walsingham, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and the marquis de Louvois,41 or rulers such as Jan Sobieski, making more scandalous revelations than the genuine memoirs that were also published in increasing numbers at this time. In England, Daniel Defoe, master of the “reality effect”—as his Journal of the Plague Year (1722) famously shows—was not only a novelist

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who produced six pseudomemoirs but also the probable author of five anonymous works in the genre studied here: The Secret History of Arlus and Odolphus (1710), The Secret History of the October Club (1711), The Secret History of One Year (1714), The Secret History of the White Staff (1714), and The Secret History of State Intrigues (1715).42 One of these political pamphlets, for that is what they effectively were, received an equally anonymous answer entitled The Secret History of the Secret History (1715).43 A little closer to fiction, Mrs. Manley’s Secret History of Queen Zarah might equally well be classified as a scandalous history or as a roman à clef, unmasking Queen Anne’s favorite Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough.44 Behind the rise of the novel and the secret history alike we can discern the expansion of the literary market in the age of what J. H. Plumb called the eighteenth-century “commercialization of leisure,” a trend visible in France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, as well as in Britain.45 Older works were republished and repackaged at this time, sometimes with the word “secret” inserted into the title, as in the case of the English translation of a novel by Mme de Lafayette that appeared as The Secret History of Henrietta (1722).46 It is surely no coincidence that this was also the time of the rise of pornography, which, like the secret histories, made private acts public.47 Some books belonged to both genres, among them the Histoire des intrigues galantes de la reine Christine (1697) and The Fair Concubine: or, the Secret History of the Beautiful Vanella (1732).48 Procopius’s portrait of the empress Theodora served as a model for texts on later royal mistresses such as the Duchess of Portsmouth.49

Under Private Eyes The merits and defects of both the novels and the secret histories were much like those of gossip. They might reasonably be described as frivolous, but under the cover of frivolity they launched some penetrating criticisms of a number of political regimes. They were usually malicious, they told some lies, and they passed on a good deal of unreliable information. However, these texts also made public a number of unofficial and uncomfortable truths, making them what Isaac D’Israeli once called the “supplement” and “corrector” of public history.50 They encouraged what seventeenth-century Spaniards used to call desengaño, disillusionment, undermining the self-presentations of rulers and their governments and so making it easier for readers to take a cool and critical look at the actions of “great men.” In short, it may be argued that these “private eyes”

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made a serious though so far unacknowledged contribution to the rise of the “public sphere.” The parallels between the secret histories and some aspects of the media of our own time, especially certain kinds of newspaper or television program, will be obvious enough, and I would suggest that we regard them with a similar ambivalence. The media have become notorious for their intrusiveness, their insistence on making public exactly what individuals would most like to keep private. The invasion of privacy by the paparazzi, the appeal to Schadenfreude, and the retailing of gossip in order to increase the circulation of the paper, or the ratings of the television program, are all too common. On the other hand, though, the media regularly unmask the official version of events, catching politicians in the act of taking bribes or soldiers in the act of torturing civilians and then broadcasting these images to the world. Like their ancestors the secret historians, these journalists are a force encouraging a somewhat greater transparency or glasnost in public life.

Appendix A chronology of published histories with “secret” or a similar term in the title, 1658–1725. Four items (Procopius, 1669, 1674; Walsingham, 1695; and Burchard, 1696) come from an earlier period. 1658 J. H., The King of Spains Cabinet Council Divulged 1663 Scrinia Ceciliana (“mysteries of state”) 1666 Fauvelet, Histoire secrète de Henri duc de Rohan 1669 Les secrets des Jésuites 1669 Histoire secrète de Justinien [translation of Procopius] 1671 [Leti?], Segreti di Stato 1672 Leti, Arcani svelati de’ Gabinetti de’Principi 1674 Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian [translation of Procopius] 1677–79 Siri, Memorie recondite 1679 The Cabinet of the Jesuits secrets opened 1680 Secret History of Queen Elizabeth [translation of Comte d’Essex] 1685 Amelot, Histoire du gouvernement de Venise 1685 Varillas, Les anecdotes de Florence, ou, l’histoire secre te de la maison de Médicis 1689 [Pageau? Or Lenoir?], Intrigues de la cour de Rome 1690 Lettres de Mazarin ou le secret de la paix des Pirenées 1690 The Safety of France or the secret history of the French king (trans)

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1685 Amelot, Histoire du gouvernement de Venise 1690 [Phillips or N. Crouch], Secret history of Charles II 1690 Lenoble, The Cabinet opened, or secret history of Mme de Maintenon (trans) 1691 Secret History of the Duke of Alalcon and Queen Elizabeth 1691 N. Crouch, The Secret History of the 4 Last Monarchs of Great Britain 1692 Leti, Historie e memorie recondite di O. Cromvele 1693 Secret History of the Confederacy between the French King and his Chief Officers 1694 La Force, Histoire secrète de Marie de Bourgogne 1695 La Force, Histoire secrète de Henri IV roy de Castille, ‘l’impuissant’ 1695 “Walsingham” [Du Refuge], Le secret des cours 1696 Baudot de Juilly, Histoire secrète du connétable de Bourbon 1696 Burchard, Specimen historiae arcanae 1696 D’Aulnoy, Mémoires secrets de plusieurs grands princes de la cour 1696 Le Noble, Mylord Courtenay ou histoire secrète des premiers amours d’Elisabeth d’Angleterre 1696 Lesconvel, Anecdotes secrètes des règnes de Charles VIII et de Louis XII 1696 Saintonge, Histoire secrète de Dom Antonio de Portugal 1697 [Franckenstein], Histoire des intrigues galantes de la reine Christine 1697 Courtilz de Sandras, Histoire secrète du duc de Rohan 1697 Jones, The Secret History of Whitehall 1697 Le Noble, Histoire secrète de la conjuration des Pazzi 1698 Le Noble, Epicaris, suite des histoires secrètes des plus fameuses conspirateurs 1699 Dalairac, Les anecdotes de Pologne, Memoires secrets du regne de Jean Sobieski 1700 Bédacier, Mémoires secrets de la cour de Charles VII 1703 A satire upon King William, being the secret history of his life 1703 E. Ward, J. Denham, S. Butler, and B. Bridgewater., Secret History of the Calve’s Head Club 1704 Freschot, Histoire anecdotique de la cour de Rome 1705 Freschot, Les intrigues secrètes du duc de Savoie 1705 M. Manley, The Secret History of Queen Zarah 1709 M. Manley, Secret Memoirs of Several Persons of Quality 1709 E. Ward, The Secret History of Clubs 1709? G. L., Le portrait et la vie secrète de la reine Christine de Suède 1710 [Defoe?], The Secret History of Arlus and Odolphus 1711 Defoe, The Secret History of the October Club 1712 Secret History of the Geertrudenbergh Negotiation 1712–15 Oldmixon, Secret History of Europe 1713 Freschot, Histoire amoureuse ou badine du Congrès d’Utrecht 1714 Defoe, The Secret History of One Year 1714 Defoe, The Secret History of the White Staff

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1714 Oldmixon, Arcana Gallica or the secret history of France 1715 The secret history of the late ministry 1715 The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff 1715 Defoe, The Secret History of State Intrigues 1715 Ebert, Anecdota sive historia arcane Europae 1715 Speke, The Secret History of the Happy Revolution 1715 Stoughton, Secret History of the Late Ministry 1716 [E. Pufendorf ], Les anecdotes de Suède, ou histoire secrète des changements arrivés sous le règne de Charles XI 1719 Histoire publique et secrète de la cour de Madrid 1719 Dunton, The State Weathercocks: or, a new secret history of favourites 1721 Hanover Tales: or the secret history of Count Fradonia 1721 Secret history of the prince of the Nazarenes 1721 Amherst, Terrae Filius, or the secret history of the University of Oxford 1722 The Secret History of Henrietta [translation of Lafayette, Histoire] 1724 Dumont, ed., Mémoires et negotiations secrètes 1724 Haywood, The British Recluse, or the secret history of Cleomira ca. 1724 Secret History of the Freemasons 1725 Mary Queen of Scots, being the secret history of her misfortunes [translation from French]

Notes This chapter has been given as a lecture or seminar paper in Amsterdam, Cambridge, the Escorial, and Prague; I am grateful to the audiences on these occasions for their comments, and especially to Martin Mulsow, who read the original version of the chapter, translated as “Publicando lo privado: la aparición de la ‘historia secreta,’” in José-Miguel Marinas, ed., Lo íntimo y lo público: Una tensión de la cultura política europea (Madrid, 2005), 71–80. 1. Jean Marie Goulemot, “Les pratiques littéraires ou la publicité du privé,” in Histoire de la vie privée, ed. Roger Chartier (Paris, 1986), 3: 371–405; Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, 1993); Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995); Lisa Jane Graham, If the King Only Knew: Seditious Speech in the Age of Louis XV (Charlottesville, VA, 2000), 56–95; Robert Darnton, Mademoiselle Bonafon and the Private Life of Louis XV: What the Butler Saw and What the Public Read in Eighteenth-Century France, Hayes Robinson Lecture Series no.7 (Egham, UK, 2003). 2. Peter Burke, “L’età barocca,” in Storia Moderna, ed. Guido Abbattista (Rome, 1998), 229–48. 3. On the metaphor, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (London, 1953), 138–44. On the “unmasking turn of mind,” see Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London, 1936), 35 and 56. On “back regions,” see Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959). 4. Peter Burke, “The Great Unmasker,” History Today (1965): 426–32; and Peter Burke, “Introduction,” in Paolo Sarpi, edited by Peter Burke (New York, 1967).

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5. Sabina Pavone, Le astuzie dei Gesuiti: Le false istruzioni segrete della compagnia di Gesú e la polemica antigesuita nei secoli xvii e xviii (Rome, 2000). 6. Reinhold Koser, Der Kanzleienstreit: Ein Beitrag zur Quellenkunde der Geschichte des Dreissigjährigen Krieges (Halle, 1874). 7. The pioneer was Isaac D’Israeli, “True Sources of Secret History,” in Curiosities of Literature, 2nd ser., vol. 3 (London, 1823), 210–39. The fullest accounts I know of are by Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge, 1987), 153–82 and 183–231, and Steve Uomini, Cultures historiques dans la France du 17e siècle (Paris, 1998), 403–45. Ros Ballaster has looked at some of the English material from a different angle in Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford, 1992). See also Rebecca Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives (London, 2009). 8. Urgunge Onon, The History and the Life of Chinggis Khan (Leiden, 1990), 25; and Harold L. Kahn, Monarchy in the Emperor’s Eyes (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 50. 9. “le titre le plus à la mode des romans qu’on fait aujourd’hui” 10. Quoted in René Démoris, Le roman à la première personne: Du classicisme aux lumières, 2nd ed. (Geneva, 2002), 186. 11. Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel (Oxford, 1997), 101–6; and Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism, 187 and 198. 12. “On ne voit presque rien dans ce government, qui ne soit couvert d’une nuée d’apparences et de prétextes bien éloignés de la vérité”; on Amelot, see Jacob Soll, Publishing the Prince: History, Reading and the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005). 13. John Phillips, The Secret History of the Reigns of K. Charles II and K. James II (s. l., 1690); The Secret History of the Duke of Alançon and Queen Elizabeth (London, 1691); David Jones, The Secret History of White-Hall from the Restoration of Charles II. down to the Abdiction of the late King James (London, 1697); Eustache Le Noble, L’histoire secrète des plus Fameuses conspirations de la conjuration des Pazzi contre les Medicis (Paris, 1698); and François Pauline Dalerac, Les Anecdotes De Pologne, Ou Mémoires Secrets du Regne de Jean Sobieski, III. du nom (Amsterdam, 1699). 14. See Casimir Freschot, Les Intrigues secrètes du duc de Savoie avec une relation fidelle des mauvais traitements qu’en a reçu M. de Phelipeaux, ambassadeur de France, contre le droit des gens (Venice, 1705); Mary DeLaRivière Manley, The Secret History of Queen Zarah, and the Zarazians, being a Looking-glass for Mary de la Rivière Manley in the Kingdom of Albigion (London, 1705); Edward Ward, The Secret History of Clubs: Particularly the Kit-Cat, Beef-Stake, Vertuosos, Quacks, Knights of the Golden-Fleece, Florists, Beaus, &c. (London, 1709); John Oldmixon, The Secret History of Europe (London, 1712–15); and Samuel Pufendorf, Les anecdotes de Suede ou l’histoire secrete des changements arrivez dans la Suede sous le regne de Charles XI (The Hague, 1716). 15. Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (Roseville, CA, 2001); Yossef Bodansky, The Secret History of the Iraq War (New York, 2004); and Abdul Joshua Ruzibiza, Rwanda: L’Histoire secrète (Paris, 2005). 16. Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia, or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, 1728), vol. I, 87. 17. “dans son dishabille” 18. Antoine Varillas, Les anecdotes de Florence ou l’histoire secrete de la maison de Medicis (The Hague, 1685). 19. “révéler le secret d’une politique … exposer en vue le cabinet de la Maison d’Autriche … tirant le rideau sous lequel elle pensoit de demeurer invisible”; “Le Sieur de Bo-

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20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

nair” [Antoine Varillas], La politique de la Maison d’Autriche, 2nd ed. (The Hague, 1689), 4 and 39. Patricia M. Spacks, Gossip (New York, 1985), p. 262. The comparison had already been made by D’Israeli, “True Sources,” 211. On the value of the valet’s point of view, see D’Israeli, “True Sources,” 214, reflecting on the Mémoires de M. de La Porte, premier valet de chambre de Louis XIV, contenant plusieurs particularités des règnes de Louis XIII & de Louis XIV (Geneva, 1755). A Peep through the Key-Hole; or the Secret History of Some People, and Some Things (London, 1761). Ossuniana Conjuratio (s. l., 1623); Agostino Mascardi, La congiura del conte Gio Luigi de’Fieschi (Venice, 1629); Il governo del duca d’Ossuna (Cologne, 1678); and René Vertot, Histoire de la conjuration de Portugal en 1640 (Amsterdam, 1689). Andrew Marvell, “An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England,” in The Prose Works, eds. Annabel Patterson, Nicholas von Maltzahn, and N. H. Keeble, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT, 2003), 373. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (London, 1965). Martin Mulsow, “Practices of Unmasking: Polyhistors, Correspondence and the Birth of Dictionaries of Pseudonymity in Seventeenth-Century Germany,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 219–50. Studies of individuals include Ingrid Fröberg on Caumont de La Force in Une histoire secrete à matière nordique (Uppsala, 1981), 6–14; John J. Ricchetti, Defoe (Boston, 1987); Franco Barcia, Gregorio Leti: Informatore politico di principi italiani (Milan, 1987); Philippe Hourcade, Entre Pic et Rétif: Eustache Le Noble (Paris, 1990); Robert Mayer, “Nathaniel Crouch,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (1993–94): 391–419; and on Varillas, Uomini, Cultures historiques, 359–401. Olaf Simons, Marteaus Europa oder der Roman, bevor er Literatur wurde (Amsterdam, 2001). Details on these and other readers are available in Uomini, Cultures historiques, 440, 565, 570, 577, and 580. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT, 1992). “les plus grands et les plus fâcheuses affaires du monde commencent toujours par des bagatelles” “les événements les plus magnifiques n’ont souvent qu’une cause légère et peu connue”; Bussy, quoted in Marie-Thérèse Hipp, Mythes et realités: Enquête sur le roman et les mémoires, 1660–1700 (Paris, 1976), 173; Saint-Réal quoted in Gustave Dulong, L’abbé de Saint-Réal: Étude sur les rapports de l’histoire et du roman au XVII siècle (Paris, 1921), 309. Pierre Bayle, Critique générale de l’histoire du Calvinisme de M. Maimbourg (Villefranche [Amsterdam], 1683), 26. Folke Dahl, “Amsterdam—Earliest Newspaper Centre of Western Europe,” Het Boek 25 (1938–39): 160–97; Miriam Yardeni, “Journalisme et histoire à l’époque de Bayle,” History and Theory 12 (1973): 208–29; and Henry Ettinghausen, “The News in Spain,” European History Quarterly 14 (1984): 1–20. Quoted in Démoris, Le roman à la première personne, 180n. “un ouvrage plus Romanesque qu’historique” “le plaisir d’un roman” “surtout quand il s’agit des motifs qu’on prend soin de cacher”; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Opuscules, ed. Louis Couturat (Paris, 1903), 225–26. Leibniz was also the editor of Burchard’s reminiscences of Pope Alexander VI under the title Specimen historiae arcanae (1696).

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39. Dulong, L’abbé de Saint-Réal, and Andrée Mansau, Saint-Réal et l’humanisme cosmopolite (Lille, France, 1976). 40. Charlotte Rose de Caumont de La Force, Histoire secrète de Marie de Bourgogne (Lyon, 1694); Charlotte Rose de Caumont de La Force, Histoire secrète de Henri Quatre, Roy de Castille (Ville Franche, 1696); Marie Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville Bnne d’Aulnoy, Memoire secrets de Mr. L.D.D.O. ou, Les avantures comiques de plusieurs grands princes de la cour de France (Paris, 1696); and Marie Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville Bnne d’Aulnoy, Mémoires de la cour d’Angleterre (Paris, 1695). 41. Le Secret des cours, ou les Mémoires de Walsingham, secrétaire d’État sous la reine Élisabeth, contenant les Maximes de politique nécessaire aux courtisans et aux ministres d’État, avec les remarques de Robert Nanton sur le règne et sur les favoris de cette princesse (Cologne, 1695); Jean Baptiste Colbert, Monsieur Colbert’s ghost, or, France without bounds, being a particular account by what ways it has attain’d to that supream grandeur, and relating the secret intreagues of the French King’s ministers at the courts of most of the princes and states of Europe, with remarkes there upon, also some reflections on the interest of those princes (London, 1684); and Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, Testament politique du marquis de Louvois, premier ministre d’État, sous le règne de Louis XIV, roy de France: où l’on voit ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable en France jusqu’à sa mort (Cologne, 1695). 42. See P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, The Canonization of Daniel Defoe (New Haven, CT, 1988), 167–69. On the secret history of the White Staff, see Geoffrey M. Sill, Defoe and the Idea of Fiction (Newark, DE, 1983), 87–93. 43. The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff, Purse, and Mitre, Written by a Person of Honour (London, 1715). 44. Ballaster, Seductive Forms. 45. J. H. Plumb, The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England, The Stenton Lecture (Reading, 1973). 46. Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, Madame de La Fayette, Fatal Gallantry: or, the Secret History of Henrietta Princess of England: Daughter of K. Charles the I. and Wife of Phillip of France, Duke of Orleans, with the Manner of Her Death, Illustrated by Letters from the Ministers of State, then Employed both at the Courts of France and England, and the Characters of the Principal Quality in the French Court (London, 1722). 47. Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York, 1993). 48. Christian Gottfried Franckenstein, Histoire des Intrigues Galantes de la Reine Christine de Suède et de sa Cour, pendant son Sejour à Rome (Amsterdam, 1697); and The Fair Concubine: or, the Secret History of the Beautiful Vanella, containing her amours with Albimarides, P. Alexis, &c. … To which is annexed The Lady’s Last Shift; or, a Cure for Shame: a Tale (London, 1732). 49. Procopius, Anekdota, ou histoire secrète de Justinien … (Paris, 1669) and The Secret History of the Court of the Emperor Justinian, faithfully rendered into English (London, 1674). 50. D’Israeli, “True Sources,” 210, 226, and 237.

Part II

THINKING ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT PUBLICS

Chapter 4

PRIVATE, PUBLIC, AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE The German Problem

Nicholas Boyle



Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, first published in 1962,1 is the foundational text for anyone concerned with the public sphere, and it remains astonishing in its breadth of reference and the strength of its systematic structure. Nevertheless, as with all controversial classics, reservations are possible in respect to its principal thesis. This chapter deals with two of them. Habermas’s account of the origins of the public sphere in the eighteenth century, particularly the later eighteenth century, is based, both explicitly and implicitly, on the model provided by Germany, even when he is discussing developments in other western European countries, and the first reservation is that his account of the German process is flawed by a failure to recognize its historically specific, even unique, features. The second reservation is that the distortions consequent on the use of his—I believe—incomplete account of the German case impair the value of his general thesis about the nature of the public sphere and the structural change that he claims has taken place in it since the nineteenth century. The first reservation is mainly a matter of social history; the second lies more in the area of political theory. To explain the first, I need to say something in more detail about what makes Germany unusual.

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Habermas repeatedly asserts the fundamental importance to his analysis of the distinction between state and society, and of the need to understand the growth of “the public sphere” out of the changing relationship between state and society that results from the development of society into specifically “bourgeois” or “civil” society.2 (The German term bürgerliche Gesellschaft unfortunately covers both these very different concepts, though I do not intend to pursue this issue.) I have no quarrel with the distinction nor indeed with the—even more fundamental—distinction that Habermas uses in parallel with it, that of the state, as the monopoly repository of “public force,” öffentliche Gewalt, and the market, the system of “commodity traffic,” Warenverkehr, which, if it is to be distinguished from the “public” realm of the state, may as well be called “private”—public force, we may say, stands against private enterprise.3 These distinctions have a long history—and to illuminate that history is at least part of Habermas’ intention—and they go very deep. We need not have any qualms about adopting them. But we must be very careful in applying them to German conditions in the later eighteenth century; not because they do not apply at all—they most certainly, and revealingly, do—but because the dividing line between state and market, the liminal area in which, according to Habermas, “the public sphere” arises, runs along very different routes in the German-speaking countries (apart from Switzerland) on the one hand and in England, France, and Holland (and Switzerland) on the other hand. Habermas largely ignores that difference, acknowledging it only in parentheses or footnotes,4 because he wants to present a thesis about the importance of eighteenth-century European culture in general for our understanding of the relation between state and market today and of the structural change which has distanced us from the nineteenth-century liberal constitutional state, or Rechtsstaat, that grew up on the foundations laid by that eighteenth-century panEuropean culture. Here is one formulation of the thesis: The public which may be regarded as the subject of the bourgeois [bürgerlich] constitutional state … envisages … in principle that all men [Menschen] will belong to it. Each individual private man is also, and simply, a human being, that is, a moral personality … Within the sphere of intimacy oriented towards a public, that is within the patriarchal nuclear family, there grows up the consciousness of this, as it were shapeless, humanity. But the public had in fact taken on a very specific shape—it was the bourgeois [bürgerlich] reading public of the eighteenth century.5

However, the bourgeois reading public—and especially the bourgeois writing public—of the eighteenth century did not have one single specific shape. Habermas attributes to German conditions a shape that belongs

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more properly to England when he says that in late eighteenth-century Germany, the public sphere came into existence as part of “the bourgeois/ civil society that at the same time was establishing itself as the realm of commodity exchange and autonomous social activity.”6 Conversely, he attributes to English and French conditions a shape that is more properly German when he claims that the “actual [social] vehicle of the public … from its inception is a reading public” and draws on German evidence to show that the “core” of the new class of “bourgeois,” die Bürgerlichen, are “officials of the sovereign administration … lawyers [together with] doctors, pastors, officers and professors … schoolmasters and scribes,” whom he calls die Gelehrten, “the learned.”7 These are no more Bürger, burghers in the old sense of the citizens of towns, than the new “capitalists”—merchants, bankers, wholesalers/publishers (Verleger), and manufacturers—whom Habermas equally assigns to the new class of the reading bourgeoisie. What is wrong with this characterization of the concrete social components of Habermas’s general European Lesepublikum is that it confuses two groups that represent two very different relationships between the state and the market and that have very different roles in the different national reading publics of the eighteenth century. To throw the “learned” and the “capitalists” into the same pot is to make a characteristically German confusion. It is characteristically German because those two very different social classes were indeed fused in Germany as part of the process by which the modern German polity came into existence, and the characteristically German term Bildungsbürger was created to describe the result of that fusion. To be German is to be the inheritor of that state-, nation-, and culture-building moment, and that is why it is possible to call its products characteristically German. But the moment itself occurred in the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the laborious unification that took place between 1848 and 1871. At the end of the eighteenth century, at the time that we may agree is crucial for the process Habermas is describing, these two classes were very far from being fused. They were in fact in some respects bitterly opposed, and one of them, the class of “capitalists,” was seriously underdeveloped by comparison with the Europe further west. The reading public that resulted had features of its own that cannot be assumed to be replicated in other countries, where the balance of power between the classes was different or the division was less significant. Habermas’s failure to make this distinction is part and parcel of a more general historiographical failure on his part: a failure to recognize that the development in Europe both of economic capitalism and of the bourgeois society, which he quite properly dates from the thirteenth century,8 and which I fully accept is the right context in which to discuss the develop-

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ment of the “public sphere,” was not in Germany by any means steady or continuous. Relations between the market and the state changed drastically in Germany in the seventeenth century and in ways which differentiated Germany from the rest of Europe for a good three hundred years, and specifically in the areas that matter most for Habermas’s thesis. In 1952 Hajo Holborn wrote: “In many ways one can make a case for the view that the sixteenth century in Germany was more bourgeois than the eighteenth,” and a full elaboration of this view can be found in Eda Sagarra’s A Social History of Germany, 1648–1914 (1977).9 Sagarra argues that the social structure of eighteenth-century Germany was profoundly influenced by the seventeenth-century catastrophe that was the Thirty Years’ War. The consequences of the war were not simply material or demographic, with towns losing on average 30 percent of their population and the countryside more, up to 50 percent or even higher in parts of Thuringia and Württemberg. It took a century, but Germany as a whole did eventually make up its loss of population. The most serious effect of the war was a shift in the social and economic structure (for which no doubt there were also other contributory reasons), such that after 1648 economic leadership and political control passed from the bourgeoisie, from the craftsmen, entrepreneurs, and bankers, from the burghers and the town patricians, into the hands of local absolute rulers. “To a large extent,” Tim Blanning writes, “the princes were filling a vacuum rather than invading territory already held”:10 the war had cost too much and private enterprise could not provide the capital and initiative to replace the losses and to start again. It was natural for the state to step in. After the war the great towns of the fifteenth-century and sixteenth-century bourgeoisie—Nuremberg, Augsburg, Cologne, Ulm—declined into backwaters (Nuremberg at the end of the eighteenth century had a population of thirty thousand, half of what it had two hundred years before).11 The cities that rose and prospered in the postwar period were Munich, Vienna, Berlin, Stuttgart, Hannover—cities of residence, Residenzstädte, built or rebuilt in accordance with the schemes or to the greater glory of the prince, where the traditional rights of the citizens, guilds, and municipalities were suppressed, and where the original artisan and trading economy was replaced by servicing the court, provisioning the military, clothing and adorning the nobility, the bureaucracy, and their servants, and entertaining them with music and theater. Sagarra cites the example of Munich, in which, in a little over a hundred years after the town became a ducal residence and the duke began to pack the council with lesser nobility, the town lost the right to trade in salt, the right to grant citizenship, and the right to elect members to the council. The council itself ceased to represent the inhabitants: in the sixteenth century all artisans,

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Handwerker, could be members of it; in the eighteenth century it was the province only of the nobility or of well-to-do merchants who enjoyed ducal patronage. In Sagarra’s words, “bourgeois Munich had given way to electoral Munich.”12 Throughout Germany the same pattern was repeated as absolutism, which elsewhere in western Europe was on the retreat, reasserted itself and reached new heights. Local princes increasingly interfered in town affairs, stifling old rights and the old trade patterns, introducing new taxes, erecting new tolls on old roads, and claiming new monopolies. Where initiative was shown, it was shown by the nobility, not by old burghers or new capitalists. According to Blanning, in 1785 there were 243 mines in Upper Silesia, of which 191 belonged to nobles, 20 to the king of Prussia, 14 to other German sovereigns, and only 2 to private citizens of Breslau.13 A town like Silesian Hirschberg, which prospered and was beautified solely by the efforts of the local textile merchants, was a rare exception, comparable only with Hamburg, the greatest exception of all, which with its semidetached relation to the Empire was more like a little Northern Switzerland.14 It is manifest, therefore, that even in late eighteenth-century Germany there was virtually nothing corresponding to a bourgeoisie as Marx described the class in the Communist Manifesto (1848). In particular, it is impossible to ascribe to the class of private entrepreneurs a decisive role in the cultural development, often called Enlightenment, that culminated in German classical and romantic literature and philosophy from Lessing to Hegel. The Marxist terminology was coined to apply to the industrial and principally western European societies of the middle of the nineteenth century, and its anachronistic transference to the precapitalist German Ständestaat of the eighteenth century leads, among other things, to neglect the real seat of economic and political power in the Germany of that period—namely, the local but centralized State, whose “overwhelming importance … in the development of society” was, according to Rudolf Vierhaus, one of the essential factors in Germany’s “backwardness,” by comparison to western Europe, until its own industrial revolution.15 In the eighteenth century, Germany was a statist society, and to an extent that other European countries came to experience only in the twentieth century. It was therefore not as a property-owning class, or as a commercial bourgeoisie, that the middle strata in eighteenth-century Enlightened Germany could approach the center of power, but only in so far as their interests were connected to the interests of the state. The classes that became the vehicle of the second German renaissance from 1780 to 1815 were not the ossified grands bourgeois of the imperial cities, which may

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have been free but were politically of ever-diminishing significance, nor the economically successful but politically emasculated tradesmen and merchants of such unfree cities as Leipzig or—especially—Berlin, but the classes that, distributed across the whole of Germany, everywhere stood in an immediate relation to the local state power: the Protestant clergy, the professors, and the officials. Vierhaus, like Hans Heinrich Gerth before him, calls them die Gebildeten, but the term refers to the same social reality as Habermas’s term die Gelehrten.16 Their common interests were not merely intellectual but also material; indeed, the Protestant clergy and the professoriate, including schoolteachers, could in many respects be regarded simply as subdivisions of state-salaried officialdom. Germany’s officials—and there were tens of thousands of them—were not employees of local councils or public corporations, as in Switzerland, or free entrepreneurs, as under the tax-farming system in France. They were the organs and direct representatives of the prince—in Baden-Durlach into the eighteenth century they were actually his bondsmen, effectively serfs.17 The middle class and the state-official class were in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Germany largely, and even increasingly, coextensive. In eighteenth-century usage the terms Geschäfte and Geschäftsmann usually refer not to commercial but to official life—a point not noticed by Habermas when he cites Kant’s praise of the mixed social gathering that brings together not only university people but Leute von Geschäften and even women.18 More significantly still for Habermas’s thesis, the Beamtenstand, Germany’s official class, was effectively coextensive with its intellectual class. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the German middle class was far too weak to follow the English or the Dutch example and seize back the power that the princes had stolen from the urban bourgeoisie during and after the Thirty Years’ War. Instead, on a long march through the institutions19 and in the guise of a class of officials, the German middle class succeeded in forging an alliance with the nobility, principally with its lower reaches. In this form, as what has been called “a half-noble, half-bourgeois class,”20 or, by one of its most brilliant representatives, a “universal class,”21 it gained “a partial victory over absolutist monarchy”22 and inaugurated the age of absolutist bureaucracy. The cultural flowering of the last third of the eighteenth century in Germany can be understood only in these terms. It was the work of an intelligentsia that on the whole was born in Protestant parsonages23 and educated at universities that functioned as “channels for social advancement into the ranks of clergy and bureaucracy.”24 The profoundest, yet most tangible, difference between the literary culture of England and Germany at this time, and so between their different reading publics, lies in a single statistic: Germany had around forty universities at a time

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when England had two. Impressive though they were as centers of study, however, the German universities were not founded or maintained out of a disinterested love of learning. They were founded to educate officials: lawyers above all, and the crypto-officialdom of schoolteachers and clergymen. The professors were all state employees and they all took an oath of loyalty to the sovereign. Territorial rulers, notably the electors and kings of Prussia, made repeated efforts to prevent their subjects from studying anywhere but at their own state universities. Not merely did professors set out to educate—in the words of Göttingen University’s eighteenthcentury mission statement—“useful servants of the state, more precisely, servants of this territorial prince,” they themselves often had been or were destined to become administrative officials or, in the case of the theologians, exercised hierarchical authority.25 In Blanning’s summary: “more than anything else, it was this academic-bureaucratic predominance which distinguished German culture in the eighteenth century.”26 However, the reasons for the peculiar form taken by the literary culture of the late eighteenth-century German reading public lay not merely in the sociopolitical fusion of the will to power—and the largely synonymous will to nationhood—of the second and third estates. A further and decisive factor in the social dynamic that made this cultural development possible was, as Herbert Schöffler saw over sixty years ago, secularization.27 Among the educated (die Gebildeten), the clergy were specifically charged with handing down cultural values. Reflection about the human race, about the collective and individual destiny of its members, about ethics and psychology, was the essence of their social role, even for those who were not Pietists. In the course of the eighteenth century, as a result partly of state-sponsored overproduction of theologians and partly of the subversion of the authority of the Bible, itself also encouraged by the state,28 this class found itself in a crisis: the sons of clerical families, saddled both with doubts and with unsatisfactory prospects, looked around for a new way of living; students of theology changed to different subjects, often to the new subjects introduced into the “philosophical” faculties. But under the new label the old functions persisted. As Schöffler and Gerth have shown, we owe to this mass desertion of the clergy two principal elements in classical German culture that can both be regarded as secularized continuations of the tasks of the pastorate: first, literature understood as art—that is, as a courtly institution—but with a collective pedagogical purpose (in the second half of the eighteenth century the share of the German book market taken by theology and edifying literature declines in exactly the same proportion as the share of belles lettres increases):29 and second, neohumanism, in which a fantasy of ancient Greece serves for many (for example, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, or the Schiller

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who wrote the poem The Gods of Greece in 1788) as a sublimation of the religious instinct. Secularization is a matter not just of intellectual history, but of painful social realities. Within the social structure of the absolutist Ständestaat there were only limited possibilities of escape for an ambitious mind. A freelance writer had no chance of success unless he or she said what the prosperous but unfree commercial classes wanted to hear, not what interested the “half-noble, half-bourgeois” class of die Gebildeten, who, however, alone had access to power and the idea of nationhood, albeit by the indirect means of a compromise with absolutism. The only course open to an ex-theologian, if he was lucky, was a university position in one of the new subjects, philosophy, history, or classical philology. Otherwise, he had to be content with the marginal role of a private tutor, unless, like Joseph von Eichendorff, he was prepared to give up his mission to the nation or to practice it only as a kind of hobby that, at any rate, subjectively could transfigure the earnest reality of life as a civil servant with a glimmer of hope for “redemption through art.” But anyone who, like Heinrich von Kleist, wanted both to be a public “praeceptor Germaniae” and to achieve the economic and social independence that only the capitalist free market can provide, was doomed from the start. If even Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, the author of the epic poem Der Messias (The Messiah, 1748–73) and the most highly regarded poet of his age, derived only 17 percent of his total income from his “profits” as a writer,30 there was no hope for the author who wanted to avoid the life of an actual or virtual state official but was not willing to sell his or her soul into subliterary servitude. The resultant fissure in the German reading public between commercially rewarding literature of no intellectual or political significance, written and sold by private entrepreneurs, and the literature of the official elite, in a tense relation with the absolute power of the state but distant from the market, determined the unique character of the German literary renaissance and was given definitive expression in Goethe and Schiller’s polemical epigrams Xenien (1796) and the controversy they unleashed.31 As France went through a political revolution, Germany went through an intellectual revolution. During that era, the universities not only served to give shelter to the victims of the process of secularization; they also promoted the process itself. In the theological faculties biblical criticism, which for many individuals began the process, was developed as a fully conscious element in a modern religion open to the world and to the interests of the state.32 The philosophical faculties worked away at the byproducts of the decomposition of the old theology—idealist philosophy, neohumanist classical philology with its nationalist and utopian inspiration, and, in the early nineteenth century, the study of modern vernacu-

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lars, as in Germany the national literature became an object of study in school and university earlier than elsewhere. In 1815 the range of possibilities of intellectual escape or evasion for a member of the intelligentsia caught in a crisis of faith was quite different from what had faced his predecessor in 1780—and all of these opportunities made it possible to continue to function (and continue to be paid) within the framework of the politically significant class of professors and officials with their proximity to the source of power. There developed therefore in Germany a cultural triangle of forces composed of the half-noble, half-bourgeois official class, the universities, and the Protestant clergy. These elements were held together by their willingness to collaborate with princely absolutism; the inner dynamic in their relationship was provided by secularization, that is, the dissolution of theology for state-oriented purposes; and together they furnished both the producers and the notional public of classical and romantic German culture. The “artist,” as he—nearly always he—was called, now demanded a position in the courtly environment corresponding to that of a higher cleric. These demands reached their peak in Schiller with his letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), in Johann Gottlieb Fichte with his lectures on The Vocation of the Scholar (1794), and in Friedrich Hölderlin and his conception of the poet—all three of them secularized (that is, disappointed, former or failed) theologians. The true middle class—the Bürgertum—had scarcely any part in these developments. It was either a passive observer, or at most—to take up Schiller’s description of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister33—the cultivable, bildsam, observer that was permitted to read the books and, like Heinrich Drendorf, the protagonist of Adalbert Stifter’s novel Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857), to yearn and toil to be accepted into the elite; or it had to make do with Trivialliteratur, as it has been called, the massproduced literature with no aspiration to embody the ideas structuring the exercise of power in the nation. Trivialliteratur, it is worth emphasizing, was and is trivial: precisely because it bypassed the profoundest sociopolitical realities of the day, it has less claim on our attention now. A lasting intellectual achievement cannot be based on a misapprehension of the reality that produces it, and anyone at the end of the eighteenth century who thought that the driving force in German society, the factor that would determine Germany’s immediate future as a nation, was the middle class of tradesmen and merchants—which included the freelance, that is, market-dependent, writer, but, despite what Habermas says, did not yet include capitalist manufacturers, because Germany did not have any34—had misapprehended their own position, and that of their contemporaries, and could produce only trivialities. In eighteenth-century Germany, therefore, it was not the market, not the system of “commodity

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traffic,” that produced the reading public, or, at any rate, the reading public that mattered, but the state. The readers came from the middle classes, yes, but from middle classes whose economic security derived not from their “private” status as autonomous agents in the market, but from their “public” status as executives of the state power that employed them. They had no incentive, and no resources, to do as the English middle classes had done in 1688 or the French Girondins did in 1789 and make a direct bid for political autonomy. Instead, they had to have recourse to the indirect method of collaboration, and this necessity accounts for the peculiar features of what they read and what they wrote. The escape into idealism so often observable in the literature that appealed to this reading public, but not to many others in Europe, is not a sign of resigned submission but—as a renunciation of immediate and undivided power—it is a necessary component of the compromise that makes possible the conditional admission of the middle class into the dominant levels of the political hierarchy. We should understand the differently idealist proclamations of Schiller, Fichte, or Hölderlin not as an act of resignation by the bourgeoisie but as a demand for power by die Gebildeten. And so I come to my second reservation, a point of political theory. If this representation of German social history is correct, Habermas’s dialectic, through which the politically functioning bourgeois public sphere is supposed to come into existence, applies neither to German nor to nonGerman Europe. In the dialectic a private sphere is first of all constituted by the exclusion of the family unit and its proprietorial-patriarchal head from political power, from a share in the deployment of public force (for example, by the arrogation of all political power to a monarch). The interaction of all the private units, one with another, in the essentially private medium of the market then creates, as the market develops, and with it communication, a public sphere detached from the state—the sphere of the reading public and of public opinion. This sphere endeavours to gain a hold over the state, to achieve the power of decision over the deployment of public force, by claiming that public opinion is the true foundation of the law. The decisions of the state derive from the reasoned agreement of all, rather as the just price emerges from a perfectly transparent and efficient market. Responsibility, and responsiveness, to public opinion is, Habermas claims, the basis of the liberal constitutional state, the Rechtsstaat, which flourishes for “one happy moment,” in nineteenth-century Europe, before the descent into modern or postmodern chaos.35 It should now be clear, however, that this dialectic is not exemplified in eighteenthcentury Germany, because the original separation of the family units—the middle classes—from the state power, and their reconstitution as an autonomous market of private persons, does not occur. The culture-bearing

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families of Enlightened Germany are not private, in Habermas’s sense, because their paterfamiliases are all servants of the state, and they are certainly not agents in a capitalist market—German officialdom remains deeply suspicious of capitalism, in fact, until well into the twentieth century. The German reading public of the Enlightenment talks to itself as the lower orders of an authoritarian hierarchy, perhaps, but as members of that hierarchy, as instruments, not opponents, of the state power. Equally, the dialectic does not apply to the English case, which Habermas discusses in considerable detail. For here the culture of the reading public and public opinion may well derive from a market, and understand itself as produced by a market made up of many private men. But at no point after 1688 is the privacy of those men, or the publicity of the sphere of opinion that collectively they make up, defined by its separation from the state power. It may be that in the mythical past of the Civil War, or of the reign of King John, they were forced into privacy by monarchical arrogance, but in the Enlightened age that followed on the Glorious Revolution, the power of monarchs was been curbed. The public that a man addresses and in which he takes his place, whether in coffeehouses, journals, pamphlets, or Parliament, always includes some—in London, many—who are voters in elections, or vociferous onlookers,36 and so always has direct and rightful access to the power of decision over the deployment of public force. An eighteenth-century Englishman, such as Habermas depicts, thinks himself free not, as Habermas maintains, because he is a private citizen, nor because he can speak his mind and so contribute to the forming of a public opinion that will sway the decision of the legislature, but because among those he speaks to as his equals there are some who themselves are legislators, who deploy the state power, and to that extent he is himself a participant in that power. Habermas’s dialectic, then, does not apply to eighteenth-century Germany: there is a clear distinction between the state and the market, but only because there is no market of any significance and the dialectic cannot get started. And the dialectic does not apply to eighteenth-century England either, because here the market and the public world constituted by the market already include the state—literally so, in the case of the rotten borough—and the private property owners who make up the market also dispose of the public power of force; the dialectic is already superseded. It follows that, just as Habermas’s analysis of the relation between the market and the development of public opinion in England cannot tell us anything directly about the rise and significance of the “public sphere” in Germany, so also the German literary and philosophical material on which he draws to explicate the German public sphere is unlikely to

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have any very direct application to the English case. Habermas seems not to notice the fundamental difference between a text such as Immanuel Kant’s reflections on the public sphere, addressed to fellow readers of the Berlinische Monatschrift under the title “Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), and Burke’s contemporary reflections on a superficially similar topic in his various addresses to the electors of Bristol.37 Burke is speaking to those who through their elected representatives wield the power of the state. Kant is speaking to those who serve it. Habermas cites them both as, equally, evidence of the development of the politically functioning bourgeois public sphere. Indeed, he regards Kant’s exposition as the “theoretically mature form” of the “principle of publicity” (Publizität) and devotes to it a whole chapter.38 But he passes over in silence the distinction by which Kant acknowledges the reality of the German situation, the distinction between the public and private uses of reason.39 To be precise, he passes over half the distinction. What Kant says about the public use of reason is of course grist to Habermas’s mill. The public use of reason is that by which one addresses one’s fellow men—for example, by writing articles for the Berlinische Monatsschrift—as members of the reading public, that is, one addresses them as the educated (die Gebildeten), or the learned (die Gelehrten), in the hope and expectation that one day, through the very process of rational communication, all the world will become rational. We have, however, seen that the qualification as die Gebildeten, or die Gelehrten, is culturally and sociologically very specific—it is not, as Habermas believes, and as is necessary if Kant’s text is to have application outside Germany, a general characterization of the literate European bourgeoisie. That it does not have such a general application is shown by the second and complementary concept in Kant’s distinction, to which Habermas gives no attention at all: the private use of reason. The private use of reason, Kant says, is the use of it in “some civil post or office that has been entrusted to one,” and in such a case the critical and speculative use of one’s personal reflections is “not permitted—rather one must obey.” The public use of reason is a leisure activity for an official, we might say—he can write articles about political theory in the evenings—but when he is in the office, his not to reason why; he must do as he is told, that is, as the state power that employs him dictates. Kant’s assumption that in order to contribute to the process of worldwide Enlightenment we have to imagine ourselves as civil servants on holiday was no doubt realistic as an assumption about his German reading public in 1784, but it cannot be universalized into a necessary precondition for the political development of the bourgeois public sphere in general. Perhaps we can go further and say that it is only in Germany that a public sphere developed that completely fulfilled Habermas’s twin defini-

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tions of it. He defines a politically functioning public sphere as, first, belonging completely to the middle classes—that is, as being, in his sense, bürgerlich—and second, as being completely detached from the state— that is, as making rational public opinion alone, and not any exercise of the state monopoly of force, into the source of the legitimacy of the laws. These conditions are perfectly fulfilled by the German official class—that is to say, by a class in and for which die Bürgerlichen and die Gebildeten are coextensive—when in its leisure hours it imagines itself freed from its private role of the instrument of absolute authority—that is, when it detaches itself from the state—and makes public use of its reason in the cause of Enlightenment. This “politically functioning public sphere,” which influences the legislators only by the moral suasion of public opinion, would be better denominated a sphere of political impotence.40 The Kantian-Habermasian model of “the public sphere,” Öffentlichkeit, will not fit either eighteenth-century English or post-Revolutionary French society for two reasons: firstly, the middle classes who are to constitute the public derive largely, or even overwhelmingly, from the market, not from state officialdom; and secondly, they contain too many political agents—parliamentarians with legislative powers, and those who vote for them. It is of course true that throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries there is in those countries a public discussion about who may be a representative and, especially, about who may be a voter, and for as long as those who participate in the discussion include those who are neither, there is in England and France too such a thing as a public opinion that is the voice of political impotence and has only the power of moral suasion with which to attain its end. But the public sphere as a whole—the sphere of contributors to public opinion—is not made up only of the impotent, but always includes some of those who have power, who have to be persuaded to extend the franchise, or the role of parliamentary reporting, and who do not have to imagine themselves detached from power in order to take part in the debate. There is, in short, no reason to make a distinction in principle between the debate in the parliamentary assembly and the debate outside it. I cannot in the end avoid the impression that Habermas’s “politically functioning public sphere” is a phantom. Its ghostly existence began in the German Enlightenment as second-best for those who had no direct share in political power and were simply the monarch’s administrative instruments. It maintained a tenuous hold on reality throughout Europe during the long struggle to enlarge the franchise. But it finally evaporated with the achievement of universal adult suffrage. Habermas sees parliament and the voting system as mediating between the law—the deployment of state force—and public opinion, the voice of the “politically functioning

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public sphere.” But in reality, I believe, parliament—the political process—mediates between the law—the deployment of state force—and the market. There is no need for an extra mediator, a phantom reduplication of the political process. What Habermas calls the Zerfall, that is, the “decline” or “disintegration” of the politically functioning bourgeois public sphere, is simply the decline of an illusion that he has himself created.41 It is not necessary, it is perhaps not even possible, to understand who we are now in terms of a structural shift in the relation of private to public.42 What matters is the relation of the market to the state: that was the case in the eighteenth century and is still the case now. Habermas’s complaint that the public sphere no longer matters is really an admission that his categories were always an irrelevance anyway.43

Notes 1. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, new ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1990). All translations, if not otherwise noted, are my own. 2. Ibid., 57, 66–67, 88–90, 148–49. 3. Ibid., 66, 120. 4. Ibid., 148n51 and 156n65. 5. Ibid., 156. 6. Ibid., 56. 7. Ibid., 80 and 81. 8. Ibid., 69–70, and Peter Spufford, Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe (New York, 2003). 9. Hajo Holborn, “German Idealism in the Light of Social History,” in Germany and Europe (New York, 1971), 7; and Eda Sagarra, A Social History of Germany, 1648– 1914 (London, 1977). 10. T. C. W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743–1803 (Cambridge, 1974), 9. 11. Sagarra, A Social History of Germany, 56; and W. H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social Background of the Literary Revival (Cambridge, 1965), 336. 12. Sagarra, A Social History of Germany, 62. 13. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 10. 14. Sagarra, A Social History of Germany, 65–66. 15. Rudolf Vierhaus, Deutschland im Zeitalter des Absolutismus (1648–1763) (Göttingen, 1978), 24–25. 16. Vierhaus, Deutschland im Zeitalter des Absolutismus, 78; and Hans Heinrich Gerth, Bürgerliche Intelligenz um 1800: Zur Soziologie des deutschen Frühliberalismus (Göttingen, 1976), 44–45. 17. Sagarra, A Social History of Germany, 12. 18. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 183.

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19. Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660–1815 (Cambridge, 1958). 20. Wolfgang Zorn, “Deutsche Führungsschichten des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts: Forschungsergebnisse seit 1945,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 6 (1981): 190. 21. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, in Werkausgabe, eds. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), 357 (§ 205). 22. Zorn, “Deutsche Führungsschichten des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts,” 191. 23. Gerth, Bürgerliche Intelligenz um 1800, 87. See also Herbert Schöffler, “Anruf der Schweizer,” in Deutscher Geist im 18. Jahrhundert: Essays zur Geistes- und Religionsgeschichte, ed. Götz von Selle, 2nd ed. (Göttingen, 1967), 7–60. 24. Gerth, Bürgerliche Intelligenz um 1800, 33. 25. The quotation is from Sagarra, A Social History of Germany, 82. 26. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 14. 27. Herbert Schöffler, Protestantismus und Literatur, 2nd ed. (Göttingen, 1958). 28. Nicholas Boyle, “Lessing, Biblical Criticism, and the Origins of German Classical Culture,” German Life and Letters 34 (1981): 196–213. 29. Albert Ward, Book Production, Fiction, and the German Reading Public, 1740–1800 (Oxford, 1974) 33 and 164–65. 30. Gerhard Sauder, “Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 4 (1979): 214. 31. Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, II: Revolution and Renunciation (1790– 1803) (Oxford, 2000), 402–4. 32. John Cochrane O’Neill, The Bible’s Authority: A Portrait Gallery of Thinkers from Lessing to Bultmann (Edinburgh, 1991). 33. Schiller to Goethe, 28 November 1796, in Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, ed. Siegfried Seidel (Munich, 1984), vol. 1, 271 (no. 248). 34. See, in contrast, Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 81. 35. “glücklichen Augenblick”; Ibid., 148. 36. See, for instance, Karl Philipp Moritz’s account of an election meeting in London: Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahre 1782: In Briefen an Herrn Direktor Gedike, in Werke, ed. Horst Günther, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), 34–36. 37. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 167; Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” in Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 11 (Frankfurt am Main, 1964), 53–6;, and Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Edmund Burke (London, 1999), 155–57 and 282–92. 38. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 178. 39. Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” 57. 40. “politisch fungierende Öffentlichkeit”; Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 151. 41. Ibid., 268. 42. Nicholas Boyle, Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney (Notre Dame, IN, 1998). 43. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, 274.

Chapter 5

THE SECOND LIFE OF THE “PUBLIC SPHERE” On Charisma and Routinization in the History of a Concept

John H. Zammito



The notion of a public sphere has been one of the great success stories of recent historical writing. —Brian Cowen, “What was Masculine about the Public Sphere?”

Introduction Because concepts are the most crucial instruments with which practitioners of the human sciences operate, it is critical that we come to terms with their situatedness or contingency in time and circumstance. That is, we need to practice what Margaret Somers has termed a “historical sociology of knowledge.”1 Now, the project of recognizing the historicity of concepts is not new. The prestigious Journal of the History of Ideas has been in operation for a very long time, and intellectual history, qua history of ideas, has at least as long a tradition.2 More recently, the massive and imposing project of Begriffsgeschichte was launched by Reinhard Koselleck and his associates.3 But what is crucially different about Somers’s

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suggestion is that this historicization is not just a matter of the object of inquiry, but rather a reflexive operation incumbent on the subject, the inquirer: a matter of theoretical self-consciousness. It is in that vein that I wish to offer a historicization of one particularly interesting concept in our repertoire, originated in 1962 by the German social philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the idea of the “public sphere.”4 To do so, I wish to employ a well-established conception in social studies, the model of charisma and routinization. The standard conceptualization of charisma and routinization recognizes two distinct phases: an inaugural moment, a kind of epiphany that galvanizes a collective movement, followed by institutionalization, with attendant revision of key ideas and loss of fervor. Conventionally, the model is applied to a historical figure or movement, but I hope to show it can work for a concept, too. My argument is that, for very important contextual-historical reasons, Habermas’s concept of the public sphere experienced a second life, a charismatic epiphany, on the occasion of its long-delayed English translation in 1989. But I also claim that contextual circumstances have shifted dramatically since 1989. While the concept has become ubiquitous in the human sciences, and particularly in the historiography of the eighteenth century, it has lost a considerable part of its original motivation and character to become instead a standard tool for a certain kind of historical work—hence, we have passed from the charismatic moment to the routinization of the concept. Routinization, in my view, need not be a privative notion. It can in fact be affirmative in at least two aspects: (1) what gets routinized changes, but the routinization removes blemishes in the original model, making it more practically useful; and (2) this reaps the benefits of “normal science,” i.e., following the Kuhnian observation on research communities and conceptual frameworks, it allows for certain commonly accepted presuppositions that facilitate more focused and refined inquiry.5 Almost all commentators have noted the strange fact that a text published as a Habilitation in Germany in 1962 came to have such an impact only when translated into English in 1989.6 This was all the more noteworthy because its author, Jürgen Habermas, had long since emerged as one of the two or three most important European philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, and the early work was clearly understood to have reflected a crucial step in his evolution away from the Marxism of the Frankfurt School to his own far more nuanced position.7 The embroilment of Habermas’s early work in a specifically German context, and in dialogue with the roughly contemporary and highly controversial work of Reinhard Koselleck’s Kritik und Krise, may well have rendered the matter more marginal for the historiogra-

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phy of the Enlightenment or of the emergence of “bourgeois-democratic” culture in Europe than it might otherwise have been.8 It is notable that while a French translation of Habermas’s work appeared in 1978, it had little or no impact on the practices of the human sciences.9 Anthony La Vopa was quite correct to note that Habermas and Koselleck “attracted little attention in France because their philosophical preoccupations and their approaches to ideology cut against the grain of the reigning Annales School paradigm.”10 What mobilized the English translation and created the “charismatic” moment for the idea of the public sphere was a striking conjoncture—to borrow an Annales term—that we can associate with the year 1989. It had three elements: 1. Mere chronological coincidence: the bicentennial of the French Revolution; 2. Grand historical surprise: the collapse of the Soviet Union; and 3. Academic vogue: the climax of poststructuralism, the triumph of language over “social structure” in explanation. These conjunctural-contextual elements had three consequences for the reception of the notion of the “public sphere”: 1. The revolution in French Revolution interpretation (François Furet, et al.); 2. The feminist consensus on “public/private” and “bourgeois democracy” (Joan Landes, et al.); and 3. The crisis of “social explanation”—the “linguistic” and “cultural” turns (Michel Foucault, et al.). Furet’s new orthodoxy in French Revolution interpretation, like the orthodoxy of feminist history that Landes coded (adversarially) in terms of Habermas’s public sphere, and Foucault’s power/knowledge discourse analysis (as the putative orthodoxy of poststructuralism for the “new cultural history”) all achieved preeminence in the American academy around 1989, and all of them (Foucault most tacitly) used Habermas and the public sphere (at the very least as a foil). Furet, Landes, and Foucault stand as three eminences of the charismatic moment of the “public sphere” idea circa 1989 whose waning influence conversely bespeaks its routinization. I will for the most part leave the wider political context of the bicentennial and the collapse of the Soviet Union aside to concentrate on the methodological or theoretical moment associated with the three eminences. It is not coincidental that the evanescence of Furet is far more comfortable in the academy than is the case with Landes (synecdochically for the

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feminist orthodoxy of 1990) or Foucault (the eminence still for much cultural-political history), but I will endeavor to make the case regarding all three, suggesting in conclusion that the waning of their eminence might betoken the fading of the fin de siècle mood of “postmodernism.” We can swiftly clear up one issue, namely, that the concept of the public sphere has become ubiquitous. The proliferation of usage is unquestionable. One need only look to the formulation of theme volumes in major historical journals for eighteenth-century studies, to say nothing of the plethora of major monographs invoking the term.11 Today the concept is widely invoked in a variety of disciplinary/interdisciplinary contexts “as inspiration, instigation or foil.”12 Thus, as Brooke puts it: “The public sphere poses distinctly different problems for different disciplines. Political philosophers seek a precise definition of its qualities in a ‘Platonic now’; historians try to describe how these qualities and the institutions and practices that support them evolved through time; literary scholars ask [after] new interpretations of particular texts and the wider discourses in which they were embedded.”13 Each disciplinary community has harvested the notion of the public sphere from its original Habermasian formulation and moved forward to new and energetic applications.14 Thus, Eyan Rabinovitsch discerns “competing directions for improvement” leading to a “proper conceptualization of the post-Habermasian public sphere.”15 The question is whether this ubiquity has diluted or trivialized its utility. Brian Cowan observes, “the term has become so fluid that with a little imagination it can be applied to almost any time and any place.”16 Does the concept of the “public sphere” have theoretical rigor and historical specificity? For a sampling of recent scruples: Joseph Loewenstein and Paul Stevens are “mindful of how a useful critical term can lose its leverage by enthusiastically lavish application.”17 John Brooke wonders “whether the topic of the public sphere is reaching beyond the margins of the useful … reaching a critical moment of overexpansion, deflation, and collapse.”18 Ruth Bloch virtually affirms that “a once specific theoretical concept has come perilously close to dissolving into mush.”19 David Bell gives and takes: “Thirty years after publication the clarity and conceptual strength of Habermas’s work continues to impress, but does it still provide a useful prism for viewing the French ancien régime?”20 Cowan concludes that “perhaps the concept has been over-exploited. When historians can find ‘public spheres’ in nearly every time and place, and scholars blithely jettison the original Habermasian formulation of the term in favor of definitions that more properly suit their interests, the analytic purchase of the concept is much diminished.”21 “In the end,” writes David Waldstreicher, “the significance of the public sphere … will be determined by its ability

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to produce not only new or better interpretations of texts but also a richly documented history of people and their practices and institutions.”22 One aspect of routinization is a clear discrimination between Habermas’s personal intentions for the idea and its current intellectual utility or energy. Waldstreicher observes: “the public sphere serves historians mainly as a shorthand for … expanding press and popular political culture or for the public as opposed to the private or domestic realm. This vague descriptive usage is quite different from Habermas’s argument.”23 Therefore, it is fruitful to start by disaggregating Habermas’s specific investments from the general intellectual capital of the notion. What had to be discounted in taking up this conceptual resource? There were two clear overinvestments by Habermas: in Marxist “grand history” and in Kantian moral idealism.24 And there may well have been a significant third: mandarin cultural elitism. The concern of this chapter is with the utility of the “public sphere” as a concept for historical use. “While the Habermasian perspective has gained increasing popularity in political philosophy, historians and sociologists have long been frustrated with its overly abstract formulation.”25 Habermas’s main concern was not the historical genesis but the normative requisites of public discourse. That is, “What are the conditions under which rational, critical and genuinely open discussion of public issues becomes possible?”26 His critique of the systematic distortions of moral and political life in advanced capitalist society led him to a nostalgic recursion to the Enlightenment (Kant) for the ideals essential to a liberal political order. Habermas discriminated three criteria: 1. The force of better argument alone should prevail; 2. Nothing should stand immune to critique; and 3. Secrecy was politically unacceptable.27 To explain the ascendancy of such a regime of public discourse, Habermas evoked three connected contexts: 1. The rise of the modern nation-state and of the autonomous market (capitalism), occasioning the society/state split; 2. The concomitant commercialization in the sphere of culture; and 3. A shift in family and domestic life toward companionate marriage and intimacy. Historically, Habermas located the emergent political public sphere as the outcome of a prior expression of intimate life in a literary public sphere,

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situated in new institutions for sociability instigated by the marketization of literature. These literary and institutional forms of sociability created new standards for discourse with eventually political significance, the rise of public opinion. From the current vantage, James Van Horn Melton has analyzed the weaknesses in Habermas’s original position with great insight. As Melton pointedly phrases his criticism, “part of Habermas’s problem is that he takes his history from Marx but his moral philosophy from Kant.”28 Therefore, Habermas came under two distinct forms of attack. First, there was a theoretical critique—largely poststructuralist in formulation—that attacked the very idea of rationality as always-already tyrannical/paternalistic, etc. This line was articulated particularly by Foucault and then taken up by feminists like Joan Landes.29 This critique condemned Habermas’s very ideals and impugned, accordingly, his idealization of the Enlightenment as the “unfinished project of modernity.”30 Then there was the historical critique, which discerned several weaknesses. The Marxist metanarrative of “bourgeois emancipation” was faulted both for the hypostasis of “class” as the agency of historical change, and also for “economic determinism” as the decisive form of that change.31 But even apart from Marxism, Habermas’s developmental chronology seemed implausible: several major historical studies demonstrated that the literary public sphere did not precede the political one. David Zaret made this case with reference to the seventeenth-century English revolution, and Ursula Goldenbaum made it with reference to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious controversies in Protestant Europe.32 In both contexts, it was religious-political controversy that first generated a significant public sphere. That occasioned the general criticism that Habermas neglected the crucial role of religion in early modern European history. And, of course, feminists blasted Habermas from the outset for a neglect of the problem of gender both historically and politically. As Simon Richter summarizes, “Authors such as Carol[e] Pateman, Nancy Fraser, Geoff Eley, and Mary Ryan have made Habermas aware of how deeply gendered yet gender-blind his early work was.”33 It is of interest, further, that the reception of Habermas’s original text in Germany entailed strong criticism from the left that he had restricted his attention prejudicially to the bourgeoisie, neglecting the popular and working classes.34 The bill of indictment is indeed severe, and the wonder is that the concept of the public sphere survived its originator’s weaknesses. Yet this was ironically the very trigger for its charismatic rebirth: freed from Habermas’s personal concerns, it could find its place in other, more compellingly contemporary discursive fields around 1989.35

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Furet and the French Revolution The convergence of the bicentennial of the French Revolution with the fall of the Soviet Union made the discrediting of Marxism peculiarly salient not only politically, but also theoretically. Apart from the fatuous proclamation of an “end of history” by Fukuyama, there were major historiographical consequences that attended this political watershed.36 Above all, it occasioned the consolidation into a triumphal new orthodoxy of a revisionist campaign going back decades: a revolution in the interpretation of the French Revolution, presided over by François Furet.37 At the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Furet and his followers seemed thoroughly to have displaced social explanation with invocations of political ideology, the imaginary, and the discursive in accounting for the great revolution.38 Furet himself used Habermas’s notions to develop the idea of the “democratic imaginary,” and Mona Ozouf followed along that line.39 However, mobilizing Habermas’s theory of the public sphere to uphold Furet’s revolutionary ascendancy was a particularly American enterprise.40 The most important American developers of Furet’s approach were Lynn Hunt and Keith Baker. Taking off from Furet, Hunt elaborated a more ethnographic and cultural-historical approach to the revolution, and Baker made the notion of “political culture” central.41 Significantly, “those who have used The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere to rewrite the cultural history of the eighteenth century have explicitly rejected the Marxist chronological and sociological aspects of Habermas’s work.”42 Baker pushed Furet’s argument in a more resolutely linguistic direction: “With the Revolution, the sacred center was symbolically refigured; the public person of the sovereign was displaced by the sovereign person of the public. The nation was thereby constituted symbolically as the ontological Subject, its unity and identity becoming the very ground of individual and collective existence.”43 Patrice Higonnet drew the appropriate conclusion: the tragedy of the Terror centered upon the “inability of the propertied revolutionaries of all hues to resolve the gap between their universalist vision of transparent social forms and the reality of Parisian popular life.”44 Baker made the interesting observation that events in France in 1968 helped historians to grasp the power of the political imagination and the force of rhetoric in social behavior. The role of these events in the rise of poststructuralism makes this even more significant for the historical sociology of knowledge. The decisive feature of the second life of the public sphere was the general evacuation of faith not only from the Marxist notion of bourgeois revolution, but also from the larger theoretical frame of class—and with it, social explanation. “Class” as a general concept was being distinctly

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demoted. The controversy over E. P. Thompson’s classic Making of the English Working Class (1963) is crucial here.45 Gareth Stedman Jones’s problematization of “class” as a “language” of interpretation (and, accordingly, of historical actuality) was central to the deconstruction of that category.46 This occasioned the second concomitant, namely the dissolution of grand narratives that pivoted on the category of class for their rationale—not only Marxism but other discourses of modernization originating in the Scottish Enlightenment narrative of capitalism’s triumph over feudalism.47 In the swell of poststructuralist and postmodernist enthusiasm by the late 1980s, there arose a distinct crisis of confidence in what Jean-François Lyotard dismissed as “grand narratives.”48 A key exemplar of this new approach is Sarah Maza’s recent, prizewinning monograph The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie (2003). In an earlier text, Maza hit the keynote: “there was no economically determined and class-conscious bourgeoisie in eighteenth-century France.”49 Maza agrees with Patrick Joyce: “class ‘is an imagined form, not something given in a “real” world beyond this form.’”50 In a word, “society is not a physical object but a concept.”51 Therefore, “we need to find new ways of understanding the link between material experience and consciousness in that society,” i.e., ask more concretely “the question of how class is constructed through language and culture.”52 Maza claims, with self-conscious hyperbole, “the central thesis of this book is that the French bourgeoisie did not exist.” That is, “no group calling itself bourgeois ever emerged in France to make claims to cultural or political centrality and power” and “classes only exist if they are aware of their own existence.”53 Not only is Maza rejecting the notion of bourgeoisie as a social class in the sense of a “natural kind,” a pregiven actuality, she is questioning the idealizing metanarrative behind it, the classic “transition from feudalism to capitalism” that was initially conceived by the Scottish Enlightenment and given its respectively negative and positive canonization in Marxism and Whig liberalism in the nineteenth century. Maza contends that classic historical sociology “presumes an objective, material reality of social existence that is passively reflected in, and sometimes concealed by, language.”54 These are matters to which we shall return. Remarkably, Furet’s hegemony has proven short-lived. There has been “a collective assault on [the Furet school’s] contention that the ideology of 1789 led to the Terror.”55 Critics challenge not just Furet’s conservative political implications or his dismissal of the positive significance of the French Revolution. While “many reject Furet’s interpretation without repudiating discursive methods more globally,” there has also emerged a decided methodological revisionism.56 William Sewell Jr. “faults Baker and Furet for ‘their evacuation of the social from the Revolution.’”57 Against

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the “primacy of ideology,” Jack Censer recognized that “the social has returned.”58 To be sure, as Suzanne Desan cautions, “by 1999, ‘classic social history’ has not staged an astonishing comeback, but neither has Furet’s approach continued to define the contours of the field.”59 Instead, a new kind of social history inflected by culture has arisen: “a resurgence of empirical and narrative approach to politics … emphasiz[ing] the complexity—rather than the ineluctability or coherence—of the revolutionary dynamic.”60 That is, “scholars in both France and the United States have been attempting to articulate some form of social situatedness to counterbalance and complement work on political ideology, imagination, and symbolism.”61 As Lynn Hunt puts in a more recent work, “the experience of those who made the Revolution in its various phases was always much more contradictory, ambiguous, and ambivalent” than our representations have allowed. In an unprecedented way, “politics invaded every aspect of life, including the most intimate details of daily existence. … How did people understand this remarkable expansion of politics? For the most part, they probably didn’t. The experience was so new that it did not fit into the available categories of political explanation.”62 Hunt suggests that the “family romance” provided a metaphorical system within which to try to make sense of this new political experience: “The family romance was a kind of prepolitical category for organizing political experience.”63 In fact, the family romance was a congeries of metaphors, different “between social groups, between men and women, between people in different regions of the country, between competing political formations, and perhaps even between adults and children.”64 These “metaphors for public life … were developed in response to changing events … but also … drove the revolutionary process forward.”65 What Hunt points to in her conception of the family romance metaphoric is the interplay of the ongoing self-creation of political identity in the press of events and the recourse to symbolic categorizations (albeit “prepolitical”) to articulate or interpret the novel experiences. This is the very stuff of what Margaret Somers has called “instituted processes” as the core of political culture or the public sphere. As she has noted several times, “institutional relationships and relational networks consistently ‘outrun’ social categories.”66 Desan characterizes the current theoretical situation in the following terms: At a moment when interpretive emphasis on either discursive structures or social structures seems constricting or overly determinist, the word “practice,” while not as naive-sounding as “agency,” implies an open-endedness, a malleability, room for strategy. Because “practice” is often allied with the

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adjective “social” and used in contrast to “discourse,” it generally implies, albeit rather loosely, some kind of social affiliation, network, or meaning.67

Not all of us feel so sheepish about asserting “agency.” But “practice” will do. And one aspect of both, as William Sewell has stressed, is the need not only for “schemas” (symbolic codes) but also for “resources” (material and institutional) for the undertaking.68 It is here that “structure” can come back in, without regression into reifications. As with Hunt’s invocation of the “family romance,” these schemas and resources may be strikingly “prepolitical” or “premodern” and still play a decisive political and modern role, i.e., implement the public sphere. This is the aspect of Keith Baker’s and Roger Chartier’s work on the cultural origins of the French Revolution in the Enlightenment that is of lasting importance.69

Public Sphere, Private Sphere, and Democracy: Feminist Orthodoxy in 1989 Habermas’s theory of the public sphere as an eighteenth-century phenomenon figured crucially in the feminist reconsideration of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. “The tendency among feminist authors on the eighteenth century has been to assimilate the concept of the ‘public sphere’ (both in the Enlightenment and in Habermas’s thought) to the classical conception of politics in which private and public spheres are defined in opposition to one another.”70 As Suzanne Desan notes, a “shift in feminist analysis dovetailed with the emerging field of political culture.”71 Thus, “by the early 1990s, a synthetic interpretation of the Revolution’s impact on women had begun to emerge.” At its core was the claim that “the construction of a bourgeois public sphere of democratic politics necessarily excluded women from public life and contributed to confining them within the home.” Desan notes: “Most influential in developing this interpretation was Joan Landes’s Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution.”72 Landes published her monograph in 1988, a year before the actual appearance of the translation of Habermas’s work, but with clear anticipation of its appearance, and frequent references to the text by its eventual English title. More importantly, she clearly conceived the task of feminist history and theory in terms of reinterpreting Habermas’s conception of the public sphere with regard to the problem of women and political participation. Her thesis was that there was a decisive change in the political possibilities of women over the period 1750 to 1850, the “classical” age of the “bourgeois public sphere,” and that this change could be located

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in the Rousseauian discourse of female domesticity (idealized as “republican motherhood”) that was taken up by the French revolutionaries as the basis for the necessary exclusion of women from political life in order to constitute “bourgeois republicanism.” Hence, the exclusion of women from the political public sphere was an innovation and a necessary, not contingent, feature of the constitution of “male” republicanism.73 Landes suggests that women were in a degree complicit then and thereafter in this liberal or republican exclusion of women, even as they invoked its ostensible “universalism” in the campaign for their lost political rights. But critics have both questioned the degree to which there was any significant political participation or power by women in the eighteenth century, such that the relegation to a private sphere represented a major novelty in women’s history, and also denied that there was any necessary exclusion of women’s political rights in the character of liberal republican political theory.74 As Brian Cowan observes, Landes’s assertion that “the bourgeois public is essentially, not just contingently, masculinist,” drew a lot of criticism, “but her general interpretation of the period has not lost its partisans … because it has fit so well with the master narrative of women’s history, the story of the emergence of separate spheres for men and women.”75 The synthesis was widely shared. Desan points to Carole Pateman’s theory that liberalism rested on a sexual contract, Joan Scott’s deconstruction of liberal universalism, and the contentions of Geneviève Fraisse and Christine Fauré “that democracy limited women’s participation.”76 Not coincidentally, a large part of this emergent orthodoxy invoked French poststructuralism as its theoretical vantage.77 These feminists asked “how and why were women excluded from the public sphere or from the liberal politics of rights?”78 As Sarah Maza put it, “was this stark separation of spheres and silencing of female voices the necessary outcome, in gendered terms, of Habermas’s ‘structural transformation,’ or just one of several possible outcomes?”79 Landes took the first position and helped shape it into a feminist orthodoxy around 1989. Another key figure was Dena Goodman: “Like Landes, Goodman thinks women were excluded from the public sphere when men of the French Revolution drew the line between a male political sphere and a female domestic one, and, like Landes, she argues that this line was drawn when the revolutionaries institutionalized a Rousseauian ideology of republican motherhood.”80 This new orthodoxy of feminist interpretation has an “ironic parallel” with Furet’s. “Landes’s influential argument resembles Furet’s not only in seeing a direct continuity from Rousseauist thought to the repressive politics of 1793, but also in assuming the primacy and relative coherence of discursive determinism.”81 But there are problems with her characterization of the exclusion

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of women. Kale suggests it is “both mysterious and totalizing, since it implies that history is a zero-sum game, that the cultural representations responsible for reorganizing experience have the same effect on everyone equally and at the same time.”82 Lynn Hunt has been outspokenly critical of this “trend within feminism that attacks liberal political theory for its bias against women.”83 She does not dispute that, “because it was molded in the varying images of the family, the political imagination was inherently gendered, and its gendering had important, often unforeseen consequence for the construction of the social order.”84 But Hunt insists that “the exclusion of women was not theoretically necessary in liberal politics … liberal political theory actually made the exclusion of women much more problematic. It made the exclusion of women an issue.” Thus, “it is no accident that there was a self-conscious feminist movement, however small, in France, and nowhere else, not even in America.”85 Daniel Gordon endorses Hunt’s stance: “the denial of women’s rights was historically contingent and not essential to the liberal framework … Although women were excluded from the public space as constitutionally defined in the nineteenth century, they did inherit from eighteenth-century thought a discursive space in which they could publicly and forcefully articulate their dissatisfaction with those constitutional arrangements.”86 Desan notes, accordingly, that “in the late 1990s, this synthesis and its line of inquiry ha[d] become less dominant.” One reason was that feminist theory had found the distinction of public and private less obvious, and another was the “overly simplified and dichotomous portrait of the Revolution as ‘bad for women.’”87 Detailed research revealed more diverse female political practices and rediscovered “women’s activism, practices, and interactions with revolutionary institutions.”88 As Steven Kale notes, “The explanatory power of the feminist synthesis for which Landes and Goodman were largely responsible has diminished among historians in the face of criticism pointing to the rigidities of the private-public dichotomies and the possibilities for female activism and women’s rights opened up by the French Revolution.”89 Considering Carole Pateman, David Norbrook comes to a somewhat similar assessment that feminist critiques of Habermas’s notion of the public sphere “raise important issues; but they are often pitched at a very abstract level and fail to take account of the agency of particular women.”90 Thus, Brian Cowan observes, “there is at present very little agreement on the extent to which women were excluded from the early modern public sphere.” Indeed, he notes, “the studies of Lawrence Klein, Dena Goodman and Daniel Gordon of eighteenth-century ideals and practices of public sociability have emphasized the important role of women in the

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public sphere, especially as conversationalists in salons and literary societies.”91 Cowan juxtaposes the stance of Kathleen Wilson, emphasizing “stridently gendered and exclusionary notions of political subjectivity,” with that of Lawrence Klein, who found women active in many public settings. Cowan observes: “Wilson and Klein are thinking of two very different sorts of public spheres: the former of the magisterial realm of state power and high politics, and the latter of the world of commercialized leisure.”92 Of course, the Habermasian idea was to discern a third space between these two, and, Cowan notes, “Steven Pincus has made the most powerful argument for the early emergence in Restoration England of ‘a public sphere in the Habermasian sense’ that was ‘not gender or class exclusive.’”93 Lawrence Klein points to a substantial historiography that establishes—at least in his sense—that “women had extensive public lives in the eighteenth century.”94 He suggests that the feminist orthodoxy took too seriously “high theory and prescriptive literature” at the expense of the actual social life of women in the eighteenth century, which revisionist historiography has increasingly revealed.95 This is not altogether unequivocal, however. Kathryn Shevelow, in a very important study of literary periodicals, concluded that “during the eighteenth century, as upper and middle class English women began to participate in the public realms of print culture, the representational practices of that culture were steadily enclosing them within the private sphere of the home.”96 On the other hand, Deborah Heller has argued for the persistent vitality of women in the English literary public sphere into the late eighteenth century, and Mary Thale has documented their presence in London debating societies in the 1780s.97 Indeed, Linda Colley has shown that “the conservative backlash of the 1790s offered opportunities for greater female participation in a new public life of loyalist parades, petitions and patriotic subscriptions.”98 Ironically, they used the rhetoric of separate spheres to engage in active public interventions.99 Perhaps the crucial perspective comes from within feminist theory and historiography: the direct challenge to the “categories and chronology” of the separate spheres interpretation. An early challenge came in an address to the Organization of American Historians in April 1984 by Barbara Sicherman.100 The critique reached its height in essays by Linda Kerber in 1988 and Amanda Vickery in 1993.101 Kerber, famous as the historian who defined “revolutionary motherhood” as a trope in the early American republic, had become skeptical of the whole discourse of “spheres.” She noted that this “metaphor of the ‘sphere’ was the figure of speech, the trope, on which historians came to rely when they described women’s past in American culture.”102 (This long-established connection

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of “sphere” with “public” may well account for the rendering of Habermas’s term Öffentlichkeit as “public sphere” in the English translation. The original German has no particular spatial metaphoricity except perhaps for openness, and the French translation used the less metaphorically encumbered term “espace.”) What Kerber found central to the metaphor is its preemptive structuring of historical conceptualization as a confining “common sense.”103 Reconstructing feminist historiography from that vantage, Amanda Vickery proposes a more systematic deconstruction of the approach. As she summarizes the orthodox view, it claimed “a shrinkage of political, professional and business opportunities for women in the years 1800–40 … [due to] the formation of separate gender spheres: the private sphere of female domesticity and the public sphere of male work, association and politics.”104 The argument built from Barbara Welter’s “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860” (1966), through Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: Women’s Sphere in New England, 1780–1835 (1977), to Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (1981).105 A striking innovation in this feminist history, launched particularly by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, was the affirmation of the cultural development of female solidarity that resulted from this separation.106 Thus, as N. A. Hewitt summarizes, “the true woman/separate sphere/women’s culture triad became the most widely used framework for interpreting women’s past in the United States.”107 Responding to the trajectory of this research, Cott recognized that “the more historians have relied on women’s personal documents the more positively they have evaluated women’s sphere.”108 Vickery suggests this is subject to a different construction. “Rather than conclude from positive female testimony that women were not necessarily imprisoned in a rigidly defined private sphere, the dominant interpretation simply sees the private sphere in a better light.”109 Vickery argues that the first option is far more cogent. “Whether informed by Foucault, Lacan or Greenblatt, recent feminist literary criticism still depends ultimately on a narrative of social and economic change which has barely changed since 1919.”110 Like Lynn Hunt, she observes that “few have reflected on the possibility that equal rights feminism was less a response to a newly imposed model of stifling passivity, than the fruition of a political tradition.”111 Vickery accentuates “recent work both theoretical and empirical” in which “doubts now circulate … about the conceptual usefulness of the separate spheres framework.”112 One of the most important weaknesses of the separate spheres story is its “compelling vision of a pre-capitalist utopia, a golden age, for women,” from which the new consignment to domesticity marked a radical priva-

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tion.113 “Yet,” Vickery writes, “few eighteenth-century historians would claim that women enjoyed an institutional heyday in their period.”114 Vickery asks: “were the work opportunities and public liberties enjoyed by propertied women before the factory so much greater than those of the Victorian period?”115 Invoking such historians as Olwen Hufton, Vickery argues that “the basic continuities in women’s work between 1200 and 1900 must render inadequate the conventional explanation of female subordination in terms of capitalism and industrialization.”116 “In any case,” she continues, “research on seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury economy raises doubts about the conviction that female enterprise decayed substantially between 1700 and 1850.”117 As to questions of political rights, “in no century before the twentieth did women enjoy the public powers which nineteenth-century feminists sought—the full rights of citizenship. … If all this adds up to a separation of the public sphere of male power and the private sphere of female influence, then this separation was an ancient phenomenon.”118 Kerber makes the same point: “the allocation of the public sector to men and the private sector (still under men’s control) to women is older than western civilization.”119 Vickery draws the essential conclusion: “What is extremely difficult to sustain … is the argument that sometime between 1650 and 1850 the public/private distinction was constituted or radically reconstituted in a way that transformed relations between the sexes.”120 The Landes thesis and the feminist orthodoxy that consolidated around it regarding the Habermasian concept of the public sphere is severely vitiated by this critique.

The Crisis of Social Explanation By the mid-1980s John Law could observe that, especially under the impact of Michel Foucault, “structure has collapsed into knowledge in the form of discourse.”121 The whole enterprise of social explanation was being undermined. As Bruno Latour put it, “the evolution of our field has made the notion of a ‘social explanation’ obsolete.”122 Latour was emphatic: “notions like ‘context,’ ‘interest,’ ‘religious opinion,’ ‘class position,’ are … part of the problem rather than of the solution.”123 The summary verdict pronounced by Michael Lynch has reverberated widely: “Sociology’s general concepts and methodological strategies are simply overwhelmed by the heterogeneity and technical density of the languages, equipment, and skills through which … practitioners in many … fields of activity make their affairs accountable. It is not that their practices are asocial, but that they are more thoroughly and locally social than sociology is prepared to handle.”124

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The mid-1980s witnessed the shattering of faith in the categories of causal explanation of orthodox sociology. What had come under attack was “the idea that there is a backcloth of relatively stable social interests which directs knowledge or ideology.”125 With the crisis of sociological explanation, the whole enterprise of sociology reached a fatal impasse. Since 1970, when Alvin Gouldner published The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, “at least 150 articles concerning the ‘crisis of sociology’” have appeared.126 Indeed, the “sense of disorientation in American sociology … has never really abated since 1970.”127 It is thus a commonplace to observe that “since the mid-1960s the discipline has endured a crisis of identity.”128 Steven Seidman, noting this “almost permanent sense of crisis,” proclaimed: “sociological theory has gone astray.”129 Even more drastic was Norman Denzin’s pronouncement that “sociology is dying. The death of the social is upon us.”130 Since the dissolution of the Parsonian orthodox consensus, “the very idea that sociology has a ‘core’ has become doubtful.”131 One adherent of this lapsed orthodoxy lamented in 1993 what he called The Decomposition of Sociology.132 At the end of the century, Stephen Cole organized a massive inquiry into What’s Wrong with Sociology?133 Over the discipline there had clearly settled a mood for which several commentators found the nineteenth-century phrase fin de siècle of renewed resonance. Anthony Giddens saw sociology beset with “feelings of disorientation and malaise” identified with the notion of fin de siècle, and Jeffrey Alexander entitled a 1995 book Fin de siècle Social Theory.134 Stuart Hall, the doyen of British cultural studies, made the point elegantly: “When I was offered a chair in sociology, I said, ‘Now that sociology does not exist as a discipline, I am happy to profess it.’”135 What happened to social explanation? Starting in the mid-1960s, “thinkers like Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and the early Michel Foucault created a revolution in the human sciences by insisting on the textuality of institutions and the discursive nature of social action,” Jeffrey Alexander observed.136 Swiftly poststructuralism radicalized the scene, both problematizing the epistemological frames of structuralist semiotics and introducing a grim reckoning with the problem of domination: “Althusser converted texts into ideological state apparatuses. Foucault conflated discourse with dominating power.”137 Simultaneously or sequentially, the works of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault swept the theoretical world of the human sciences. By the late 1980s, the initiative passed from “social science” to a different scholarly cadre and to a different theoretical orientation—“cultural studies.”138 The 1980s instantiated what William Sewell Jr. has dubbed “a kind of academic culture mania.”139 This movement saw its task as overcoming “a general failure in work on cultural production to analyze historically

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the sign-systems, codes and styles which are available for authorial and audience groups to make meanings with.”140 Within the discipline of sociology, Sewell observes, “by the late 1980s, the work of cultural sociologists had broken out of the study of culture-producing institutions and moved toward studying the place of meaning in social life more generally.”141 Cultural studies had responded initially to the rise of the “new social movements” and the restive political dissent associated with the New Left.142 In part because the proletarian redemption embraced by the old Marxism had lost its luster, the quest for alternative sites of resistance to oppression and for articulation of alternative political futures proved coterminous, especially for dissident, if mostly academically ensconced intellectuals. The key issues of race, class, and gender, as these have become canonized in contemporary discourse, followed out of the rise of the “new social movements,” but with the ebbing of their wider social efficacy, cultural studies has tended to become increasingly academicized and to persist as a radical agenda within (or better, against) the disciplinary structures of academia. In a 1990 survey of the field, Michèle Lamont and Robert Wuthnow observe that “a growing number of American cultural sociologists are increasingly reading outside their discipline, and are becoming more influenced by the interdisciplinary current in which European cultural theorists play a central role.”143 More specifically, “as American cultural sociology has begun to flourish again in recent years, it has been increasingly influenced by the work of scholars such as Foucault, Habermas, Douglas, and Bourdieu.”144 “Cultural sociology” became “a prominent subfield” by 1988 and “a major growth industry in the sociological portfolio” for the 1990s.145 There is a very strong connection between “cultural studies,” as it has evolved in the United States, and adamant advocacy of French poststructuralism. In his contribution to a volume notably entitled From Sociology to Cultural Studies (1995), Steven Seidman emphasizes that “cultural studies seems to parallel French ‘postmodern’ theory in viewing the new role of the mass media, the saturation of daily life by commerce and commodification, the new technologies of information, and the foregrounding of cultural politics as signaling perhaps a second ‘great transformation’ in post-Renaissance Western societies.”146 Seidman wishes to draw upon cultural studies to “challenge” disciplinary sociology to accept the fundamental poststructuralist epistemological and theoretical positions—the semiotics of Barth and Foucault, the psychoanalysis of Lacan, etc.—as more socially and politically emancipatory.147 Seidman abjures any claims to ultimate warrant or even empirical adequacy and pitches his case entirely on “pragmatic” grounds.148

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On similarly pragmatic grounds, however, one may well dispute the benefit of buying into Foucault, Lacan, and their brethren at anything like the rate of (cultural) exchange at which American postmodernists have valued them. It seems to me that we are well underway to a decisive deflation of their intellectual value. American cultural sociology of the late 1980s and the 1990s set itself the task of working through the theoretical resources developed in continental structuralism and poststructuralism—above all Foucault and Bourdieu, both of whom appeared to the Americans inclined toward a “discursive determinism”—in juxtaposition with the work of theorists in the “interpretive” tradition of social theory, like Clifford Geertz, Anthony Giddens, and Jürgen Habermas.149 The same influences that made “cultural sociology” a “growth sector” in that discipline were mirrored in the prominence of the “new cultural history” in historical research and in the “new historicism” in literary studies.150 The crisis of the Annales paradigm of impersonal social history in the longue durée proved precisely coterminous with the crisis of social explanation in sociology.151 The turn from structure to event, and even more from economic history to the history of mentalité, marked the new ascendancy of “cultural” considerations that had their origin, unequivocally, in the structuralist and poststructuralist critiques that had riven French discourse since 1968. If there was a “Foucault for sociologists,” there was also, perhaps even more, a “Foucault for historians,” and for “new historicists” in literary studies.152 As articulated by Jacques Revel and others, a new “cultural history” was clearly in the ascendant in the Annales school.153 By 1989, the “new cultural history” had swept over American academia, as codified by the widely cited volume The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt. But that ascendancy has eroded. Note the shift in position from The New Cultural History (1989) to Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999). A decade has brought significant reconsideration. In the introduction to Beyond the Cultural Turn, Bonnell and Hunt offer a most discerning account not only of where the human sciences have been over the last thirty years but also of where they might most profitably move now.154 I find myself in general sympathy with both their diagnostic history and their prospective proposals. What is clear in their account is that while “during the 1980s and 1990s, cultural theories, especially those with a postmodernist inflection, challenged the very possibility or desirability of social explanation,” this postmodernist view is now subject to a powerful revisionism.155 They note that the social “began to lose its automatic explanatory power” largely because of the collapse of positivist and orthodox Marxist explanatory paradigms of their own (dead) weight. Yet, with poststruc-

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turalism and postmodernism, “the cultural turn threatened to efface all reference to social context or causes and offered no particular standard of judgment.”156 Accordingly, today the human sciences might well “find common ground again in a redefinition or revitalization of the social.”157 Similarly, after the massive invective against “disciplinarity,” they suggest, “‘redisciplinization’ seems to be in order,” as “interdisciplinarity can only work if there are in fact disciplinary differences.”158 That does not mean that the challenges of poststructuralism to epistemology and methodology can be forgotten; “epistemological and even ontological issues are invariably raised by the cultural turn,” and reflexivity is inescapable.159 But by the same token, the fatal impasses in radical reflexivity that postmodernism saw at every turn are coming to seem more hallucinatory than necessary, or, as one commentator put it with admirable obliqueness, they seem now “philosophically undermotivated.”160

The Postmodern Take on the “Public Sphere” I conclude with a critique of the postmodernist reconstruction of the trajectory of the concept of the public sphere offered by Harold Mah and William Reddy. Mah’s essay “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians” appeared in 2000, whereas Reddy’s essay “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere: Implications for an Historical Ethnography” appeared earlier, in 1992.161 They are both, in my view, advocates of a postmodernist—more specifically poststructuralist—approach to historical practice, and they see the historical imbrication with the concept of the public sphere as a case in point for the need for such a poststructuralist turn.162 I take exception to this view. I do not dissent, however, from their contention that the reception of Habermas’s notion of the public sphere is directly connected with the high tide of poststructuralist influence in the practice of history and the humanities more generally, as is clear from what I have already said. I suggest simply that this connection between the concept and poststructuralism has lost its cogency. Mah is correct in claiming that the historical reception of the “public sphere” concept is “based on a misunderstanding of what exactly is entailed in the theory of the public sphere” as Habermas intended it. That is, “historians have rhetorically ‘spatialized’ the public sphere, conceiving it as a space or domain of free expression and argument that is accessible to any social group.” In doing so, historians neglect “how the public sphere constructs itself as a unitary entity … a mass subject.” This mass subject “is, of course, a phantasy … always at odds with an empirical re-

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ality of conflicting social identities and interests.” That is, “a collective subject is always belied by the reality of disagreeing social groups.”163 There are two implications Mah draws from this observation. First, the real historical concern should be with how a dominant social group succeeds in presenting its social identity in the public sphere so that it appears consistent with the universalistic requirement of the singular “mass subject” despite its actual particularity. Second, historians must recognize that such a “mass subject” is “necessarily unstable.” Mah relates the reception of the theory of the public sphere to a moment in historical practice derived from the rise of the “new social movements”—the focus on “dissenting groups,” on “how oppressed groups rise out of their submergence to become self-conscious and active political agents.” As Mah writes, “the recuperative intentions of social history were … directed to emphasize the specificity of different groups, the distinctive characters of their social and political expression.” Hence, there was “a new concern for the achievement of self- and social recognition or identity on the part of marginalized and other groups in society.”164 There were two concomitants of this accentuation of “race, class, and gender” as the new trinity of social interpretation. First, as Mah observes, the move toward “difference” and the recognition of a plurality of social movements brought with it “a loss of synthesizing explanation and narrative.” It also brought with it, however, a new sensitivity to modes of representation in the space of the public that did not conform to Habermas’s rational-universal discourse. Mah writes of “ethnographic tendencies in historical writing … [that conceptualized the] use of other kinds of expression—of rites, festivals, satire, ceremony, and carnivals.”165 What Mah highlights is that routinization blurred irretrievably the ostensibly “modern” bourgeois public sphere with the very “representative publicness” of the premodern from which it was Habermas’s primary objective to distance it. For Mah, there is nothing wrong with the historians’ moves. Rather, there was something wrong with Habermas’s theory. Historians simply need more forthrightly to recognize this when they employ a refigured version of his terminology. For Mah, “the public sphere requires as a condition of entry a phantasmic reshaping of social identity.”166 In insisting on the “mass subject,” this discourse “rhetorically personified, referred to as if it were a real person, a single subjectivity, in unitary possession of reason.”167 That entailed a “double fiction.” Never has there been a public sphere that was genuinely universal, and never has there been this kind of abstract individualism dissolving all particular embodiments. The public sphere could only be “imaginary,” though that did not mean it could not exert “real political force.” And that is what Mah sees as the key to the

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revolution in the interpretation of the French Revolution launched by François Furet. The school focused precisely on the “strange circuit of misrecognition and identification,” “the mysterious conferring of agency to a new, fictitious mass subject,” “the ‘impersonal and anonymous tribunal’ of ‘public opinion.’”168 Yet these historians, according to Mah, contrasted this “phantasmic projection” against too uncritically accepted a notion of “empirical reality” in terms of “pragmatic social interests.” They accepted a discourse of the rise of modernity, even as they removed the Revolution from its place in that discourse. While the Revolution lost itself in the maze of the imaginary, seeking an “impossible embodiment,” to “represent what could not be represented” (a dementia that led necessarily to the Reign of Terror), Furet et al. postulate a return to sanity (with Thermidor) in which the “rational” signified precisely the strategic pursuit of particular interests.169 In this, the revisionist historians contradicted everything that Habermas as a political philosopher hoped to invoke with the public sphere.170 In fact, Mah points out, this helped Habermas to see that he should just leave history alone and take refuge in the pure reason of communicative action theory, as his subsequent work demonstrated.171 Mah argues that historians would have been better served to have gone all the way with the poststructuralist political theory that their deconstruction of the Revolution had in fact instanced. They should have realized that they should follow Foucault in “challeng[ing] the claims of reason and the narrative of modernity.”172 I want to hold out that this is not the only way to read the tale. The need for more concrete and narratively specific accounting has carried historians “beyond the cultural turn” to a more articulated engagement once more with a “social” that is neither a “natural kind” nor a “discursive construct” but a dialectic of experiential constitution in actual time and place. Identity, in this view, is never prior to practice, but rather its achievement. The characterization of this recourse as “imaginative”—and in “imagined communities” or the “social imaginary”—should not escalate into hyperbolic suggestions that it is or was delusory either at the level of interpretive theory or at the level of historically lived experience. I believe that poststructuralism—its self-defense when challenged notwithstanding—typically and essentially operates in a mode of condescending hyperbole, and that Mah and Reddy instance it.173 Against the postmodernists, I propose we must become more modest about the claims of interpretation, just as we must be more “empathetic”—to use a highly charged methodological term—in grasping the symbolic recourses of historical actors, as instanced in Hunt’s metaphorics of the family romance.174 The way historians employ theoretical concepts, no less than

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the way historical actors invoke symbolic orders of meaning, prove highly contingent and yet at the same time indispensable. Contingent, empirical reconstructions are not proof against absolute skepticism or deconstruction. But they are both the stuff of historical practice and the matter of historical life. With the new millennium, as Jack Censer has noted, “the social has returned.”175 To be sure, this is social history inflected by culture, and as Suzanne Desan puts it, the theoretical premium is on “complexity … rather than … ineluctability.”176 We recognize, as Margaret Somers argues, that “instituted processes … consistently ‘outrun’ social categories.”177 The task for twenty-first century social history is, as Immanuel Wallerstein has claimed, precisely to “unthink” nineteenth-century constructs like class and bourgeois.178 But I would add that we should not do so too “unthinkingly.” Our task, I submit, is to make better metanarratives, not give up the prospect, and this is where I part company with the advocates of postmodernism.

Notes 1. See Margaret R. Somers’s articles “What’s Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere? Toward a Historical Sociology of Concept Formation,” Sociological Theory 12 (1995): 113–44; “Where is Sociology after the Historic Turn? Knowledge Cultures, Narrativity, and Historical Epistemologies,” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence McDonald (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), 53–89; and “The Privatization of Citizenship: How to Unthink a Knowledge Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, eds. Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1999), 121–61. 2. The German tradition of Geistes- and Ideengeschichte goes back to the great masters of the turn of the century, Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Meinecke; in America, Arthur O. Lovejoy pioneered the “history of ideas.” See his Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948). This was the direct inspiration for the Journal of the History of Ideas, published since 1940. 3. Reinhard Koselleck, ed., Historische Semantik und Begriffsgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1979); and Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politischen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1972–97). The journal Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte has been published since 1955. 4. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Neuwied, 1962). 5. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1970). 6. See, for instance, Hohendahl, “Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture,” 89–118; Robert Holub, “Habermas among the Americans: Modernity, Ethics and the Public Sphere,” German Politics and Society 33 (1994): 1–22; Margaret Jacob, “The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A European Perspective,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (1994): 95–113; and La Vopa, “Conceiving a Public,” 98–115. See also the contributions in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere.

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7. On Habermas’s development see Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA, 1978). On Habermas and the Frankfurt School, see Peter-Uwe Hohendahl, “The Dialectic of Enlightenment Revisited: Habermas’ Critique of the Frankfurt School,” New German Critique 35 (1985): 3–26; and Robert Holub, “The Enlightenment of Dialectic: Jürgen Habermas’s Critique of the Frankfurt School,” in Impure Reason: Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany, eds. W. Daniel Wilson and Robert Holub (Detroit, 1993), 34–47. 8. Koselleck, Kritik und Krise. 9. The French translation was entitled L’espace public: archéologie de la publicité comme dimension constitutive de la société bourgeoise, trans. Marc de Launay (Paris, 1978). 10. La Vopa, “Conceiving a Public,” 81. 11. The recent literature using “public sphere” is boundless. See the special issues of French Historical Studies 17, no. 4 (1992); William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2005); and Criticism 46, no. 2 (2004). In American historical work, Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in eighteenth-century America (Cambridge, 1990) established a major direction, which Warner elaborated with “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 49–90. See also John Brooke, “Reason and Passion in the Public Sphere: Habermas and the Cultural Historians,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1998–99): 43–67. In German historical work, the prominence of the public sphere is equally clear. See especially Benjamin Redekop, Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder and the Quest for a German Public (Montreal, 2000); Thomas Broman, The Transformation of German Academic Medicine, 1750–1820 (Cambridge, 1996); and John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, 2002). A good overview can be found in Melton, The Rise of the Public Sphere in Enlightenment Europe. 12. Christopher Looby, “Introduction,” in “Alternative Histories of the Public Sphere,” special issue, William and Mary Quarterly 62 (2005): 4. 13. John Brooke, “On the Edges of the Public Sphere,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 (2005): 95. 14. In the sphere of political theory, this is particularly clear. See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25–26 (1990): 56–80, and Peter-Uwe Hohendahl, “Recasting the Public Sphere,” October 73 (1995): 27–54. 15. Eyan Rabinovitsch, “Gender and the Public Sphere: Alternative Forms of Integration in Nineteenth-Century America,” Social Theory 19 (2001): 344. 16. Brian Cowan, “What was Masculine about the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffehouse Milieu in Post-Restoration England,” History Workshop Journal 51 (2001), 128. 17. Joseph Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, “Introduction: Charting Habermas’s ‘Literary’ or ‘Precursor’ Public Sphere,” Criticism 46 (2004): 201. 18. Brooke, “On the Edges of the Public Sphere,” 93. 19. Ruth Bloch, “Inside and Outside the Public Sphere,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 (2005): 99. 20. David Bell, “The ‘Public Sphere,’ the State, and the World of Law in EighteenthCentury France,” French Historical Studies 17 (1992): 915. 21. Cowan, “What was Masculine about the Public Sphere?” 150. 22. Ibid. 23. David Waldstreicher, “Two Cheers for the ‘Public Sphere’ … and One for Historians’ Skepticism,” William and Mary Quarterly 62 (2005): 110. 24. On this second score, Michael Sauter, “Preaching, a Ponytail, and an Enthusiast: Rethinking the Public Sphere’s Subversiveness in Eighteenth-Century Prussia,” Cen-

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

tral European History 37 (2004): 565, has aptly observed that “Habermas’ Structural Transformation is one of the most famous examples of too strong a reliance on Kant’s vision of enlightenment.” Rabinovitsch, “Gender and the Public Sphere,” 347. Melton, The Rise of the Public Sphere in Enlightenment Europe, 4. These are genuinely Kantian principles for publicity and political right. See John Christian Laursen’s articles “The Subversive Kant: The Vocabulary of ‘Public’ and ‘Publicity,’” Political Theory 14 (1986): 584–603, and “Scepticism and Intellectual Freedom: The Philosophical Foundations of Kant’s Politics of Publicity,” History of Political Thought 10 (1989): 439–55, as well as Kevin Davis’s articles “Kantian ‘Publicity’ and Political Justice,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 8 (1991): 409–21, and “Kant’s Different Publics and the Justice of Publicity,” Kant-Studien 83 (1992): 170– 84. See also Cioran Cronin, “Kant’s Politics of Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003): 51–80. Melton, The Rise of the Public Sphere in Enlightenment Europe, 4. David Hiley, “Foucault and the Question of Enlightenment,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 11 (1985): 63–83; Ehrhard Bahr, “In Defense of Enlightenment: Foucault and Habermas,” German Studies Review 11 (1988): 97–109; and the contributions in Michael Kelly, ed., Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, MA, 1994). John Tate, “Kant, Habermas, and the ‘Philosophical Legitimation’ of Modernity,” Journal of European Studies 27 (1997): 281–322. See also the contributions in Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, eds., Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, eds., Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1992); and Keith Baker and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Palo Alto, CA, 2001). Steven Kale, “Women, the Public Sphere, and the Persistence of Salons,” French Historical Studies 25 (2002): 121. David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Goldenbaum, Appell an das Publikum. Simon Richter, “The Ins and Outs of Intimacy: Gender, Epistolary Culture, and the Public Sphere,” The German Quarterly 69 (1996): 111. See also Kale, “Women, the Public Sphere, and the Persistence of Salons,” 117; Nancy Fraser, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender,” New German Critique 35 (1985): 97–131; and Joan Landes, “The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration,” in Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed. Johanna Meehan (New York, 1995), 91–116. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1972). Cowan, “What was Masculine about the Public Sphere?” 129. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992). For another version of the end of history, see Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? (London, 1992). See Keith Baker’s articles “Enlightenment and Revolution in France: Old Problems, Renewed Approaches,” Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 281–303, and “On the Problem of the Ideological Origins of the French Revolution,” in Modern European Intellectual History, eds. Steven L. Kaplan and Dominick LaCapra (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 197–219, as well as Jack Censer’s articles “The Coming of a New Interpretation of the French Revolution?” Journal of Social History 21 (1987): 295–309, and “Commencing

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38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

the Third Century of Debate,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 1309–25. See also Sarah Maza, “Politics, Culture, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 704–23, and Isser Wolloch, “On the Latent Illiberalism of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 1452–70. Kale, “Women, the Public Sphere, and the Persistence of Salons,” 122; and Colin Jones, “Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 101 (1996): 15. Mona Ozouf, “L’opinion publique,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, I: The Political Culture of the Old Regime, ed. Keith Baker (Oxford, 1987), 419–34. For another approach, see Keith Baker, “Politics and Public Opinion under the Old Regime: Some Reflections,” in Press and Politics in PreRevolutionary France, eds. Jack Censer and Jeremy Popkin (Berkeley, 1987), 205–46. Benjamin Nathans, “Habermas’s ‘Public Sphere’ in the Era of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 16 (1990): 620–44. Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990). Kale, “Women, the Public Sphere, and the Persistence of Salons,” 121. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 9–10. Patrice Higonnet, “Cultural Upheaval and Class Formation During the French Revolution,” in The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity, ed. Ferenc Fehér (Berkeley, 1990), 92. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963). Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983). The Scottish Enlightenment master narrative of modernization, as it can be found in Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), conceived of four stages in the progress of civilization, based primarily around property law, culminating in the displacement of feudalism by capitalism. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, with a foreword by Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis, 1984). Sarah Maza, “Women, the Bourgeoisie, and the Public Sphere: Response to Daniel Gordon and David Bell,” French Historical Studies 17 (1992): 938. Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 9. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 52 and 8. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 6. Suzanne Desan, “What’s after Public Culture? Recent French Revolutionary Historiography,” French Historical Studies 23 (2000): 180. Ibid. Ibid., 184, referring to William Sewell Jr., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and What Is the Third Estate? (Durham, NC, 1994), 33 and 37. Jack Censer, “Social Twists and Linguistic Turns: Revolutionary Historiography a Decade after the Bicentennial,” French Historical Studies 22 (1999): 162. Desan, “What’s after Political Culture?” 164. Ibid., 185.

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61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

Ibid., 193. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992), 195. Ibid., 196. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 199. Margaret R. Somers, “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy,” American Sociological Review 58 (1993): 595. Desan, “What’s after Political Culture?” 178. William Sewell Jr., “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (1992): 1–29. Keith Baker and Roger Chartier, “Dialogue sur l’espace public,” Politix 26 (1994): 5–22. Daniel Gordon, “Philosophy, Sociology, and Gender in the Enlightenment Conception of Public Opinion,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 4 (1992): 899. Desan, “What’s after Political Culture?” 188. Ibid. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 1–13. For the first criticism, see Olwen Hufton’s review of Landes in American Historical Review 96 (1991): 528–29; for the second, see Keith Baker, “Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas,” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 198–208. Cowan, “What was Masculine about the Public Sphere?” 131. Desan, “What’s after Political Culture?” 188. See Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Cambridge, 1989), 118–40; Susan Okin, “Gender, the Public and the Private,” in Political Theory Today, ed. David Held (Palo Alto, CA, 1991), 67–90; Scott, Gender and the Politics of History; Geneviéve Fraisse, Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy (Chicago, 1994); Christine Fauré, Democracy without Women: Feminism and the Rise of Liberal Individualism in France (Bloomington, IN, 1995); and Elizabeth Egar, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O’Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton, eds., Women and the Public Sphere: Writing and Representation 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 2001). Kathleen Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,” Signs 19 (1994): 368–404. Desan, “What’s after Public Culture?” 188. Maza, “Women, the Bourgeoisie, and the Public Sphere,” 944. Kale, “Women, the Public Sphere, and the Persistence of Salons,”127, citing Dena Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,” History and Theory 31 (1992): 15. Maza, “Women, the Bourgeoisie, and the Public Sphere,” 944. Kale, “Women, the Public Sphere, and the Persistence of Salons,” 127. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, 201. Ibid. Ibid., 203. Gordon, “Response to Sarah Maza,” French Historical Studies 17 (2002): 953. Desan, “What’s after Public Culture?” 190. Ibid., 191. Kale, “Women, the Public Sphere, and the Persistence of Salons,” 133.

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90. David Norbrook, “Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere in the Mid-Seventeenth Century,” Criticism 46 (2004): 224. 91. Cowan, “What was Masculine about the Public Sphere?” 132. 92. Ibid., 146, referring to Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995) and Lawrence Klein’s articles “Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, eds. Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester, 1993), 100–15, and “Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1995): 97–109. For a general consideration of the issue, see Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe, eds., Shifting the Boundaries: Transformations of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1995). 93. Cowan, “What was Masculine about the Public Sphere?” 137, referring to Steve Pincus, “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 807–834. See also Brian Cowan, “Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (2004): 345–66. 94. Klein, “Gender and the Public/Private Distinction,” 100. 95. Ibid., 101. 96. Kathryn Shevelow, Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London, 1999), 1. A similar claim can be found in Elizabeth Goldsmith and Dena Goodman, “Introduction,” in Goldsmith and Goodman, eds., Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 8. 97. Deborah Heller, “Bluestocking Salons and the Public Sphere,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 59–82; and Mary Thale, “Women in London Debating Societies in 1780,” Gender and History 7 (1995): 5–24. 98. Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” The Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383–414, especially 399, referring to Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1877 (New Haven, CT, 1982), 237–81. 99. Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?” 400. 100. Barbara Sicherman, “Separate Spheres as Historical Paradigm: Limiting Metaphor or Useful Construct?” comment delivered at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Los Angeles, April 1984, cited by Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female World, Women’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75 (1988): 28. 101. Kerber, “Separate Spheres,” and Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?” 102. Kerber, “Separate Spheres,” 10. 103. Ibid., 11. 104. Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?” 384. 105. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–74; Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: Women’s Sphere in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, CT, 1977); Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, 1981). 106. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1 (1975): 1–29. 107. N. A. Hewitt, “Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women’s History in the 1980s,” Social History 10 (1985): 301, cited in Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?” 385.

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108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

127. 128. 129. 130. 131.

132. 133. 134.

135. 136.

137.

Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 197. Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?” 386. Ibid., 406. Ibid., 392. Ibid., 393. Ibid., 402. Ibid., 400. Ibid., 401. Ibid., 403. Ibid., 408. Ibid., 411. Kerber, “Separate Spheres,” 18. Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?” 411–12. John Law “Introduction,” in Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? ed. John Law (London, 1986), 18. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 256. Ibid. Michael Lynch, “From the ‘Will to Theory’ to the Discursive Collage,” in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago, 1992), 298. Law, “Introduction,” 2. Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York, 1970); and George Steinmetz and Ou-Byung Chae, “Sociology in an Era of Fragmentation: From the Sociology of Knowledge to the Philosophy of Science, and Back Again,” Sociological Quarterly 43 (2002): 113. Steinmetz and Chae, “Sociology in an Era of Fragmentation,” 112. Henrika Kuklick, “The Sociology of Knowledge: Retrospect and Prospect,” Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983): 292. Steven Seidman, “The End of Sociological Theory: The Postmodern Hope,” Sociological Theory 9 (1981): 131. Norman Denzin, “The Death of Sociology in the 1980s: Comment on Collins,” American Journal of Sociology 93 (1987): 179. Michael Lynch and David Bogen, “Sociology’s Asociological ‘Core’: An Examination of Textbook Sociology in Light of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 484. Irving Horowitz, The Decomposition of Sociology (New York, 1993). Stephen Cole, ed., What’s Wrong with Sociology? (New Brunswick, NJ, 2001); and Nicos Mouzelis, Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? (London, 1995). Anthony Giddens, “Living in a Post-Traditionalist Society,” in, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, eds. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash (Palo Alto, CA, 1994), 56; and Jeffrey Alexander, Fin de siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason (London, 1995), 5. Stuart Hall, “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities,” October 53 (1990): 11. Jeffrey Alexander, “Cultural Sociology or Sociology of Culture? Towards a Strong Program,” Culture: Newsletter of the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association 10 (1996): 4. Ibid. For the endless wrangles of Althusserian vs. Foucauldian terminologies, see Trevor Purvis and Alan Hunt, “Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology …” British Journal of Sociology 44 (1993): 473–99.

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138. See, for instance, Henry Giroux, David Shumway, Paul Smith, and James Soskowski, “The Need for Cultural Studies: Resisting Intellectuals and Oppositional Public Spheres,” Dalhousie Review 64 (1985): 472–86; Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York, 1992); and Elizabeth Long, ed., From Sociology to Cultural Studies: New Perspectives (Oxford, 1997). 139. William Sewell Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 36. 140. Michéle Barrett, Philip Corrigan, Annette Kuhn, and Janet Wolff, “Representation and Cultural Production,” in Ideology and Cultural Production, eds. Michéle Barrett, Philip Corrigan, Annette Kuhn, and Janet Wolff (New York, 1979), 23. 141. Sewell Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” 37. 142. Enrique Laraña, Hank Johnston, and Joseph Gusfield, eds., New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity (Philadelphia, 1994); and Nelson Pichardo, “New Social Movements: A Critical Review,” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 411–30. 143. Michèle Lamont and Robert Wuthnow, “Betwixt and Between: Recent Cultural Sociology in Europe and the United States,” in Frontiers of Social Theory: The New Syntheses, ed. George Ritzer (New York, 1990), 306. 144. Ibid., 301. 145. Robert Wuthnow and Martha Witten, “New Directions in the Study of Culture,” Annual Review of Sociology 14 (1988): 49. 146. Steven Seidman, “Relativizing Sociology: The Challenge of Cultural Studies,” in Long, From Sociology to Cultural Studies, 45. 147. Ibid., 46. 148. Ibid., 58. 149. Paul Rabinow and W. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (Berkeley, 1979); Paul Rabinow and W. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley, 1987); David Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, eds., The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1991). For a recent retrospect, see Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates, eds., Schools of Thought: Twenty-five Years of Interpretive Social Science (Princeton, NJ, 2001). 150. Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989); and H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York, 1989). 151. Stuart Clark, ed., The Annales School (New York, 1999); Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–89 (Cambridge, 1990); François Dosse, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales (Urbana, IL, 1994); François Dosse, L’Histoire en miettes: Des “Annales” à la “nouvelle histoire” (Paris, 1997); and André Burguière, L’École des annales: une histoire intellectuelle (Paris, 2006). 152. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1982); Jan Goldstein, ed., Foucault and the Writing of History (Oxford, 1994); Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Palo Alto, CA, 2002); Joseph Rouse, “Power/Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge, 1994), 92–114. 153. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New York, 1995). 154. Victoia Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, “Introduction,” in Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 1–32. 155. Ibid., 3. 156. Ibid., 9. 157. Ibid., 11.

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158. Ibid., 14. 159. Ibid., 13. 160. Robert Brightman, “Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification,” Cultural Anthropology 10 (1995): 525. 161. William Reddy, “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere: Implications for an Historical Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992): 135–68; and Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere,” 153–82. 162. Reddy, “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere,” 136 and 152. 163. Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere,” 154–55. 164. Ibid., 160–61. 165. Ibid., 164. 166. Ibid. 167. Ibid., 167. 168. Ibid., 171. 169. Ibid., 177. 170. Mah is clear about the philosophical as opposed to historical interest that dominated Habermas’s work. 171. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action. 172. Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere,” 179. 173. See John H. Zammito’s articles “‘Are We Being Theoretical Yet?’ The New Historicism, The New Philosophy of History and ‘Practicing Historians,’” Journal of Modern History 65 (1993): 783–814; “Ankersmit’s Postmodern Historiography: The Hyperbole of ‘Opacity,’” History and Theory 37 (1998): 330–46; “Reading ‘Experience’: The Debate in Intellectual History Among Scott, Toews and LaCapra,” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, eds. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garcia (Berkeley, 2000), 279–311; “Rorty, Historicism and the Practice of History: A Polemic,” Rethinking History 10 (2006): 9– 47; and “Ankersmit and Historical Representation,” History and Theory 44 (2005): 155–81. 174. See John H. Zammito’s chapters “‘Practicing Historians’ and the Challenge of Philosophy,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, ed. Aviezer Tucker (Oxford, 2010), 63–84, and “Toward a Robust Historicism: Historical Practice in a Post-Positivist Environment,” in Handbook of Historical Theory, eds. Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (Thousand Oaks, CA, forthcoming). 175. Censer, “Social Twists and Linguistic Turns,” 162. 176. Desan, “What’s after Political Culture?” 164. 177. Somers, “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere,” 595. 178. Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of NineteenthCentury Paradigms (Cambridge, MA, 1991).

Part III

CULTURAL POLITICS AND LITERARY PUBLICS

Chapter 6

PROBING THE LIMITS The Contribution of Literary Writing to Defining the Public Sphere

David Midgley



The public sphere, in Habermas’s understanding of the term, emerges historically as a forum of communication that mediates between the domain of the “state” and that of “society.”1 What makes it particularly significant for political history is that it is socially permeable in both directions, a point that Habermas illustrates with reference to the character of salons and literary societies, as well as coffeehouses, as they developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.2 Such institutions, according to Habermas, demonstrated the potential, at least, for differences of class and wealth to be suspended for the purposes of open critical discussion, enabling “private people”—i.e., individual citizens who are not acting as office holders of the state—to communicate amongst themselves about matters of common interest, whether these relate to issues of significance for the state or to the experiences of social and private existence.3 A key feature of the social group that Habermas envisages coming together to form a “public” in this sense is that they are, from the outset, a reading public,4 and that reading matter provides the basis for the development of skills of interpretation and argument that will in due course be put to work on political issues. (Very much in evidence behind Haber-

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mas’s model of historical development is Kant’s conception of enlightenment as the process whereby individuals emancipate themselves through the exercise of their powers of reason, a conception that similarly gives prominence to the notion of a reading public as the effective forum for the development of critical discussion.5) Habermas explicitly states that, before the “society” of “private people” can effectively vie with the “state” for influence over the political decision-making process, a reading public develops that is as yet unpolitical in character, but that can be recognized as an embryonic form or “precursor” of the political public that is to come.6 As he puts it, the political public sphere “evolved from the public sphere in the world of letters; through the vehicle of public opinion it put the state in touch with the needs of society.”7 The purpose of this chapter is to consider the role that literary writing plays in Habermas’s conception of the public sphere and the way that role has developed historically, regardless of Habermas’s specific concerns. I therefore wish to explore both the senses in which literary history lends credence to Habermas’s argument (how did literature historically help to define the public sphere?) and the senses in which the role of literature as a medium of public communication might prompt us to question or elaborate Habermas’s conception of historical developments (where can we see it pushing at the boundaries of the public sphere, and where are the limits of its contribution to public debate?). One semantic issue that ought to be clarified from the outset is that Habermas, in his original German, uses the adjective literarisch in contradistinction to politisch, and that we should therefore be wary of artificially narrowing the meaning of his term by translating it into English as “literary.” Given the broad sense of a reading public that Habermas is working with, we would clearly do better in certain contexts to translate it as “literate,” or by referring, as Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence did in their rendering of the passage quoted above, to the “world of letters,” i.e., to the broad field of public communication in written form. But it is equally clear that Habermas sees literature, in the strict sense in which the term has come to be understood, as contributing very significantly to the historical development and expansion of the public sphere. In this, his historical view is consistent with that of the latest literary scholarship that was available to him at the time of writing The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Amongst the items he cites in that work we find publications by Raymond Williams and Ian Watt that corroborate his sense of how the emergence of a new kind of reading public in the eighteenth century was associated with processes of social change. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957), had spoken of a shift in the “centre of gravity” of the reading public:

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The fact that literature in the eighteenth century was addressed to an everwidening audience must have weakened the relative importance of those readers with enough education and leisure to take a professional or semiprofessional interest in classical and modern letters; and in return it must have increased the relative importance of those who desired an easier form of literary entertainment, even if it had little prestige among the literati.8

He goes on to illustrate how earlier forms of patronage were progressively superseded by a market in books and periodicals, with all the variation in quality that that entails. It has been estimated that, following a sharp rise in literacy during the seventeenth century, by 1750 at least 60 percent of adult males and 40 percent of adult females in Britain could read (literacy was higher in Scotland and southeast England, especially London, and lower in rural areas),9 and the demand for writings about contemporary life steadily grew to supplement, though not to supplant, the traditional demand for religious and didactic literature.10 Early exponents of the modern novel such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson were themselves representative of the middle-class London tradesmen— and their families and servants, we might add11—who constituted their readership. As Watt puts it, they were able to express “the needs of their audience … from the inside much more freely than would previously have been possible.”12 For Watt, then, as for Habermas, the public articulation of the concerns of the private sphere becomes possible through the market in literature.13 Subsequent literary scholarship has identified senses in which Watt’s way of accounting for the rise of the novel focuses too narrowly on factors at work in English society rather than elsewhere, and has recognized the need to give such an inquiry an international and intercultural dimension.14 The picture that Watt paints is also complicated by the distinction between what was being written in the eighteenth century, and what was being widely read—the latter category including many older works that had long since ceased to interest the cultural elite.15 But as far as the historical significance of the expansion of the reading public and the opening up of new areas of contemporary interest are concerned, Watt’s insights appear to have been largely corroborated.16 It is not only since the eighteenth century, of course, that the existence of a reading public has had an important part to play in generating a sense of cohesion in complex societies. Investigations into the history of the novel have been pushed back into classical antiquity in recent decades, not least under the stimulus of the writings of Bakhtin.17 And Erich Auerbach—not in his famous study of realism as a literary mode (Mimesis, 1946), but in a later collection of essays on the literature of classical antiquity and the early Middle Ages—notes the importance of reading as a public medium for the self-recognition of the Roman Empire as an inte-

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gral culture. His illustrative example is an anecdote recorded by Pliny the Younger, in which his fellow writer Tacitus gets into conversation with a member of the equestrian order from the provinces who eventually asks him whether he is from Italy or further afield, and who, when Tacitus replies that he will know him by his writings, promptly asks, “Are you Tacitus or Pliny?” Both writers were evidently flattered by the remark, but by putting it alongside other indicative evidence, Auerbach is able to demonstrate the role of literary writing and its readership in establishing a sense of shared values and good taste throughout the Roman world.18 What is distinctive about the development of a reading public in modern Europe, by contrast, is that it extends beyond a specialized culture of letters, as both Watt and Habermas point out, and that it expands and develops, and progressively includes more and more intimate realms of social and personal experience. In this respect, too, Habermas’s account of developments is consistent with some well-known strands of literary scholarship. He recognizes the epistolary novel as a medium in which the psychological interests of the eighteenth-century reading public are nurtured; and he points specifically to Goethe’s Werther and Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse as works in which the expression of intimate personal life is cultivated and a new conception of humanity becomes apparent.19 It is in the figure of Werther, precisely, that Lionel Trilling subsequently recognized a new cultural paradigm arising toward the end of the eighteenth century, the paradigm of the “disintegrated consciousness,” of the person who despairs of ever being able to “come to himself,” and who is destroyed by his commitment to the notion of “one true self,”20 just as he recognized in Rousseau’s policy of merciless self-scrutiny a paradigm of the “âme déchirée.”21 Habermas similarly emphasizes the sense in which an intimate private sphere becomes distinguishable from the private domain of economic activity through such writings, and that literature becomes the medium that makes the public discussion of personal subjectivity possible: In the intimate sphere of the conjugal family private individuals viewed themselves as independent even from the private sphere of their economic activity—as persons capable of entering into “purely human” relations with one another. … The self-interpretation of the public in the political realm … was the accomplishment of a consciousness functionally adapted to the institutions of the public sphere in the world of letters. In general, the two forms of public sphere blended with each other in a peculiar fashion. In both, there formed a public consisting of private persons whose autonomy based on ownership of private property wanted to see itself represented as such in the sphere of the bourgeois family and actualized inside the person as love, freedom, and cultivation—in a word, as humanity.22

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This takes us to the core of the sense in which literary writing in the Western world since the eighteenth century can be seen to be constantly pushing back the boundaries of the public sphere. This modern writing may have begun by catering to the personal and interpersonal interests nurtured within bourgeois families, but the impetus of its inquiry soon took it beyond the realm of self-representation within such a family and beyond the shared values of such a society. Authors who worked at articulating their psychological insights, their personal affection and disaffection, their sense of alienation and self-loathing, often did so in an intensely private manner. Their works, when published, may have met with a sense of bafflement, disdain, or affront, and it was often only after the authors themselves had died that their works were accepted into the literary canon as representative of the self-awareness of a shared culture. André Gide alluded to this often difficult process of assimilation into the public sphere when he spoke, at an international writers’ congress in Paris in 1935, of a “delayed community” of literary writers whose accepted public significance was grounded in the marginal and unconventional nature of their lives and works.23 He cited as examples not only the notorious poètes maudits, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and the self-scrutinizers, Stendhal and Nietzsche, but also the visionaries and oblique critics of the social world of their time, William Blake and Herman Melville. The phrase that Gide used in French conveys an almost religious sense of collective redemption over time: he speaks of a “communion à retardement” embodied in literature. Those familiar with the history of German literature will be readily able to add the names of others whose retrospective significance for German (and Austrian) cultural self-awareness is strongly connected with the marginal position from which they contemplated the social and cultural values of their own time: Kleist and Hölderlin, Heine and Büchner, Kafka and Joseph Roth, amongst others. At the same writers’ congress in 1935, which had been convened as a literary protest rally against the threat to freedom of expression posed by the fascist regimes and movements of the time, the novelist E. M. Forster drew attention to what he evidently felt to be a more insidious threat to freedom arising in that supposed bastion of free speech, Great Britain. He had in mind the use by regional authorities in the United Kingdom of legislation against sedition to harass and prosecute authors and publishers on grounds that the content of particular books appeared offensive to local standards of morality. He alluded to the well-known actions against the writings of James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, and also to the works of James Hanley, who had sought to bring various aspects of sexual experience into the sphere of public awareness.24 Hanley’s second novel, Boy (1931), had been suppressed in 1934 for obscenity; Forster himself would have been

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sensitive to the issue because he had treated the subject of homosexual love and the social exclusion associated with it in Maurice (1913–14), a novel that was to remain unpublished until after his death in 1970. As has often been observed, it was issues of sexual mores, particularly when they were depicted in the context of relations across class boundaries, that were most likely to be excluded from the domain of public discussion in Britain between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. The classic prosecutor’s question—still being asked when Marie Stopes defended her book Married Love in 1923 and when Penguin Books was prosecuted for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960—was “Would you allow your servants to read this?”25 As Jeffrey Weeks’s 1982 study of the regulation of sexuality in the British context showed, the traditionally strong association between moral censure and class prejudice had its roots in a complex history of puritan moral crusading and conscious social demarcation on the part of the nineteenth-century middle classes. Homosexual acts in particular, even when performed in privacy, were singled out for harsh penalties under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (the best-known victim of which was Oscar Wilde), whereas legal sanctions against prostitution generally focused on its visibility on the streets and its consequent aspect of “public nuisance.”26 The conditions that eventually favored the liberalization of legal approaches to sexual behavior after the Second World War appear to have come about only as a result of the gradual erosion of rigid class distinctions by changing patterns of economic activity and consumption, and at the time that Weeks was writing they had become subject to a moral backlash in their turn.27 The important reforms that did come—in the form of the Obscene Publications Act (1959, amended 1964), the Sexual Offences Act (1967), and the Abortion Act (1967)—resulted from a combination of specific lobbying pressures and practical considerations concerning the application of the law, and the process by which they were achieved left its own trail of ideological ambiguities.28 But the court verdict in favor of the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 came to be seen as symbolic of that process of change because it established the acceptability of the public discussion of intimate sexual matters—regardless of class boundaries—in the medium of literature. It was precisely on grounds of its literary merits that Lawrence’s novel was defended in court. It is commonly assumed that attitudes about sexual relations were in general more relaxed in France than in Britain, and this view is certainly not without foundation: homosexuality, for example, had been decriminalized in France in 1791. However, “outraging public morality” remains an offense under the Code pénal to this day,29 and historical analysis has shown that the motives behind the notorious legal actions against the

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publication of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal in 1857 on grounds of “obscenity” and “blasphemy” were again related to the constraints of a fraught social and political background. French officialdom under the Second Empire used censorship and prosecution to suppress any publications considered dangerous, and for that purpose no clear distinction was made between actual political criticism and works whose content merely appeared disturbing.30 The term “realism” was brandished at both Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal as a means of stigmatizing these works as offensive to moral standards, and in Baudelaire’s case the court fined him and required him to expurgate his collection of poems.31 The trial of Flaubert is particularly interesting in our present context, however, for two reasons. One is the extent to which the courtroom debate centered on issues of literary interpretation. The prosecutor, Ernest Pinard, viewed Flaubert’s depiction of the manner in which Emma Bovary twice abandons herself to an adulterous relationship as encouraging the reader to identify with her actions and to share her emotional condition; he objected to the apparent lack of any manifest moral position within the text from which Emma’s behavior might be judged, and the court endorsed that view in so far as it deemed Flaubert worthy of censure, though not actually guilty of a crime. The defense lawyer, Marie-Antoine Jules Sénard, by contrast, presented Emma’s fate as an object lesson; he compared Flaubert’s treatment of sexual encounters with works by highly respected authors and he set the incriminated passages in their context in order to bring out the novel’s implicit critique of the failings of a provincial education, and thereby to establish its moral probity. The work in its entirety, he argued, was its own best defense.32 The other reason why the story of how Madame Bovary was received is of interest here is that it offers us a particularly intriguing illustration of the long path that a literary work may take in the process of its integration into that consensually acknowledged “delayed community” of which Gide spoke in 1935: attacked in 1857 for its supposedly sympathetic depiction of adultery, by the 1970s Flaubert’s novel was being distributed by the French state authorities at weddings—for the purpose of encouraging the general public to take an interest in literature.33 Examples such as this suggest that a protracted process of institutionalization may be involved in the effective contribution that literary writing can make to the historical transformation of the public sphere. It is not—or certainly not primarily—through spontaneous action by the reading public as customers, but initially through the marketing strategies of publishers and the verdicts of reviewers in journals and newspapers that public awareness of particular texts is nurtured and molded; and it is largely through the decisions of teachers and syllabus designers in educa-

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tional institutions that texts acquire long-term status as representative of a cultural canon. (By the same procedures, of course, texts also disappear from the canon in favor of others, and as Alastair Fowler has elegantly demonstrated, there are many factors other than the cultural politics familiar in our own time that help to determine what kinds of text are perceived as accessible or appropriate for discussion and dissemination at particular times.34) In either context, the established values and conventional expectations of one generation—or of one season—may well be challenged by those of the next; indeed, professional reviewers and professional scholars may well have a vested interest in mounting such challenges. I should like to illustrate this aspect of my topic with reference to two branches of inquiry that literary scholars will recognize as having become prominent in their field in recent decades: they are the representation of women in fiction, and postcolonial writing. Another observation of Habermas’s that can undoubtedly be acknowledged as generally true is that women participated in a very uneven way in the development of the eighteenth-century public sphere as he conceives it: although strongly represented among the readers of fiction that opened up the world of private experience to public scrutiny and discussion, they were largely excluded from debates in the political realm.35 From our present-day perspective, however, the innovative writing of female novelists since the eighteenth century can be seen to have played an immeasurable part in shaping subsequent public perceptions of women’s social experiences and of their options for responding to those experiences. The novels of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, to take two well-known examples, have long been accepted as classic depictions of female figures in particular social situations. These works were controversial when they first appeared, however, because of the particular ways in which they were breaking out of the constraints of prior expectations about the representation of women in fiction. Austen had developed a narrative technique that enabled her to evoke situations that commonly faced young society women around 1800 and to present the responses of particular female personalities to the opportunities as well as the threats posed by those situations, while at the same time maintaining an ironic perspective on the nature of their responses. Charlotte Brontë, in Jane Eyre (1847), found the means to present deeper instincts and more powerful emotions as features of a young woman’s progression to self-awareness and a sense of fulfilment, and for that reason has been credited with expanding the fictional respresentation of women’s lives by depicting a young woman who yearns to “escape entirely from drawing rooms and patriarchal mansions” (to quote from the well-known study of women’s fiction in the nineteenth century by Sandra M. Gilbert

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and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic).36 But comparing the two authors at this distance of time not only shows up the historical transition in the depiction of women’s lives that occurs over the first half of the nineteenth century; it also opens up the possibility of further discussion about the images of femininity that such texts establish, about the extent to which those images can be perceived as historically superseded by the standards of our own time, and about the senses in which the accounts of the lives of Jane Eyre or Fanny Price can be recognized as fictional constructs constrained and in some part determined by the historical circumstances of the time in which they were written. The Madwoman in the Attic, from which the earlier quotation was taken, analyses the case of Jane Eyre as an elucidation of a young woman’s confrontation between “self and soul” expressed through the imagery of physical enclosure that is common in that work, and the ironic characterization of Fanny Price, amongst others, as Jane Austen’s technique as author for eluding the restraints to which her female protagonists are themselves manifestly subjected.37 In other words, the development of the critical discourse about such novels itself becomes a dynamic force in the molding of perspectives and expectations that readers subsequently bring to the works, and thus in the transformation of the functions that the literary works themselves perform as reference points in public debate. We might therefore say that in such instances changing perceptions of the literary texts come to serve as markers, not just of changes in taste, but also of changes in the nature of the public sphere over time. Another example of an ongoing historical dynamic places the issue in an international and intercultural dimension: it is the case of the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, who became a focal figure for the new discipline of postcolonial studies because, in his novel Things Fall Apart (1958), he had discovered a way to challenge the hegemony of British cultural values and articulate the alternative perspectives of the colonized. Achebe achieves a most poignant dramatic irony at the end of his novel when he depicts a new District Commissioner passing the tree from which the novel’s protagonist, Okonkwo, has hanged himself and reflecting on the sociological study of the region that he plans to write— whereas the reader has been an intimate witness of the personal experiences, the social and cultural pressures, that lie behind that act of suicide. It was an approach to representing cultural identity that Achebe himself referred to as “writing back”—a phrase that demands to be understood both as an act of dialogue (“writing back” to the “motherland” that had brought its values and its ways of articulating them to Africa) and as an oppositional act (standing up to the preconceptions of the colonialists and establishing a viewpoint independent of them)—and the critical lit-

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erature on his works has made explicit how important Achebe’s interaction with literary antecedents is for the texture of his own fiction. It was in contradistinction to the perspectives of Joseph Conrad, whose exposure of the brutality of colonialism in Heart of Darkness (1899) had presented a resounding challenge to the public perceptions of its time, and of Joyce Cary, who had presented a stereotypical view of native Nigerians in Mister Johnson (1939), that Achebe worked out his own perspectives and thematic emphases. It is this interaction with the preceding literature of colonial times that has made such terms as “hybridity” (i.e., the combination of disparate cultural features) and what Bakhtin calls “heteroglossia” (i.e., the interaction of multiple voices in a work of fiction) powerful concepts to work with in the critical literature on postcolonial writing generally. Achebe, who has been credited with creating a vast cultural genealogy for postcolonial Nigeria, as Hardy did for England and Balzac for France,38 and for whom the critique of Nigerian political culture certainly did not end with independence, makes some pertinent remarks in his essays about the contribution that literary writing can make to revising the self-image of communities. “We invent different fictions,” he writes, “to help us out of particular problems we encounter in living,” and it is through these fictions that man “refashions his imaginative landscape.”39 The sense in which these remarks are relevant to the public sphere as it has developed in practice since the eighteenth century is that it should be seen as an ever-changing arena of contestation within which literary fictions retain the power to make the elements in that contestation visible, and indeed to generate some of those elements ever anew. Literary writing can even be seen to retain something of that power in the context of a world in which new technologies of mass communication—television and the Internet in particular—might seem to have superseded literature as the primary means by which ideas are circulated and attitudes are fashioned. Undoubtedly the creation of global communication networks has generated new, delocalized notions of community and new kinds of challenges for those concerned with making the voices of specific cultural groups heard within larger communities.40 But the effect of these developments is not necessarily to override the contribution that literature makes within the forum of public critical debate. Recent research has shown not only that contemporary authors have found ingenious ways of incorporating the imagery and organizational principles of information technology into their narratives, but also that such traces of information technology in fiction can be interpreted as important indicators of the character of the imaginative forces at work in contemporary culture.41 For the purpose of the present chapter I shall focus on two more

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straightforward examples of the interaction between literary writing and the media of mass communication in our own time. Both relate to publications by well-known German authors and illustrate the continuing sensitivity, in the German context, of issues relating to the Nazi past. I have chosen them because it seems to me that the heightened sensibilities associated with the public discussion of such issues make them particularly well suited to demonstrating what literary scandals can show us about the scope for, and the limits on, the participation of literary writing in the public sphere as it operates now. My first example is an attack by Martin Walser, in the form of a satirical fiction, on what he evidently saw as the subjugation and corruption of literary taste by the power of television. His novel Tod eines Kritikers (Death of a Critic, 2002) has something of the character of a detective story: a prominent literary critic and host of a television talk show has disappeared, and an author whose latest work he has subjected to excoriating criticism comes under suspicion of having murdered him. The critic, who is given the name Ehrl-König, with the evident implication (by analogy with the “Erlkönig” of Goethe’s famous ballad) that he is the harbinger of death for newborn works of literature,42 turns up again at the end, having merely feigned his disappearance in order to spend a quiet weekend with his latest mistress. The narrator, who later turns out to be the accused writer (this is one of a number of features of the text that arguably betray its vengeful character), has meanwhile introduced the reader to the actual circumstances of the alleged crime, to the network of relationships in the media world that sustains the public celebrity of Ehrl-König, and to the climate of resentment that his peremptory verdicts have generated in the literary world. Amongst other things, the narrative draws attention to the perceived threat to the traditional themes and values of German fiction posed by the sound-bite culture of the mass media and the importation of popular genres of fiction from abroad (indeed, on the closing pages we are told that Ehrl-König has been knighted by the Queen of England for his services to the dissemination of the detective story). But what made the novel an instant object of scandal was the fact that some distinctive personal features of the Ehrl-König figure were patently modeled on those of the real-life television critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki. This was far from the first occasion on which Reich-Ranicki had attracted opprobrium—and indeed biting satire—from German literary writers for the high-handed manner in which he passed judgment on new publications, in the press as well as on television.43 What makes the Walser case particularly interesting in the context of my present theme is that the work became the subject of ferocious public controversy before the text had even been made available to the general public.

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The event that actually generated the furor was the announcement by Frank Schirrmacher, the literary editor (and a copublisher) of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, where Walser’s works had frequently been serialized in the past prior to publication in book form, that he was refusing to serialize this one in his newspaper on the grounds of its anti-Semitic character. Such an accusation, in the German context, was bound to bring forth instantaneous and instinctive reactions from readers, and it immediately generated a maelstrom of media comment based on little or no knowledge of Walser’s text.44 For, in addition to being host of the longrunning talk show Das literarische Quartett, Reich-Ranicki was known to be one of the few survivors of the Warsaw ghetto, and his recently published autobiography45 had emphasized his prominence as a representative of the Jews who had been persecuted under National Socialism. Walser, for his part, had previously come under attack for the speech he made in Frankfurt in 1998, on the occasion of being awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, in which he protested against the persistent publicization of the Holocaust, arguing amongst other things that the routine acknowledgment of Germany’s “disgrace” had become counterproductive. That speech had prompted a vehement denunciation by the President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis, and the documentary record of the ensuing controversy had been published by Suhrkamp (Walser’s regular publisher, and from time to time also Reich-Ranicki’s) and edited by Frank Schirrmacher.46 In his novel, Walser had undoubtedly sailed close to the wind by linking the characterization of the Jew Ehrl-König, whether directly or in the minds of other characters, with scurrilous motifs of a sexual nature. In the eyes of some readers these motifs came perilously close to the fantasy stereotype of the lascivious Jew as he had commonly appeared in antiSemitic propaganda of the early twentieth century, seducing young maidens and exercising a cynical control over German culture with his cold intellect. But when the development of Walser’s plot makes it explicit that the imputation of anti-Semitic motives to the supposed murderer is a trumped-up press story (disseminated, indeed, by the Frankfurter Allgemeine), he is also making a point about the susceptibility of the media for generating defamatory stories based on unexamined assumptions. Whatever the merits or demerits of Walser’s fiction as a satirical depiction of how the media operate, however, any attempt to subject it to a reasoned interpretation was for the time being obscured by the internal dynamics of the media industry. The weeks before the eventual publication of the book saw one newspaper positioning itself against another in the competition for sales; journalists and critics closing ranks and siding either with Walser or with Reich-Ranicki; and other literary writers making public

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statements on television and in the press about the justice or otherwise of the accusation of anti-Semitism. As one commentator put it, after the fracas over Walser’s Frankfurt speech of 1998, it looked as if the public was simply being treated to a follow-up media spectacle: “Walser II.”47 On the face of it, whatever the literary text itself might have been said to contribute to the public discussion of issues seemed to have been buried by the power play of the media circus. Another commentator, Eckhard Fuhr, spoke at the time of the episode as evidence of the “decay” of the public sphere. Echoing the vocabulary of Kant’s definition of enlightenment, to which, as we have noted, Habermas’s conception of the public sphere is closely related, he pointed out that the public had effectively been excluded from participation (“deprived of a voice”) in a debate that was generated by vested interests in the media, and the terms of which had been largely determined by professional loyalties. More specifically, Fuhr observed that the “protagonists of this quarrel move in a self-referential circle,” arguing that it would have been surprising if Sigrid Löffler (who had earlier fallen out with Reich-Ranicki over his television program) had not come to Martin Walser’s defense and if the literary critics of the Süddeutsche Zeitung (a major competitor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine) had not “regarded Frank Schirrmacher’s presumptuousness [Machtanmaßung] as the real scandal.”48 But it would be mistaken to imagine that the media sensation did not also generate serious debate about the issues. The more sustained contributions to the discussion at the time included a review of Walser’s novel by Jan Philipp Reemtsma, director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, which drew attention to the precise senses in which the text could be seen to be working with anti-Semitic clichés;49 and in the online literary journal literaturkritik, Thomas Anz pointed out that, regardless of the questionable qualities of Walser’s novel and of his conceivably cynical motives in generating controversy, it nevertheless prompted reflection as a continuation of the public dispute that had been ongoing between Walser and Reich-Ranicki since 1998 over whether a writer should be expected to conform to the expectations of a predetermined memory culture, and more particularly whether it was acceptable for a German author to write about his childhood in Nazi Germany without making any mention of the Holocaust.50 Over the next few years, indeed, literary scholars could be seen responding to the controversy by examining particular dimensions of the historical legacy of anti-Semitic discourse in the Germanspeaking world and where particular fictional texts might be said to stand in relation to them.51 In other words, the sense that Walser was probing the limits in his novel—probing the limits, that is, of what animosities could tolerably be expressed in a fictional work in Germany, and in what

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terms—itself became the trigger for a highly reflective, reasoned debate about those limits of tolerance in contemporary German society. The manner in which Jürgen Habermas, too, became engaged in the controversy is instructive in this connection. His intervention was an explicit gesture of solidarity with Marcel Reich-Ranicki, but it came at a point when the public discussion seemed to be moving in a direction that might open the floodgates to neonationalist sentiment.52 On the face of it, Habermas’s contribution was concerned with a semantic nicety; and to many readers at the time it might well have seemed puzzling that, of all the aspects of the dispute he might have focused on, he chose to comment on the use of the phrase “breaking taboos.” His point was that, strictly speaking, a taboo is the expression of an instinctive revulsion for something that is generally abhorred, such as cannibalism or the sexual abuse of children, and for which society therefore does not normally need to issue any explicit prohibition. The widespread talk of “breaking taboos” in the present context, on the other hand, was associated with the notion of throwing off constraints that had been established in Germany after 1945, not on the basis of instinctive revulsion for past attitudes, but by a painstaking process of moral reorientation, by the patient and arduous liberalization of publicized opinions, and, as he put it, by “collective learning processes.” It was this political transformation of the German public sphere that Habermas evidently saw as endangered by loose talk— and indirectly the Walser controversy presented him with an opportunity to publicize his thoughts on that matter. The other case I wish to consider here is that of Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk), which was also published in 2002,53 and I choose it because, while it also generated agitated public controversy at the time, it seems to me to exemplify a rather different set of relations between a literary text and the realm of public debate. The reason for the controversy in this instance was that the work addressed the issue of German suffering, which had become a popular theme in some branches of the media in the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The earliest scholarly publications on Im Krebsgang were, indeed, primarily concerned with its possible significance as a symptom of current German attitudes to their past—broadly speaking, whether the Germans were now substituting a self-image as victims for the self-image as perpetrators—and with the question of whether Grass, in his new work, had perhaps sold out to such prevailing public attitudes.54 There is indeed a sense in which Grass himself encouraged this line of inquiry by insisting, both within the text and beyond it, on the need to wrest the theme of German suffering away from right-wing agitators, and there was undoubtedly an aspect of market speculation to this work, as there was to the subsequent publica-

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tion of Grass’s autobiography, in which he allowed himself to be more candid than he had ever been before about the nature of his involvement in Nazi organizations at the age of seventeen.55 To some extent that is only to be expected of an author trying to get his voice heard in the marketplace, and I think we have misunderstood the nature of Grass’s intervention in the public debate on the issue of German suffering if we fail to take note of the precise manner in which his fiction is constructed. The historical incident on which Im Krebsgang focuses is the sinking of the crowded transport ship Wilhelm Gustloff by a Russian submarine in the Baltic, in January 1945, with massive loss of life. Far from being a straightforward object of commemoration, however, this event becomes, in Grass’s text, a subject of investigation in which the perspectives of three different generations of a particular family are intimately involved. Tulla Pokriefke, a figure from earlier works by Grass concerned with the Nazi period, has experienced the event at first hand, as a heavily pregnant teenager; her grandson Konny, aged between fifteen and seventeen at the time of narration, has become fixated on the event and the historical figures associated with it, and has taken to commemorating them on a specially dedicated website; and Paul Pokriefke (the son to whom Tulla gave birth on the fateful night, and Konny’s father) is a hack journalist ostensibly employed by the author to investigate and report on the event. In this way, the act of historical recollection is presented to the reader as a process fraught with deep-seated personal motives and misgivings. Tulla comes across as the bearer of an authentically traumatic memory—she went into premature labor when the ship was torpedoed—which, however, easily shades over into nostalgia for the times in which she grew up and for the values promoted by the Nazi regime. Konny, the son of a broken marriage who has gone to live with Tulla at an impressionable age, has developed a powerful psychological identification with the ship and the regime associated with it, which expresses itself in a vivid and elaborate cult of memory. Paul, the narrator, sets out on his task of reconstructing the event carrying a complex burden of antipathies because the date of the sinking, 30 January, is also his birthday and the date of the inauguration (in 1933) of a regime that he would much prefer to forget, and he is also confronted in the course of his investigation with aspects of the way his mother and his son want to remember the event that he knows he has to challenge. Paul’s investigation not only familiarizes the reader with the historical circumstances of the sinking, the various uses to which the Nazi regime had put the ship, and the personal history of the Nazi dignitary after whom the ship was named, but also shows the reader the implications of Konny’s manner of cultivating and publicizing the memory of the ship

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through the Internet. Konny’s chatroom is a domain in which emotionally supercharged exchanges—exchanges often couched in the language of denunciation and dehumanization—can take place in the absence of any social restraining influence, and it is a major theme of the work that when young people turn to reliving the past in virtual reality and then continue their role-play in the world of social reality, it can have fatal consequences. Indeed, Paul finds himself having to face up to such consequences, and, by implication, to his own negligence as Konny’s father. Moreover, in addition to showing us the ways in which the narrator interacts with the attitudes of his mother and the behaviour of his son, the text also shows us the relationship of tension and mutual questioning in which the narrator stands to the persona of the author—i.e., Günter Grass, with his track record of involvement in the public discussion of issues arising from the German past. In this way, Paul’s narrative enters into dialogue, not only with the emotional responses of other members of his fictional family, but also with the manner in which the issues have been aired in the public domain over the years. As I have argued elsewhere,56 the value of these tensions and complexities, and of the literary sophistication with which Grass’s text treats them, is that they demonstrate how the business of historical memory is not straightforwardly a matter of choosing which events to commemorate, but is also, of necessity, an ongoing, interpersonal, social activity. As with well-known works of literature from the past, it will no doubt take a further process of institutionalization—at the hands of teachers and syllabus-designers—to integrate Im Krebsgang into the awareness of successive generations as a significant contribution to public discussion about the German past; but at the time of writing there are already clear signs that such a process is under way. By the end of 2008, at least five different volumes of notes and guidance on the work for use in German schools had already been published.. What can safely be said about Grass’s text in the meantime is that it probes the limits of public debate, not by bringing an altogether new theme into the public domain, but by providing a specific medium through which private sentiments are rendered recognizable and can thereby become the subject of fruitful public discussion. That is what makes it a positive example of what literature can contribute, ever and again, to the opening up of debate in the public sphere.

Notes 1. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, UK, 1989), esp. chap. 2.

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2. Ibid., 33–34. 3. Ibid., 36. For a discussion of literary representations of the actual interaction of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in such contexts in England and Germany, see Martina Lauster’s contribution in this volume. 4. Ibid., 23. 5. Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” 54–60. 6. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 29. 7. Ibid., 30–31. Compare also the following passage from pp. 55–56, which forms part of the link to Habermas’s description of the English model of the political public sphere: “As a privatized individual, the bourgeois was two things in one: owner of goods and persons and one human being among others; i.e. bourgeois and homme. This ambivalence of the private sphere was also a feature of the public sphere, depending on whether privatized individuals in their capacity as human beings communicated through critical debate in the world of letters about experiences of their subjectivity or whether private people in their capacity as owners of commodities communicated through rational-critical debate in the political realm, concerning the regulation of their private sphere.” 8. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth, 1972), 53. 9. J. Paul Hunter, “The Novel and Social/Cultural History,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge, 1996), 20. 10. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 55–65. 11. Hunter, “The Novel and Social/Cultural History,” 19. 12. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 65. 13. See also Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, “Pamela” in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2005). 14. Margaret Ann Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996), and the contributions in Jenny Mander, ed., Remapping the Rise of the European Novel (Oxford, 2007). 15. Jenny Mander, “Introduction,” in Mander, Remapping the Rise of the European Novel, 16–17. 16. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, 1987); and Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester, 1982). 17. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981). 18. Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (London, 1965), 237–38. 19. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 29 and 48–51. 20. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London, 1972), 47 and 51–52. 21. Ibid., 58–67. 22. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 48 and 55. 23. André Gide, Littérature engagée (Paris, 1950), 92. See also Sandra Teroni and Wolfgang Klein, eds., Pour la défence de la culture: Les textes du Congrès international des écrivains, Paris, juin 1935 (Dijon, 2005), 184–85. 24. The French version of Forster’s text is reproduced in Teroni and Klein, Défence de la culture, 75–79. 25. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd ed. (London, 1989), 211; Bernard Levin, The Pendulum Years: Britain and the Sixties (London, 1970), 284–85; see also Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago, 1998).

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26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 85–87. Ibid., 249–306. Ibid., 260–68. It was used as recently as 1987 in the prosecution of Christian Laborde for L’Os de Dionysos, which was eventually published in 1989. See Yvan Leclerc, Crimes écrits: La Littérature en procès au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1991), 319. F. W. J. Hemmings, Culture and Society in France, 1848–1898: Dissidents and Philistines (London, 1971), 43–76. For details, see Leclerc, Crimes écrits, 223–81. For an interesting analysis of the courtroom interpretations of the work, see Dominick LaCapra, Madame Bovary on Trial (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 30–52. The transcript of the trial is reprinted in Flaubert, Oeuvres, vol. 1 (Paris, 1946), 615–83. Leclerc, Crimes écrits, 318. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford, 1982), 213–34. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 55–56. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT, 1979), 338. Ibid., 168. Nahem Yousaf, Chinua Achebe (Tavistock, UK, 2003), 2. See also Neil ten Kortenaar, “How the Centre is Made to Hold in Things Fall Apart,” in Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott, eds. Michael Parker and Roger Starkey (Basingstoke, UK, 1995), 31–51. Chinua Achebe, “The Truth of Fiction,” in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (London, 1988), 96–97. Christopher Kelty, “Geeks and Recursive Publics: How the Internet and Free Software Make Things Public,” and Georgina Born, “Mediating the Public Sphere: Digitization, Pluralism, and Communicative Democracy,” both in Beyond Habermas: Democracy, Knowledge, and the Public Sphere, edited by Christian J. Emden and David Midgley (New York, forthcoming). Kristin Veel, Narrative Negotiations. Information Structures in Literary Fiction (Göttingen, 2009). Walser had used a very similar satirical device in his novel Ohne einander (Frankfurt am Main, 1993). Authors who had previously published sharp polemical attacks on Marcel ReichRanicki’s critical manner include Peter Handke (Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire, 1980) and Helmut Heißenbüttel, who wrote in 1988, under the title “Nachruf bei Lebzeiten,” of the urge to treat Reich-Ranicki as if he were already dead (Text + Kritik 100 (1988): 26–28). See also Heribert Seifert, “Lohnschreiber, Todfeind, Clown,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag, 9 June 2002, 73. For an analysis of Reich-Ranicki’s function within the German media world of the 1990s, see Elke Hussel, Marcel ReichRanicki und das “Literarische Quartett” im Lichte der Systemtheorie (Marburg, 2000). For a critical assessment of Schirrmacher’s action, and of Walser’s text in light of the controversy triggered by that action, see Dieter Borchmeyer and Helmuth Kiesel, eds., Der Ernstfall. Martin Walsers “Tod eines Kritikers” (Hamburg 2003). Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Mein Leben (Stuttgart, 1999). Frank Schirrmacher, ed., Die Walser-Bubis-Debatte: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main, 1999). Diedrich Diederichsen, “Deconstructing Martin,” tageszeitung, 10 July 2002, 15.

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48. Eckhard Fuhr, “Im Streit um Martin Walsers neuen Roman Tod eines Kritikers bleibt das Publikum Zaungast,” Die Welt, 5 June 2002. 49. Jan Philipp Reemtsma, “Ein antisemitischer Affektsturm,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 June 2002, 47. The textual basis for Reemtsma’s assessment was in turn subjected to close critical scrutiny by Joachim Güntner, “Walser und kein Ende,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 3 July 2002. 50. Thomas Anz, “Viel Lärm um Wenig: Anmerkungen zum Streit um Walsers Roman Tod eines Kritikers,” literaturkritik 4, no. 6 (2002), http://www.literaturkritik .de/txt/2002-06/2002-06-0098.html (accessed 12 June 2002). As Anz pointed out, it was Walser’s autobiographical novel Ein springender Brunnen that Reich-Ranicki had criticized in 1998, shortly before Walser’s speech in Frankfurt, for failing to mention the Holocaust, and there are aspects of Walser’s Frankfurt speech that can be seen as a response to that criticism. 51. See especially the contributions in Klaus-Michael Bogdal, Klaus Holz, and Matthias N. Lorenz, eds., Literarischer Antisemitismus nach Auschwitz (Stuttgart, 2007). On pp. 6–12 of their introduction, the editors provide a carefully differentiated account of how literary texts need to be approached with regard to their possible relation to anti-Semitic discourse. 52. Jürgen Habermas, “Eine semantische Anmerkung: Für Marcel Reich-Ranicki, aus gegebenen Anlässen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 7 June 2002. Habermas’s target was made clear in his opening sentence, which explicitly alluded to the essay “Anschwellender Bocksgesang,” with which Botho Strauß had aligned himself with nationalist sentiment in 1994: “The diffuse chitchat about taboos and courageously shaking them off swells to a goat song [schwillt zum Bocksgesang an].” 53. Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang (Göttingen, 2002). 54. See, for example, Adolf Höfer, “Die Entdeckung der deutschen Kriegsopfer in der Gegenwartsliteratur: Eine Studie zur Novelle Im Krebsgang von Günter Grass und ihrer Vorgeschichte,” Literatur für Leser 26, no. 3 (2003): 182–97, and Andreas F. Kelletat, “Von der Täter- zur Opfernation? Die Rückkehr des Themas ‘Flucht und Vertreibung’ in den deutschen Vergangenheitsdiskurs bei Grass und anderen,” in Germanistentreffen Deutschland—Großbritannien, Irland, 30.9.-3.10.2004: Dokumentation der Tagungsbeiträge, edited by Werner Roggausch (Bonn, 2005), 167–80. See also Stuart Taberner, “‘Normalization’ and the New Consensus on the Nazi Past: Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang and the Problem of German Wartime Suffering,” Oxford German Studies 31 (2002): 161–86. A fuller range of early critical responses to Im Krebsgang is discussed in my own article, “Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang: Memory, Medium, and Message,” Seminar 41 (2005): 55–67. 55. It was in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Göttingen, 2006) that Grass acknowledged that he had been recruited into a Waffen-SS tank regiment toward the end of the Second World War. 56. Midgley, “Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang,” 55–67.

Chapter 7

HABERMAS ANTICIPATED The Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere as “Theater of the World”

Martina Lauster



Habermas’s argument about the development of the public sphere bears a striking resemblance to a particular kind of cultural memory that was being developed by nineteenth-century authors. The fact that the early eighteenth-century public sphere of London became a subject of interest in Germany during the Vormärz, the period between 1830 and 1848, can be explained by the paradigmatic role that British political culture served for liberal writers. In Britain, on the other hand, the same concern with eighteenth-century models heralded changes to the country’s participatory culture that became manifest, for example, in the 1832 Reform Bill. When Devereux appeared in 1829, Edward Lytton Bulwer, known today as the Victorian novelist Bulwer Lytton,1 was an aspiring young writer and man of letters, about to rise to European fame and to become the editor of the New Monthly Magazine as well as an independent member of Parliament in favor of reform. For his wide German readership, including authors such as Karl Gutzkow, he embodied the cultivated English aristocrat whose statesmanlike profile enviably united letters and politics. And when Gutzkow’s Richard Savage was first performed in 1839, the author had been editor of the Telegraph für Deutschland for a year and be-

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come Germany’s foremost publicist. In other words, a remarkable public role had been achieved, in a system stifled by censorship and police-state measures, by an author who had made writing his profession. Yet, as one of the “Young Germans” affected by the federal decree of 1835, which suppressed all publications of this group, he was neither able to edit the Telegraph under his name nor to identify himself (at least initially) as the author of a highly successful play. The creation of a cultural memory concerned with the growth of the public sphere is thus, for varying reasons, closely associated with the writer’s public role-play, often under the mask of anonymity, a theme that permeates the texts under discussion. Both Bulwer’s Devereux and Gutzkow’s Richard Savage contribute to the comprehensive critique of contemporary mores that is highly characteristic of European letters in the 1830s and ’40s.2 This critique draws on a moralist tradition that runs from Theophrastus, via La Bruyère, Addison, and Steele, to Mercier, and which is closely linked to the Baroque notion of the world as a “theater” in which human endeavor is seen, not as the activity of free individuals, but as role-play. Devereux and Richard Savage share an early eighteenth-century setting, precisely the period Habermas was to single out as a “blueprint” of the “bourgeois public sphere” 130 years later. By foregrounding the performative nature of social interaction in that period, both works also reflect on the nature of the public sphere at the time of writing, in the late 1820s and 1830s. Their links to the moralist tradition are apparent in their sociological perspective on both the society of their own time and that of the eighteenth century, when moralist literature flourished. It was in fact a constitutive element in establishing the modern public sphere. The intellectual wit piercing the vanity of the (aristocratic or make-believe aristocratic) world is at the hub of the process. For example, Richard Steele writes in his “Dedication” of The Tatler : “The general Purpose of this Paper, is to expose the false Arts of Life, to pull off the Disguises of Cunning, Vanity and Affectation, and to recommend a general Simplicity in our Dress, our Discourse, and our Behaviour.”3 Moralists can thus not only be seen as portraitists and critics of worldly role-play, but as actors playing the part of the fool. In Richard Savage, Steele appears as harlequin at a masked ball, hitting with his wand and verbally unmasking the upper-class guests. Theatrical imagery is associated by Gutzkow and Bulwer with the “elegant world,” the sphere of aristocratic sociability that ultimately generates the reasoning of the modern public sphere. It is therefore not surprising that much of the text in Richard Savage and Devereux takes the form of witty dialogue, the quasi-aristocratic form of communication. This theater of the (vain) world is critically viewed by an observer who is also an actor, who finds himself inside and outside the scenario of the “elegant world.” This dual

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position becomes the platform of the reasoning private individual, the social nucleus of the “bourgeois public sphere.” The specific eighteenthcentury connotations of public and private discourse (witty, aristocratic, or, in The Tatler’s terms, “disguised,” as opposed to serious, middle-class, or “simple”) mark the parameters of the nascent middle-class public sphere. What is at stake, in other words, is the transition from a limited public forum, dominated by a cultivated aristocratic elite who “represent” or “perform” (as a kind of epilogue to what Habermas calls the “representative publicness” of earlier royal or princely courts), to an expandable public sphere composed of middle-class professionals who “moralize” or “argue.”4 By speaking through the figures of moralists such as the fictitious Devereux or the historical Steele, Bulwer and Gutzkow create roles for themselves and thus reenact the transition from the aristocratic to the middle-class model of the “public sphere.” In this chapter I address this role-play in my first section and then, in the light of Habermas’s analysis, consider the analytical depth of both works in depicting their eighteenth-century subject matter. Finally, I attempt an evaluation of the way in which Devereux and Richard Savage reenact eighteenth-century moralizing in their own discursive styles. The transition from “aristocratic” wit to “middle-class” reasoning or plain speaking is embodied in the man of letters, a model to which both authors aspire.

The Author as Actor Devereux is an autobiography that fictionalizes and historicizes many features of Bulwer’s own life. The high-born narrator, a descendant of Queen Elizabeth’s unfortunate courtier Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex (1567–1601), finds himself bereft at the age of about twenty-three and begins a life of action abroad. This phase, from 1714 to 1725, is coextensive with the French exile of a real-life politician, the Tory Viscount Bolingbroke, Devereux’s only friend and role model.5 As a salon wit in Paris and as a diplomat in the service of the French crown, Devereux develops into a man of the world. Like Bolingbroke, who took up political writing after the end of his exile and active career, Devereux eventually goes back to England and retires. Around 1726, he writes his autobiography for posterity, explicitly for readers of the next century. They are to recognize themselves in his own sensibility, which is ahead of its time. As Bulwer stresses in the “Note to the Present Edition” of 1852: “In Devereux, I wished to portray a man flourishing in the last century, with the train of mind and sentiment peculiar to the present.”6 The voice of the author is intended

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to speak through that of the first-person narrator, so that the character Devereux constitutes a self-portrait in a genial historical guise. Correlating past, present, and future, the novel derives its confessional character from the “dark truth” it reveals about the protagonist’s self,7 the unhappy reverse side of the man of the world. Devereux’s splendid career has covered up disastrous family relations and the violent elimination of a loved woman from his life; indeed, he himself becomes the killer of the man responsible for her murder. The witty public actor Morton Devereux has a gloomy, Gothic personal history, which is inseparably linked to his aristocratic identity. He comes to terms with it through autobiographical writing, a quest for the self under an exterior of convention. An example of this self-critique can be found in Devereux’s comments on the “easy lesson” learned by men acting in a public function, which is acquiring “the dissimulation of composure,” be it “with the courtier’s or the citizen’s design.”8 This physiognomic self-examination of the public character corresponds to an increasing insight into the falseness of appearances within the polis. For example, Devereux finds out that the public “face” of France, its polished courtly sociability, contrasts shockingly with the misery of its vast provincial “body.”9 Here, the theatrical metaphor of the “mask” is used. Devereux notes with nineteenth-century awareness that the late Louis XIV was able to rule in his glamorous style only by ruthlessly exploiting the provinces and leaving the country as a whole destitute. A warning is expressed to England to “draw the moral, and beware … of governments which impoverish. A waste of the public wealth is the most lasting of public afflictions.”10 Thus, the writing aristocratic protagonist exemplifies the efforts of his author. Bulwer had made himself notorious via the provocative novel Pelham, or Adventures of a Gentleman (1828), in which high-society manners were reviewed. The observer Pelham, himself a representative of exclusive “Society,” mutates in his dandy guise into a man of political principles based on the thought of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham,11 and the first-person narrative makes this case a public example. Bulwer’s advocacy of the virtue attaching to the private individual who engages in such (self-)critical business, as opposed to the dazzling publicity of the man of wit and fashion, foreshadows the middle-class morality of the Victorian period. In Devereux, the symbolism of age underscores this, with youth corresponding to a state of Romantic dreaming, early manhood to one of action and satirical observation in the theater of the world, and mature manhood to one of withdrawal, reflection, and experience. Because Devereux is writing his life story for readers of the late 1820s, Bulwer’s contemporaries are invited to reap the rewards of an eighteenth-century nobleman’s “enquiry” and “examination”12—fruits of public activity pre-

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served in earnest autobiographical writing—and turn them into a public good. The excitement of the 1832 Reform Bill, which Bulwer helped to get through the House of Commons, was not far away. In 1837, when the European reverberations of the Parisian July Revolution had not yet subsided entirely, Gutzkow borrowed the name of Bulwer, whose works were highly popular in the German-speaking world, to publish a series of observations on nineteenth-century life and manners under the title Die Zeitgenossen (Contemporaries). As Gutzkow had to keep his authorship secret, Die Zeitgenossen appeared anonymously, with all the trappings of German Bulwer editions currently being produced, as an alleged translation “from the English of E.L. Bulwer.” Intercultural role-play behind the mask of Bulwer protected an oppositional author while enabling him to act the part of the English man of letters, a model that his work itself reflects upon.13 A little later, in 1839, Gutzkow celebrated his first success as a dramatist with his “English” play Richard Savage, which drew its inspiration from the early eighteenth century. Although not presented as a spoof translation, it was nevertheless based on an English source, Samuel Johnson’s An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744).14 Savage, who died in 1743, was a notorious figure whose lasting significance lies in his public role rather than in his actual works. Savage’s fate can in fact be seen as one of the early test cases of “public opinion.” Not only did this bohemian avant la lettre publicly claim to be the natural son of a high aristocrat, Lady Macclesfield, but he also stabbed a man to death in a drunken brawl, was sentenced to death, and received a royal pardon, after a pamphlet had signaled “some groundswell of popular feeling in his favour.”15 Savage’s stubborn quest for recognition as the son of Lady Macclesfield gained him much public support. The lady went down in history, not least thanks to the biography by Savage’s friend Johnson, as the archetypal heartless noblewoman. Gutzkow, seeing himself in the role of the Zeitschriftsteller, or social commentator, representing public interests against the Metternich system, capitalized on the Savage case as an antiaristocratic cause, while the English subject matter partly shielded his criticism of class prejudice. Gutzkow’s Lady Macclesfield does in the end realize and publicly admit that she is Savage’s mother,16 but it is too late, as Savage dies in poverty, having defiantly turned his back on the London “Society” whose bastard he is. Thus two lives are ruined, the poet’s as well as that of the lady herself. By giving a prominent part to Savage’s friend, the “wit” Richard Steele, and by using deliberate anachronisms so as to emphasize the contemporary relevance of the subject matter,17 Gutzkow employs drama for his agenda. Whereas in Die Zeitgenossen he had portrayed, in Bulwer’s guise, contemporary English types embodying the modern age, in Richard

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Savage he uses Johnson’s biography, itself the work of a man of letters, to lend his voice to historical English characters, notably the famous Steele, one of the earliest European journalists. Gutzkow’s Steele can be seen as the author’s alter ego, particularly at the end, when the journalist formulates the moral of the play in an epigrammatic final sentence. But even Steele’s earlier recommendation, in a dialogue with the dramatist Savage, of wit as a medium for penetrating social portraiture is very much Gutzkow’s own: STEELE. Comedies, Savage! Fine social allusions, satirical portraits of the life of the upper classes, ironical references to the lawyers, doctors and priests—there’s a field, Savage: wit, wit, wit!18

As I have argued elsewhere, “Englishness” in the sense of witty speech and thought provided an appropriate medium for Gutzkow’s own concerns.19 The public sphere of the German states, throttled from above and hampered from below by the lack of a German tradition of public discourse, was to be invigorated through the communicative style of an advanced political civilization, the type of civitas that England represented, and from which the Germans were still separated by a long way. Writing at a time in the nineteenth century when the political representation of the ascending middle class became a turbulent issue, Bulwer and Gutzkow thus slip into roles taken from what we now, thanks to Habermas, see as the locus classicus of the modern public sphere, i.e., the Augustan London of coffeehouses, The Tatler, and The Spectator. Following eighteenth-century moralist paradigms, including these journals, Devereux and Richard Savage portray this public sphere in terms of a theatrum mundi from which private individuals derive a critique or “moral.” This corresponds to Habermas’s identification of “elegant,” “witty” conversation in aristocratic circles as the matrix of public reasoning.

Devereux and Richard Savage in the Light of Habermas’s Analysis According to Habermas, the “bourgeois public sphere” grows from an education in critical and argumentative communication. Members of the cultivated middle class receive this education from an urban aristocracy increasingly independent of the court, and in urban spaces that are distinct from the monarchic sphere of influence.20 In Devereux, “Wills’s” coffeehouse—surely Will’s, situated at 1 Bow Street, London—is described as such a place of instruction, a school of cutting analysis. From the way

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in which “half-a-dozen wits” pull to pieces a whole cultural universe of “actors, actresses, poets, statesmen, philosophers, critics, divines … with the most gratifying malice imaginable,” the passive listener can assemble “a chest-full” of “knowledge,”21 presumably including both the news of the day and the style in which the subjects are taken apart. Significantly, the relationship Habermas describes between the “teaching” aristocracy and the “learning” middle class is here almost reversed, as the noblemen Devereux and Tarleton are listening to a socially mixed company in which the journalists Steele and Addison are the leading lights. The reader thus encounters what Habermas calls “a parity of the educated” that is beginning to form “between aristocratic society and bourgeois intellectuals.”22 In Richard Savage, the actress “Miss Ellen” provides a fine example of a middle-class individual beating an aristocrat, Lady Macclesfield, at her own game. Ellen seeks to persuade the lady to write a petition to the Queen on behalf of Savage.23 As her opening ploy, the lady “cuts” Ellen verbally because of her thespian profession, by sarcastically expressing respect for it. She has a high opinion of actresses, she says, if only because of the determination it must take for them—often seen as morally dubious women—to exclude themselves “from the rest of society.” Ellen later gets her own back when she retorts “What a fortune for him to have such a noble and cold-hearted mother.”24 She here wittily uses the word Glück in its ambiguous sense between “good luck” and “ill fortune,” the stress on welch making it unmistakably clear which of the two is meant. True, this dialogue is not acted out in a public place, such as the male coffeehouse forum; but Ellen has already shamed Lady Macclesfield (who significantly does not recognize her even after this event) in front of a full house by speaking certain lines of Savage’s drama Overbury with an innuendo.25 The character of Savage himself becomes particularly interesting when interpreted in the light of Habermas’s comments. He is the “avant-garde” middle-class intellectual who, thanks to his education and cultural production, has risen from very humble circumstances to the aristocraticbourgeois public sphere of the city. In addition, however, he wants to be recognized as being part of the nobility by birth, a misguided ambition in class terms.26 Most importantly, perhaps, Savage becomes a tragic case because he fails to learn from the aristocracy instead of wanting to belong to it. He cannot apply wit, relying instead on the power of “natural” feeling and emotional rhetoric to convince Lady Macclesfield. His delusion is that he, as a sentimental poet, will be able to teach her, the hardened woman of the world.27 Far from achieving this aim, Savage himself becomes a case prompting others to argue against unfeeling “Society.” Their arguments are distinctly alien to his way of thinking. The historical Richard Savage, however, did not hesitate to launch fulminous

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public attacks against the lady and her seemingly scheming ways, indirectly in his Tragedy of Sir Thomas Overbury (performed at Drury Lane in 1723 with himself in the title role) and explicitly in his poem The Bastard (1728), which marked the height of his popularity.28 In Gutzkow’s play, it is very clearly the journalist, supported by the actress, who turns wit into a public weapon on Savage’s behalf. In an amusing dialogue contrasting Steele’s satirical reasoning and Savage’s uncritical lyricism, Gutzkow depicts the journalist’s self-ironical pride in his own mastery at killing with words. Steele announces a satirical Stachelpyramide (literally: “a pyramid of barbs”) against Lady Macclesfield that, once published in his journal, would make the woman hang herself if she were an ancient Greek. Savage tears up the paper containing this stinging attack and promises an ode on his mother instead.29 This shows a certain skill in repartee as he destroys Steele’s humorously inflated self-image together with his satire. Moreover, an ode to Lady Macclesfield will be an equally “public,” but celebratory form and therefore the opposite of Steele’s verbal caricature. However, to publish his sentiments in an appropriate form, Savage would really be better off as a writer of “sentimental” letters or autobiographical notes. Habermas draws attention to the eminently public nature of this private genre in the eighteenth century, arguing that the diary as well as the first-person narrative become extraverted monologues. Middle-class subjectivity, discovered “in the close relations of the conjugal family,”30 is displayed to a readership making similar discoveries. Having grown up in the care of petit bourgeois foster parents, Savage has internalized the “intimate, close family connections” and discovered his subjectivity without, however, being sure of his identity. The documents that seem to prove his aristocratic pedigree cannot annul his middle-class subjectivity, nor settle his permanent identity crisis. The psychology of this conflict would have provided ideal subject matter for outpourings in the form of a private-public diary or narrative as described by Habermas. However, if Richardson’s Pamela (1740) is, following Habermas, indeed the paradigmatic text,31 Richard Savage lived slightly too early to participate in the “process of self-clarification of private people focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel privateness.”32 Gutzkow therefore portrays a middle-class intellectual who is as yet not in a position to understand and communicate his own subjectivity in the sense of Habermas’s “audience-oriented subjectivity,”33 and to whom quasi-aristocratic, publicly effective wit cannot offer a vehicle for self-assurance either. It is only logical that Savage, when taken under the patronage of the Whig Lord Tyrconnel, dies a mental death. He cannot play the role of salon poet because his whole sensibility is at odds with aristocratic splendor, however much he yearns to be accepted by Lady Macclesfield: “My imagination

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can conjure up nothing more, for everything is offered to it; my spirit can find no dark corner when everything scintillates with light.”34 His subjectivity, deprived of vital “dark corners” as its resources, is left in a vacuum. He projects his longing for affective and creative identity even more onto his remote, physical mother, who becomes an idée fixe. Devereux, on the other hand, does write the sort of first-person narrative which is, in Habermas’s expression, “a conversation with one’s self addressed to another person,”35 constantly addressing the next-century reader as an imagined recipient of his “confessions.” But it is not a sentimental monologue; empathy with the psyche of the narrator or other figures is not paramount. Instead, we get an account of how public and private interact in an aristocratic life, so much so that Devereux feels it necessary to assure his reader: “It is not my intention to write a political history, instead of a private biography.”36 The aristocratic private persona is a “performing” public one by heredity37 and does not need to become “audience-oriented” by communicating his innermost feelings to an audience. Yet Devereux does produce a genuine self-searching biography, a kind of Bildungsroman narrated in the first person, and not statesmanlike memoirs. The novel therefore illuminates the emergence of “subjectivity” and “privacy” from the opposite angle, i.e., from that of the upper class. Devereux’s private sensibility, for example, is so far developed as to let differences over public matters temporarily cool his friendship with Bolingbroke. Aristocratic politicians are becoming “private” individuals who take seriously their different stances in “public” affairs, and the metaphors of warmth and coldness are telling signifiers in this respect: [M]y indifference to the cause of the Chevalier, in which he [Bolingbroke] was so warmly engaged,38 threw a natural restraint upon our conversation, and produced an involuntary coldness in our intercourse—so impossible is it for men to be private friends who differ on a public matter.39

The historical Bolingbroke in fact turned from a wheeler and dealer behind the scenes into a public operator. True, Bulwer refers to him as a statesman who was still basically a courtier furthering his own interest and failing to fulfill the nineteenth-century expectation of politicians to be “useful and honest men.” But the image of Bolingbroke as the first “party” politician who, after retiring from parliamentary politics, organized an effective Tory opposition against Walpole’s Whig government through publications must have been sufficiently present for readers of the 1820s and 1830s to understand the moral drift of Bulwer’s novel. Bolingbroke’s significance as the organizer of “public opinion” through the press begins just where the plot of Devereux leaves off.40 Like Devereux himself, Bolingbroke the courtier who is responsible to the cause of a ruler mutates

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into a citizen, a private individual whose writing makes him responsible to a public. Devereux actually deals with the wider significance of this process of privatization or “bourgeoisification” in aristocratic sociability. Although the court of the aged Louis XIV, which Devereux enters as a courtier, still retains traces of splendid spectacle, things change rapidly after the Sun King’s death. The Regent Philip of Orléans, notorious for his debauchery, is a private, cultivated man on the throne whose court spectacles consist of homely cooking parties with his “chums” or “roués,”41 events degenerating into gluttonous orgies.42 Devereux becomes his confidant after having saved the life of an unknown gentleman—the Regent himself—during a fight in a prostitute’s hovel.43 In conversation, when Devereux admires Philip’s drawings, this ruler makes no bones about himself: “I should have been much more accomplished as a private gentleman than I fear I ever shall be as a public man of toil and business.”44 What the Regency period means for the development of a middle-class public sphere in France has been described by Habermas in terms of an emancipation of the city from the court as a cultural center. The Parisian salons, similar in function to the London coffeehouses, evolve into places of reasoning where “conversation” changes into “critique” and “bon mots” into “arguments,” whereas the royal residence in turn becomes the site of (to put it mildly, in the Regent’s case) informal gatherings: Only with the reign of Philip of Orléans, who moved the royal residence from Versailles to Paris, did the court lose its central position in the public sphere, indeed its status as the public sphere. For inasmuch as the “town” took over its cultural functions, the public sphere itself was transformed. The sphere of royal representation and the grand goût of Versailles became a façade held up only with effort. The regent and his two successors preferred small social gatherings, if not the family circle itself, and to a certain degree avoided the etiquette. The great ceremonial gave way to an almost bourgeois intimacy.45

In the city, a literary public sphere emerges where writers begin “to sow the seeds of thought, no longer on the narrow enclosure of the court and aristocracy, but in the open field of the public mind,” as the early twentieth-century Historians’ History of the World finds worth noting about the French Regency.46 It is also significant that, with regard to foreign policy, this period meant a rapprochement between France and England against Spain and the establishment of an order of peace in Europe, a process of pacification that is symbolically expressed in Bulwer’s novel by the exchange of the courtier’s sword for the man of the world’s papers, and ultimately for the pen of the man of letters. To enlist Russia’s support for

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peace-seeking France, Devereux is entrusted by Philip of Orléans with a “secret mission.”47 On his first stroll through St. Petersburg, the new diplomat meets a remarkable English-speaking gentleman who then turns out to be the “Czar” in person. Devereux attaches significance to the fact that he has first encountered the present rulers of France and Russia as “subjects” rather than “princes,” even if their motives for hiding their identity in public were very different—in the case of Philip of Orléans, “indulgence” in “vice” of the “grossest” kind; in that of Peter the Great, a desire “to watch … keenly over the interests of his people” in order “to learn the better the duties of the prince.”48 Yet in both cases, the novel introduces a monarch as a private individual, which underscores Bulwer’s portrayal of a significant shift in court culture during the early eighteenth century. A comparable shift was underway in 1829, inasmuch as the long process that changed England’s “rakish and raffish” aristocracy into a “respectable” body of citizens49 came to a head at the end of George IV’s reign. A different shift in public culture was happening in the German states of 1839, with the “growth of participatory politics” since 183050 having established journalism as a power to be reckoned with despite censorship. In Richard Savage, journalism is thus able to enter the stage—both through the figure of Steele and through the altogether discursive style of the play. In the next section, discursiveness, a characteristic of both works, is discussed with regard to the way in which eighteenth-century models are reenacted and transcended so as to engage with the contemporary, nineteenth-century public sphere.

Discursiveness and the Man of Letters A “discursive” text, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, proceeds “by reasoning or argument”; in other words, it talks about something rather than representing or depicting it. Bulwer’s novel and Gutzkow’s play break conventions of representation by introducing an essayistic or journalistic feature into the realms of fiction and drama, respectively. The actual plot in both works appears secondary to the reasoning or anecdotal context. Bulwer addresses this innovative technique in his “Dedicatory Epistle,” although he refers to it in terms of harking back to an older, pre-Scottian tradition of novel writing. Devereux does not follow Walter Scott’s Romantic evocation of the past, closely tying characters from history into the novel’s fiction, but is modeled on the digressive observations allowed by “the narrative romances of an earlier school.” One could think here of picaresque novels such as Le Sage’s Gil Blas (1715–35), which show their

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hero on a journey through contemporary mores. Thus, unlike Scott, Bulwer connects his figures and episodes from real history only loosely with the fictional (and rather implausible) story line. Therefore, “a greater air of truth and actuality” seems to be achieved in comparison with Scott’s historical romances, which lay the emphasis on depiction or “picturesque” representation; hence Devereux is described as “a fiction which deals less with the Picturesque than the Real.” Bulwer’s resistance against making real eighteenth-century public characters part of his melodramatic main fiction, and their inclusion instead in a digressive, “unfictional” strand could indeed be seen as a contribution to the formal experiments that are characteristic of the period. The very fact that the novel is presented as a fictional autobiography, a cross between imaginary and “real-life” writing, already indicates the innovative hybridization of genre, leading the old-established form of autobiography as well as the essayistic “imaginary portrait” into the terrain of the novel, while shifting that ground altogether in the direction of reasoning. Therefore, the actual plot, which involves stock Gothic elements51 and is orchestrated by a scheming Jesuit, Devereux’s antagonist, cannot be regarded as a failed “realistic” historical romance, but must be seen as a symbolic device. When the Jesuit is eventually killed, the Gothic story collapses in on itself, left behind by the self-reflective narrator like his own childhood and youth and thus symbolizing the crumbling of aristocratic identity, defined as it was for centuries by medieval (Latinate and Catholic) traditions. Parallel to the construction of Devereux as a modern private individual writing for the next century, this symbolic form of representation is effectively eroded by the discursive context in which it is embedded. Yet there is an element of what Bulwer terms “the Real” even in the symbolic Gothic strand of the novel, insofar as Catholic connections in Protestant England after 1688 were of high political importance. The English rulers from William and Mary to Queen Anne were not recognized by France, Spain, or the Papal states, who instead supported the French-educated Catholic James Stuart (the “Chevalier” or “Old Pretender”) as the rightful heir. The historically grounded French allegiance of the Devereux is therefore loaded with political significance, and it is not by chance that the French Jesuit exploits the family’s Catholicism and ties with France as well as the Jacobite networks of the time to further his own cause in England. But the most “real” aspect of Morton Devereux’s Catholicism is his exclusion from parliamentary activity, from the “open senate,” which forces him to become a player and observer in the sphere of “veiled intrigue.”52 This is precisely the scenario of antechambers, salons, coffeehouses, and theaters from which the modern public sphere originated. In 1829, this public sphere was still only just

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being extended to allow Catholics into parliament and high-ranking public offices, and in this respect Devereux is to be seen as a politically most topical work.53 How then does “reasoning,” the power that Habermas has identified as the motor of the “bourgeois public sphere,” appear in Devereux, and how does it involve the nineteenth-century reader? First of all, it determines the protagonist’s own transformation from “derider of human follies and keen actor in the human drama”54 to serious “examiner.” This change is presented as the result of a journey through the theatrum mundi, beginning in Book IV and ending in Book VI, where the outcome of this experience is formulated: I now surrendered myself to a nobler philosophy than in crowds and cities I had hitherto known. I no longer satirised—I inquired; I no longer derided—I examined.55

The theatrical space of courts and cities, the site of “veiled intrigue” and witty discourse where individuals score points off each other to further their careers, is altogether left behind. It is replaced by the solitude of an ancestral home where the protagonist writes the text his readers have before them, a form of reasoning about the self as much as a critique of contemporary public life. In terms of social type, Devereux mutates from aristocratic actor, swashbuckling nobleman and courtier who is “by prejudice” a “cavalier” and “tory,”56 into a denizen of the republic of letters, a “solitary and forsaken” man of books who teaches the “lesson” of “experience” to the next century, as he himself once listened to the republican Cromwell’s son who described himself as a “hermit.”57 The overarching model of the narrative is thus a moralist critique that exposes the vanity of the polis, such as that of the recluse Diogenes passing verdicts from his tub58 and that of the essayist observing contemporary mores in his journal. Devereux’s reasoning observations would, of course, be unthinkable without the school of urbane wit. The man of letters is an inverted man of the world, the kind of individual Addison characterizes in his figure of the “Spectator.” Significantly, the political, “statesman”-like qualities of this man of letters are mentioned first: Thus I live in this world rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species; by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part in life.59

The anonymous self-portrait of the “Spectator” or “man of letters” fills the first number of the eponymous journal, The Spectator (1 March 1711).

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An “insatiable thirst after knowledge” has acquainted this persona with “all the countries of Europe, in which there was any thing new or strange to be seen,” after having already absorbed nearly all “celebrated books, either in the learned or the modern tongues,”60 so that he is now in a position to record and publish the observations he makes as a ubiquitous figure in London’s streets and public meeting places. The ironic point is that this man, who can appropriately be dubbed “conversant” with every field of knowledge and its developing special discourse (e.g., political, economic, legal, theological, or literary, allocated to different coffeehouses)61 is himself mute. If he opens his mouth at all, it will be in his own circle at Will’s coffeehouse, which itself constitutes a social panorama. It includes the landed gentleman “Sir Roger de Coverley,” the merchant and “man of strong reason” “Sir Andrew Freeport,” the candid and modest military man “Captain Sentry,” the man of fashion and women’s favorite “Will Honeycomb,” as well as a lawyer and “wit” whose real passion is literature, and a “very philosophic” clergyman.62 This “set of humourists,”63 described (again anonymously) in The Spectator’s second issue by Steele, acts as a kind of editorial board for the essays appearing in the journal. These are the brainchildren of the unnamed, silent man of letters who “prints out” his knowledge through them: [W]hen I consider how much I have seen, read, and heard, I begin to blame my own taciturnity; and since I have neither time nor inclination to communicate the fulness of my heart and speech, I am resolved to do it in writing, and to print myself out, if possible, before I die. I have been often told by my friends, that it is a pity so many useful discoveries which I have made should be in the possession of a silent man. For this reason, therefore, I shall publish a sheet full of thoughts every morning, for the benefit of my contemporaries.64

In the reflections of the man of letters who listens and observes rather than taking part in the conversations, the reasoning of “wits” thus undergoes its first transformation, while its second, crucial one happens in the encyclopedic moralizing of a periodical. This acts as the medium in the genesis of the “bourgeois public sphere” by circulating both knowledge and middle-class moral views. Their premise is that knowledge has to be “productive,” not a mere means of (aristocratic) “representation.” In Devereux, the transformation of self-serving wit into socially productive reasoning is performed, as has already been indicated, on the level of the protagonist’s change from an acting and conversing man of the world to a withdrawn, writing man of letters intent on communicating his observations to morally and intellectually more advanced readers of a later age. The same transformation can be observed in the way witty

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(and would-be witty) dialogue is raised to a level of reflection involving the nineteenth-century reader’s own intelligence. The scene at Will’s, where coffeehouse regulars exercise their minds “with the most gratifying malice” on all kinds of cultural subjects, is a good example. It also illustrates how the man of letters, Bulwer, generates discursive literature from sources of a related kind—in this case, from The Spectator. Devereux and his companion Tarleton hit upon a circle of “wits” whom the educated reader will recognize as the “set of humourists” described in The Spectator, as Steele himself actually joins their company and the characteristically silent Addison is already present. The journal’s avocational types (the gentleman Sir Roger de Coverley, the merchant Sir Andrew Freeport, and so on) are thus presented to the reader of Devereux in the form of differently named “real-life” originals.65 A bumptious “Captain Cleland,” sporting “an orange-coloured coat” and seeming, “by a fashionable swagger of importance, desirous of giving the tone to the company,”66 is thus recognizable as the original of Steele’s and Addison’s gallant, “Will Honeycomb.” Readers who do not “get” this are helped by a footnote by the fictitious nineteenth-century editor of Devereux, who frequently comments on historical characters or translates learned quotations—another feature of discursiveness. To add to the playful intertwining of life and letters, Bulwer sets the scene just after the appearance of The Spectator’s first few numbers in March 1711, when the editorship of Addison and Steele was yet unknown, and therefore an entertaining guessing game starts among the company at Will’s. The man-about-town Tarleton, who is “sufficiently educated to pretend to the character of a man of letters,” introduces his young friend Devereux to the great Richard Steele. But they are cut off before they can start a conversation by Cleland, who asks if they have seen “the new paper” and, while others conjecture that it may have been produced by Congreve or Swift, seeks to take the credit for having written it himself. Neither Steele nor Addison let on who the real editors are; indeed, Steele insists, by allusion, on his anonymity in that role.67 But the reader is, of course, in the know, as is the narrator Devereux with the benefit of hindsight. The text thus wittily communicates with the reader as an initiate able to see through the conceited behavior of the “wits” who all claim to have inside knowledge, particularly the domineering and vain Cleland. He mentions the new journal with the sole purpose of flaunting his fashionable up-to-dateness and privileged access to information. The “quiet” and simple question that Steele puts to Cleland thus marks a stroke of true witty genius, debunking coffeehouse wit and transferring the “knowing” communication to that between reader and text at the same time. What is also imparted is the plain-speaking moral sense that informs Addison and Steele’s journal.

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One of the main resources of discursiveness, conversation or dialogue, is dramatized in Richard Savage. For example, a dialogue about Steele’s reluctance to use his journal for attacks on Lady Macclesfield and on her inhuman behavior toward Savage becomes a vehicle for discussing the power of the press and of public opinion. Reasoning here “enacts” arguments that would normally be found in a discursive text such as a journal article or similar publication: LORD TYRCONNEL. Can you tolerate that, Steele, you who invented the literature of the day, you, Steele, who forged those Olympic thunder-bolts of public opinion that you hurl down upon the lies and deceit of our corrupt morals and opinions? STEELE. Mylord! The more devastating the weapon, the greater the care to be observed in employing it. Public opinion is not always a Themis sitting in judgment, but more commonly a harpy who never again yields up that which she has torn apart. If she once besmirches the virtue of an angel, heaven itself can never wash it clean again. A thousand justifications, a thousand refutations—something always clings.68

In this contest of two wits, middle-class moralizing wins, but only by fully exploiting the argumentative resources of educated discourse. The man of letters, Steele, triumphs over the aristocrat Tyrconnel not only by his morally superior argument, but also by his erudition. One classical allusion by Tyrconnel is answered with two. Tyrconnel’s personal interests in exposing the Lady Macclesfield publicly are in turn exposed by Steele. In an aside (before “Mylord” above), he communicates with the audience by means of another classical reference: “An actor running onto the street in his costume and playing Brutus in reality.”69 This responds to the lord’s request for journalistic aid in mobilizing “the Olympic thunder-bolts of public opinion” that he needs in order to finish off Lady Macclesfield. Tyrconnel, a “liberal” nobleman, finds himself conveniently side by side with public opinion against this woman, who once snubbed him and on whom he wants to avenge himself. Steele’s journal could translate semipublic rancor against the lady (the drama of the salon) into a public execution, while Tyrconnel would earn political glory. At the same time, Steele’s critical aside about the actor Tyrconnel running into the street to carry out in real life his stage act as Brutus touches on the stage as a semipolitical institution. Public interests are, as it were, pre-presented in the theater before the press re-presents them; the act of Brutus is rehearsed on the stage before being taken on by print media and carried out “in reality” in the open political arena. Steele does, after Savage’s imprisonment, produce the dagger of Brutus in the form of the satire on Lady Macclesfield that he intends to publish in his journal, but this

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follows the performance of Savage’s The Tragedy of Sir Thomas Overbury at Drury Lane. Miss Ellen, playing the leading female part, has ensured that the important lines alluding to Lady Macclesfield’s coldness have hit home, so that the case is now public enough, and Steele is ready to take it up only when neither the success of Savage’s play nor his impending transportation have elicited any human response from the lady. This is morally and publicly responsible journalism as opposed to the personally motivated public coup Tyrconnel wanted Steele to launch. On this sort of public opinion politics based on self-interest, Steele finally reasons “that no truth is any longer conceivable in this world that is not accessed from behind by some chicken ladder of interest, however small it may be.”70 The scene in which Lady Macclesfield watches Overbury from her theater box,71 finding herself exposed to a tide of hostility as people in the audience turn their attention on her, and losing her nerve when the allusive lines exposing her are spoken to thundering applause, is a masterpiece of theatrical self-referentiality. The incident occurs as the performance of Savage’s Overbury reaches the end of Act II, which coincides with the position of the scene where the lady witnesses the performance in Gutzkow’s play. The eighteenth-century stage is here literally reenacted as a moral institution, while the nineteenth-century stage performs more than such public moralizing. It also shows the woman at the receiving end and her genuine inability to rouse any motherly compassion for Savage, even if he is her natural son, and this results in her determination to defy “public opinion,” which demands such feelings from her. Gutzkow’s drama therefore informs public reasoning in a “sociological” way, indicating that the lady, morally criticized by an early bourgeois public sphere, is in fact a victim of her own class mentality. This is also the essence of Steele’s moral presented at the end. The self-referential theatricality of the play can even be detected in the melodramatic final act. As in Devereux, where stock Gothic elements of narrative take on a particular significance, the seemingly trivial form of exaggerated dramatic pathos in Richard Savage becomes meaningful in the play’s discursive context. In the last act the moralist drift is made explicit in a theatrum mundi of shrieking contrasts and operatic gestures. Not surprisingly, the plot here has nothing to do with the historical Savage; it is “pure theater” in this respect. Disgusted by the vanity and scheming of polite society (which is exposed as a result of another theatrical event, a masked ball in the splendor of Tyrconnel’s house), Savage retreats to the poverty from which he has risen and dies in the drab front room of his first foster mother. Here he speaks some of the play’s most damning lines attacking class society, referring to himself as “born in stillness, secretly, under the bad conscience of his parents, shamefully like a speech-defect

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that makes one blush, a naught that the schoolboy at his math places in front and not behind.”72 The spirit of criticism has caught up with him after all, but it is too late to turn him into a Diogenes. Finally, Lady Macclesfield rushes into the working man’s abode, realizing and admitting that she is Savage’s mother. She is joined by “common folk,” as well as by Ellen and Steele, who has just had Savage’s claims officially recognized by Parliament. The implausibly theatrical culmination of the plot is significant because it allows stage roles to be shown as roles, and a moral to be expressed as in a fairground show. Even the ratiocinative intellect, commentator, and critic Steele is shown to have played a part, that of an eighteenth-century wit. His final act of “plain speaking” concludes the play and transcends this role by directly addressing his nineteenth-century audience as well as audiences of all times and mores. Significantly, Steele’s reasoning now emphasizes empathy and love, rather than wit and satire, as the socially progressive forces combating prejudice, even if hatred (often inspiring satire) may be a closer associate of truth: STEELE. [pointing to Savage’s body and Lady Macclesfield] Times and mores, see your victims! O that the fetters of prejudice would break, that with fuller breaths our hearts might beat more boldly! Have faith in the God who speaks from within you! For in love even error is better than in hatred the truth!”73

The middle-class and aristocratic actors from the eighteenth-century public stage have been joined by the nineteenth-century underclass, who are not yet acting on the stage of the “bourgeois public sphere,” but have entered Gutzkow’s theatrical space. A setting showing the living conditions of the poor was innovative in 1839, and satire directed against impoverished artisans would have been totally inappropriate. The ending of Richard Savage pre-presents “actors” who will soon present themselves “in reality” in the public arena of the 1840s. Habermas saw the “classic” public sphere based on the circulation of knowledge and informed opinion to be in sharp decline from the moment mass media began to appear in the 1830s, a view he has since modified. In his foreword of 1990 he concedes that there is “capacity for resistance” and “critical potential” even within a “mass public,” and even (or particularly) in an age that has made the borders between high and low culture, as well as between information and entertainment, permeable.74 This correction could be further modified by arguing that, as far as the breaking down of borders between belles lettres and discursive writing is concerned, the period of the 1830s and beyond actually was a heyday of reasoning public discourse. The witty, earnest man of letters is a secret agent in the process, acting himself as a nameless player.

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Notes 1. He changed his name to Bulwer Lytton after inheriting the family estate in 1843 and is now chiefly remembered as the author of The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). 2. I have shown elsewhere that the period’s rapid social and political change was dealt with in quasi-sociological terms by a vast body of writing, notably urban sketches. See Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century. European Journalism and its ‘Physiologies’, 1830–50 (Basingstoke, UK, 2007). 3. The Tatler: By Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., in The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff [by Richard Steele] (London, 1733), 1: before p. 1. 4. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1989), 5– 14. 5. Impeached for treason because of his Jacobite activities by the new king, George I, the former foreign secretary Bolingbroke fled to France in 1714 and only returned to England after receiving a royal pardon in 1725, without, however, regaining his seat in the House of Lords. 6. Edward Bulwer Lytton, “Note to the Present Edition,” in Devereux (London, 1852), v. 7. “[W]ho shall tell what lurks, dark and fearful, and ever vigilant, below!” Edward Bulwer Lytton, Devereux (London, 1862), book 4, end of chap. 1, p. 151. All page numbers refer to this edition, but book and chapter are also mentioned for readers of different editions. 8. Ibid., book 6, chap. 3, p. 248. 9. Ibid., beginning of book 5, p. 204. 10. Ibid., p. 205. 11. The Right Hon. Lord Lytton, Pelham, or Adventures of a Gentleman (London, n.d.), 163. 12. Bulwer Lytton, Devereux, book 6, chap. 2, p. 240: “I now surrendered myself to a nobler philosophy than in crowds and cities I had hitherto known. I no longer satirised—I inquired; I no longer derided—I examined.” 13. See the dedication to a statesman “An Sir Ralph ****,” signed by “E.L.B.” (the alleged Edward Lytton Bulwer), in Karl Gutzkow, Die Zeitgenossen: Ihre Schicksale, ihre Tendenzen, ihre großen Charaktere, in Gutzkows Werke und Briefe: Kommentierte Digitale Gesamtausgabe, Schriften zur Politik und Gesellschaft, vol. 3, edited by Martina Lauster (Münster, 2008). 14. First published in 1744, this biography was then included in Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1779–81). 15. Richard Holmes, Dr Johnson & Mr Savage (London, 1994), 121. 16. The first version of the play had Savage turn out not to be Lady Macclesfield’s son. This ending was apparently necessary due to censorship. It would have been seen as inappropriate to put on stage a noblewoman who had borne a child out of wedlock. See the author’s foreword to ‘“Richard Savage oder Der Sohn einer Mutter: Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen,” in Gutzkows Werke: Auswahl in zwölf Teilen, edited by Reinhold Gensel (Berlin, [1910?]), Erster Teil, 91–155. All page numbers refer to this edition, but Act and Scene are also mentioned for readers of different editions. The play, based on the first book edition, has meanwhile appeared as part of the internet edition of Gutzkows Werke und Briefe (www.gutzkow.de) and in print (Münster, 2009). 17. For example, Savage in Gutzkow’s play faces deportation to Australia for murder, and to this part of the globe he prefers even “the foul atmosphere of Birmingham and

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18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

Manchester” and the “coal smoke in the factories” (Karl Gutzkow, Richard Savage, act 3, scene 2.3, p. 128). “Lustspiele, Savage! Feine gesellschaftliche Bezüge, satirische Gemälde des Lebens der höhern Stände, Ironien auf die Advokaten, auf die Ärzte, auf die Priester—das ist ein Feld, Savage; Witz, Witz, Witz!”; Gutzkow, Richard Savage, act 3, scene 2.4, p. 131. Martina Lauster, “The Gentleman Ideal from Lichtenberg to Hofmannsthal,” in German Literature, History, and the Nation, eds. Christian J. Emden and David Midgley (Oxford, 2004), 151–54. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 29. Bulwer Lytton, Devereux, book 2, chap. 3, p. 63. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 32. Unlike his real-life model, Gutzkow’s Savage kills a haughty aristocrat, a relative of Lady Macclesfield, during an argument after the performance of his Overbury at Drury Lane. Gutzkow, Richard Savage, act 3, scene 1.2, pp. 124 and 126. Ibid., act 2, scene 3.6, p. 121. In psychological terms, as a struggle for motherly affection, it is portrayed more sympathetically, albeit also as typical of the overemotional Savage. Steele calls him “dieser liebenswürdige, aber tolle Schwärmer” (Ibid., act 2, scene 1.2, p. 112). Ibid., act 2, scene 2.3, p. 115. Holmes, Dr Johnson & Mr Savage, 68 (on Overbury) and 133–34 (on The Bastard). Gutzkow, Richard Savage, act 3, scene 2.4, p. 131. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 49. Ibid. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 49. “Meine Phantasie kann nichts mehr zaubern, da ihr alles geboten wird; mein Gemüt findet keinen dunkeln Winkel, wo alles von Lichtern widerstrahlt”; Gutzkow, Richard Savage, act 4, scene 1.3, p. 140. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 49. Bulwer Lytton, Devereux, book 4, chap. 2, p. 151. Looking back on his life, Devereux realizes: “Thus, by the finest, but the strongest, meshes, had the thread of my political honours been woven with that of my private afflictions” (Ibid., book 6, chap. 5, p. 277). During his exile, Bolingbroke was furthering the cause of the “Chevalier” or “Old Pretender,” James Francis Edward Stuart (who had been brought up in France under the protection of Louis XIV), against the new Hanoverian king George I. Bulwer Lytton, Devereux, book 4, chap. 7, p. 183. See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 60: “Then under George I began the dominance of the Whigs that was to last for decades. But it was not the Whigs who, purchasing the London Journal in 1722 (the most important and widely read journal at that time), created political journalism in the grand style; this was the work of the Tories who now constituted themselves as the opposition under Bolingbroke. … In the summer of 1726, inspired by Bolingbroke, there appeared as the ‘long opposition’s’ literary prelude three pieces satirizing the times: Swift’s Gulliver, Pope’s Dunciad, and Gay’s Fables. In November of the same year Bolingbroke brought out the first issue of the Craftsman, the publicist platform of the opposition until the editor’s emigration to France in 1735. With this journal, followed by the

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41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

Gentleman’s Magazine, the press was for the first time established as a genuinely critical organ of a public engaged in critical political debate: as the fourth estate.” Bulwer Lytton, Devereux, book 4, chap. 10, p. 195. Ibid., book 4, chap. 10, 197–200. This is very reminiscent of the brawl involving the real-life Richard Savage. It underlines Bulwer’s portrait of the French regent, a notorious bon viveur with literary and artistic inclinations, as a man normally encountered without a royal mask. Bulwer Lytton, Devereux, book 4, chap. 9, p. 194. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 31. Henry Smith Williams, ed., The Historians’ History of the World: A Comprehensive Narrative of the Rise and Development of Nations as Recorded by the Great Writers of All Ages, vol. 12, France, 1715–1815 (London, 1908), 24. Bulwer Lytton, Devereux, book 4, chap. 10, p. 195. Ibid., book 5, chap. 4, p. 215. Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), and the review by Asa Briggs, “From Raffishness to Respectability,” Times Higher Education Supplement, 26 January 2007, 29. James J. Sheehan, German History 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989), 588–653. These include concealed identities, forged papers, secret doorways, a mysterious Spanish don, his angelic daughter who is too perfect for this world and, as Devereux’s wife, is killed, a mad Italian monk turning out to be Devereux’s brother who was believed dead, etc. Bulwer Lytton, Devereux, book 4, chap. 1, p. 150. Catholic emancipation in Britain saw its breakthrough in the Catholic Relief Act of April 1829. Bulwer Lytton, Devereux, book 4, chap. 1, p. 151. Ibid., book 6, chap. 2, p. 240. Ibid., book 3, chap. 4, p. 126. Ibid., book 3, chap. 4, pp. 125 and 127. The currency of Diogenes as a moralist in the sociological literature of the period can also be gleaned from the title of one the most influential collections of Parisian city sketches, Etienne Jouy’s L’Hermite de la Chaussée d’Antin, ou, observations sur les usages parisiens au commencement du XIXe siècle (1812–14). The Spectator; with a Biographical and Critical Preface and Explanatory Notes (London, 1860), 1:3. All further references are to this edition. Ibid., 1:2. John Pelzer and Linda Pelzer, “Coffee Houses in Augustan London,” History Today 32 (October 1982): 44. The Spectator, 1:4–9. Ibid., 1:8. Ibid., 1:3. This despite the fact that nineteenth-century critics warned against the assumption of particular individuals behind The Spectator’s characters. See editor’s note in The Spectator, 1:4–5. Bulwer Lytton, Devereux, book 2, chap. 3, p. 63. When asked what the mysterious editor of the new journal, The Spectator, has given as his name, Steele replies: “Græci carent ablativo—Itali dativo—Ego nominativo” (Bulwer Lytton, Devereux, book 2, chap. 3, 64). This is dutifully translated in a footnote by the fictitious editor of Devereux: “The Greeks want [lack] an ablative—the Italians a dative—I a nominative.”

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68. Gutzkow, Richard Savage, act 2, scene 1.2, p. 112. LORD TYRCONNEL. Sie können das dulden, Sie, Steele, der die Literatur des Tags erfunden hat, Sie, Steele, der jene olympischen Blitze der öffentlichen Meinung schmiedete, die zerschmetternd aus Ihrer Hand in den Lug und Trug unserer verdorbenen Sitten und Meinungen niederfahren? STEELE. Mylord! Je verheerender meine Waffe ist, desto vorsichtiger muß man mit ihr umgehen. Die öffentliche Meinung ist nicht immer die richtende Themis, sondern weit öfter eine Harpyie, die nichts wieder herausgibt, was sie einmal zerrissen hat. Beschuldigt sie einmal die Tugend eines Engels, der Himmel selbst kann ihn nicht wieder rein waschen. Tausend Rechtfertigungen, tausend Widerlegungen—immer bleibt etwas hängen. 69. “Ein Akteur, der mit seinem Kostüm auf die Straße rennt und den Brutus ganz in Wirklichkeit spielt”; Ibid. 70. “daß in dieser Welt keine Wahrheit mehr denkbar ist, zu der nicht hinten—eine, wenn auch noch so kleine, versteckte Hühnerleiter des Interesses führt”; Ibid., act 2, scene 1.2, p. 114. 71. Ibid., act 2, scene 3.6. 72. “geboren in der Stille, heimlich, mit bösem Gewissen der Eltern, … schimpflich wie ein Sprachfehler, über den man rot wird, eine Null, die der Knabe beim Rechnen vorn statt hinten ansetzt”; Ibid., act 5, scene 3, p. 151. 73. “Zeiten und Sitten, seht eure Opfer! O spränge doch die Fessel jedes Vorurteils, daß mit dem vollern Atemzuge der Brust die Herzen mutiger zu schlagen wagten … ! Glaubt dem Gott, der aus euerm Innern spricht! Denn in der Liebe ist selbst der Irrtum besser als im Haß die Wahrheit!”; Ibid., act 5, scene 5, p. 155. 74. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 30.

Chapter 8

KARL KRAUS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY VIENNA Edward Timms



The public sphere—die Öffentlichkeit—is one of the central themes explored in Karl Kraus’s magazine Die Fackel (The Torch), from its foundation in Vienna in April 1899 until his death in June 1936.1 An electronic word search reveals that the word Öffentlichkeit occurs in Die Fackel no less than 597 times, and there are 2,823 instances of his use of the adjective öffentlich.2 Kraus had good reason to be skeptical about the liberal concept of “public opinion,” or öffentliche Meinung; the pervasive focus of his satire is on forms of false consciousness generated by the media on behalf of powerful interest groups and dominant ideologies. Thus, in my two-volume study Karl Kraus—Apocalyptic Satirist, I emphasized his critique of propaganda and the press.3 To illuminate his changing conception of the field of cultural production, this chapter will focus on a series of interlocking themes: the public sphere and its integrative nexus; the forces of the street and the newspaper landscape; and finally the politicization of culture and the construction of counterfeit reality.

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The Nexus of the Public Sphere My research on the historical context of Kraus’s writings leads me to suggest that in Vienna around 1900 the public sphere can be pictured as a group of interacting political and social spaces (Figure 8.1). The diagram has a top-down axis, reflecting the authoritarian political structure. Control in the late Habsburg monarchy was exerted from above in a traditional and rather autocratic manner: not by parliament (which was virtually paralyzed by the nationalities conflict) but by the cabinet and the imperial bureaucracy, acting under the authority of the emperor. However, this anachronistic system was by no means moribund. For the traditional political structure coexisted with dynamically modern social institutions: commercial (on the left-hand side) and cultural (on the right). Hence the arrows in the diagram run in both directions: top-

Figure 8.1

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down, as the traditional hierarchy of autocrats and mandarins attempted to maintain political control; but also bottom-up, as journalists, authors and lawyers, stockbrokers and entrepreneurs, theater directors and publishers competed to extend their spheres of influence and increase their market share. On the one hand, given the lack of an effective parliament, newspaper editors exerted a disproportionately powerful influence. On the other, the exceptional prestige enjoyed by culture and the arts meant that theater directors could make significant public interventions. The model in Figure 8.1 could doubtless be applied, with variations, to other societies in the throes of modernization. But what is specifically Viennese is the focal point at the center, represented by my question mark—the forum where opinion makers could meet, which I would call the “integrative nexus.” It is not hard to guess what that question mark represents. Traditionalists might claim that it should be either the Catholic Church or the Austro-Hungarian army, both of which exerted a disproportionate influence on public affairs. In a diagram of the traditional power structure, both the army and the Church certainly would have their place, alongside the state bureaucracy. But my model represents not those closed and autocratic institutions, but the more open public spaces of modernity, as conceived by Jürgen Habermas in his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). Readers of Habermas will recall that his account of eighteenth-century European cultural formations assigns special significance to coffeehouses. Those semipublic spaces, he argued, provided a forum for the emergence of a bourgeois public dedicated to enlightened discussion. Habermas may be unduly schematic in his account of the emergence of new social forces. The London coffeehouses frequented by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift generated a culture of debate on a different scale from the urban centers of eighteenth-century Germany, where the courts of the petty principalities remained the dominant factor. But, in principle, he was surely right to highlight the emancipatory function of the coffeehouse, even if he was premature in his chronology. If there was one city culture in which coffee-houses undoubtedly played a defining role, it was Vienna around 1900. This was the space where members of all segments of polite society could meet informally and exchange ideas. It is thus the coffeehouse circles that form the center of the diagram in Figure 8.2. The discursive space created by the coffeehouse held the potential for the emergence of new forms of antiestablishment culture, and the backwardness of Habsburg political institutions made this discursive space all the more significant.

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Figure 8.2

In the first volume of Karl Kraus—Apocalyptic Satirist, the role of the coffeehouse was dealt with rather briefly. “By the end of the nineteenth century,” I observed, “the tradition of wit had entered the currency of social intercourse, with the coffee-house as the exchange for well-worn anecdotes and new-minted puns.” Memoirs of the period, like those of the conductor Bruno Walter, were cited to confirm “the part played by the Viennese coffee-house in the stimulation of conversational genius.” I went on to argue that the great strength of the Viennese avant-garde lay in its internal organization. Each of the dominant personalities gathered around him a circle of adepts: Otto Wagner’s school of radical architects, Theodor Herzl’s Zionists and Victor Adler’s Social Democrats, Freud’s Psychoanalytic Association and Schnitzler’s more loosely knit circle of literary acquaintances. In many cases, I observed, “these were literally circles—groups of people meeting round a table at a particular

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time (Freud’s Wednesday evenings) in a specific place (Kraus’s table at the Café Central).”4 When, in my second volume, the focus switched to the 1920s, the role of the Vienna circles was redefined in terms of a more politicized field of cultural production. Kraus was at the height of his fame, having gained an international reputation through the subversively antiwar satires published in Die Fackel during the years 1914–1918, followed in 1919 by the first edition of his compelling documentary drama, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind). By this date the Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed and Vienna was merely the capital of a small rump republic. The government was no longer controlled by Habsburg autocrats, but by elected politicians forming parliamentary coalitions. Republican institutions were far more democratic, but politics had become more polarized, as a result of the confrontation between the reformist program of the Social Democrats, led by Otto Bauer, and the hostile responses of the Christian Social Party under the leadership of the Catholic prelate, Ignaz Seipel. Moreover, the balance of power was decisively altered by a mobilization of the forces at the base of my diagram—the forces of the street.

The Forces of the Street and the Newspaper Landscape In Kraus’s writings before the First World War, the street was pictured as a backdrop for the flaneur, responding impressionistically to the sights of the city as he strolls to the coffeehouse or the theater. But during the 1920s his perspective changed, as the streets of European cities became a battleground between competing factions. Traditionally, governments had tended to take the key decisions behind closed doors, and the behavior of crowds was carefully regulated. They were permitted to mass on the streets as spectators for royal processions or participants in orderly demonstrations, but not to set the political agenda. By 1900, however, the mobilization of crowds was becoming a significant factor, culminating in the patriotic fervor of 1914. The conduct of the crowds in Berlin and other German cities at the outbreak of war has received increasing attention from political historians, offering a differentiated picture of war euphoria. The demonstrations in Berlin during the weekend of 25–26 July, in response to the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, were led by patriotic students and reinforced by well-established national rituals. The patriotic fervor may have appeared spontaneous, but was actually being orchestrated by the government. In response to the surge of patriotism, the police were instructed by the gov-

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ernment not to enforce the law prohibiting unauthorized public demonstrations. The war enthusiasm was thus the product of a combination of factors: the unwritten script of shared patriotic assumptions, the hidden hand of the government—and above all the sensational headlines in the newspapers, which rushed special editions onto the streets and into the hands of the waiting crowds.5 After the collapse of 1918, the return of thousands of war veterans created a mood of uncontrollable anarchy, and the boulevards of Berlin and Vienna, originally designed for imperial pageants and military cavalcades, became a battleground for competing factions. Throughout the interwar period there were demonstrations on the Vienna Ringstrasse and mass rallies on the Heldenplatz, culminating in Hitler’s triumphal return in 1938. In other urban centers, too, there were continuous territorial battles between socialists defending their “strongholds” and right-wing formations determined to reclaim their “right to the streets” through aggressive counterdemonstrations.6 In Germany, too, patriotic rallies by right-wing pressure groups “claimed the public spaces that had once been the domain of Social Democrats,” and the combined activities of middleclass cultural societies and militant veterans groups “provided cover for increasingly militant antiparliamentary politics.”7 The struggle was waged throughout the 1920s by a proliferation of political militias, each with its own marching songs. Militant political action displaced the traditional association of the street with poverty and prostitution, reflecting a crucial historical transformation. The street, as Kraus ruefully observed in January 1926, now belonged “to those shouting slogans.”8 He was among the first to capture this transformation in literary form. Each act of Die letzten Tage der Menschheit begins with crowds on the boulevard, convulsed by the cries of news vendors. The street becomes a discursive space through a cacophony of competing media: placards advertising political programs or commercial products, newspapers announcing the latest sensation, marching tunes and popular songs, with newsreel cameras recording the urban frenzy. The early twentieth-century metropolis, as Kraus recognized, abounded in messages that passersby were expected to “read.” Newspapers provided indispensable guides to the “hectic rhythms of the metropolis,” so that “not to read the newspaper was to risk losing orientation.”9 Traditionally, especially in Austria, newspapers had been sold from decorous kiosks or delivered directly to the door, while relatively few were hawked on the streets. But in Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, the first voice we hear is a newsboy screaming: “Special Edition! Assassination of the Heir to the Throne!” The seismic shift of history portrayed in Die letzten Tage der Menschheit involved an inversion of the hierarchy of discourse. A series of ironic re-

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versals exposes the new systems of communication that substitute the slogans of the street for the discriminations of the academy. The Antichrist sits in the editorial office, dictating tomorrow’s leading article, but his minions are everywhere: from reporters fabricating patriotic interviews to officials doctoring the latest communiqué from the front. Language loses its rapport with reality, and as the discrepancies between words and actions approach breaking point, the news vendors become frenzied maenads, racing up and down the streets uttering incomprehensible screams. Central to Kraus’s critique of the public sphere is this convergence between the politics of the street and the power of the press. Looking back over his career in February 1929, Kraus used emphatic type to proclaim that in Austria for the past thirty years “no other power has ever ruled except the press.”10 This is one of those Viennese hyperboles that, although actually untrue, have generated a wealth of insight—comparable to Sigmund Freud’s dictum that all dreams are wish fulfillments, Adolf Loos’s association of ornament with crime, Weininger’s claim that everyone is bisexual, or Friedrich August von Hayek’s view of Austrian-style socialism as the road to serfdom. Such assertions are untenable, but as Ludwig Wittgenstein explained in a comment on Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903): “The greatness lies in that with which we disagree. It is his enormous mistake that is great.”11 Kraus’s claim that no power had ruled in Austria except the press was clearly an overstatement, as the government generally held the upper hand in its dealings with editors, manipulating the press for its own purposes. But his media criticism has wider implications. The early twentieth century was the great age of the newspaper press, as mass literacy endowed the printed word with unprecedented power. Newspaper production was revolutionized by rotary presses and linotype composing machines, while modern roads and railways, together with the telephone, telegram, and teleprinter, were transforming communications. In western Europe, democratic institutions, social reforms, and scientific discoveries seemed to be laying the foundations for a new era in the history of mankind. But it was also a period of intense imperial rivalries, backed by highly trained forces and sophisticated armaments industries. Given the precarious international situation, it was possible at moments of crisis for journalists to tip the balance between war and peace. Wars were good for newspaper sales, and wealthy proprietors like William Randolph Hearst and Lord Northcliffe were imperialists capable of pressurizing governments into declarations of war. Almost alone in the period before the First World War, Kraus saw the press as an apocalyptic threat. In number after number of Die Fackel he would reprint examples of newspaper propaganda and expose their fal-

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sification of reality. Where the editorials of the leading Austrian daily, the Neue Freie Presse, were celebrating the advances of German culture and European civilization, he would expose the realities of conflict and suffering. He had a gift for dissecting the cliché-ridden language of his contemporaries. Sonorous metaphors like “standing shoulder to shoulder” evolved into satirical leitmotifs, culminating in his indictment of the anachronistic ideals that sustained the Central Powers during the First World War. His own style, by contrast, was enlivened by an aphoristic wit and moral imagination that left his readers uncertain whether to laugh or cry. In 1914 the warmongers had their way. Indeed, the brainwashing that had occurred before the First World War was insignificant compared with the immense propaganda apparatus set up in every belligerent country during the war. The telegram, Kraus shrewdly observed, is “an instrument of war like the grenade.”12 In order to make the thousands of casualties acceptable, the public was saturated with propaganda about the ethical purpose of the war and the glory of dying for one’s country. When Kraus argued in November 1914 that people’s minds had been numbed by clichés, he had one slogan especially in mind: “dying a hero’s death” (Heldentod). Through decades of practice, he argued, “the newspaper reporter has brought us to that degree of impoverishment of the imagination which makes it possible for us to fight a war of annihilation against ourselves.” A more truthful use of language would reveal the “hero’s death as cruel destiny.”13 “When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty,” according to a phrase attributed to Senator Hiram Johnson. In 1928 this was the motto chosen by Arthur Ponsonby for his book Falsehood in War-Time.14 Kraus had formulated the same insight considerably earlier and with greater sophistication. “How is the world governed and made to fight wars?” he asked in an aphorism in autumn 1915. “Diplomats tell lies to journalists and believe them when they see them in print.”15 This introduced a subtle conception of media-induced false memory: the hypnotic power of repetition led politicians to believe the falsehoods they had put into circulation. The result was a self-generating system of mendacity with disastrous consequences. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the influence of Viennese dailies like the Neue Freie Presse was severely reduced, and by the mid-1920s broadcasting provided a counterweight. But Kraus was unrelenting in his critical scrutiny of what he called “the jungle of press freedom,” attacking the abuses of journalism across a broad spectrum.16 To illustrate the reshaping of the Austrian public sphere in this period, the second volume of Karl Kraus—Apocalyptic Satirist includes a diagram of the “Vienna Newspaper Landscape in the mid-1920s” (Figure 8.3). This

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Figure 8.3

diagram is framed by the left-right political spectrum. Almost all of the Vienna daily papers were ideologically committed, from the socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung to the clerical Reichspost, with the pro-Nazi Deutsch-Österreichische Tageszeitung becoming increasingly vocal toward the end of the decade. In Figure 8.3, each paper is assigned a circle whose size reflects its circulation, incorporating the name of the editor. The diagram reflects the position in the mid-1920s, and the leading dailies are located on a horizontal axis from (socialist) left to (conservative) right, adjusted vertically from a baseline of democratic liberalism to the extremes of antidemocratic communism (top left) and protofascist nationalism (top right). The increasingly strident anti-Semitism of völkisch groups (on the antidemocratic right) had the effect of strengthening the Zionist group associated with Robert Stricker’s Wiener Morgenzeitung (and its successor Die Neue Welt). The old-established Wiener Zeitung, official organ of the Austrian government, remained a significant factor, reflecting the policies of the right-wing coalitions that formed the government from October 1920 onward. The majority of Austrian newspapers in this period can be categorized either as “party” publications (Parteipresse) or as “ideological” (Gesinnungspresse). The large-circulation Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung was

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unusual in being primarily market-oriented and not supporting any specific political party. 17 Anyone who has studied files of the Reichspost, the Wiener Stimmen, and the Deutsch-Österreichische Tageszeitung will understand why Kraus was so vehement in his denunciations of the right-wing press. Day after day they subjected their readers to a barrage of antidemocratic, antisocialist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic arguments and images. Mocking the crudity of this conservative “Christian” journalism, so much less slick than the more liberal “Jewish” competition, Kraus recognized that it amounted to an incitement to violence. This is summed up in a phrase that forms a leitmotif in his satire of right-wing journalism, “Rrrtsch obidraht!” an expletive that conveys the thrill experienced by Austrian backwoodsmen at the moment of wringing the neck of some helpless creature that has been hunted down. Kraus associated the spine-chilling jocularity of “Rrrtsch obidraht!” with a fanatically anti-Semitic humorist named Karl Paumgarten, who wrote for the humorous magazine Die Muskete under various pseudonyms. Kraus believed that there could be no equivalent for this gruesome expression in any other language. However, a right-wing British newspaper caught the same tone of facetious chauvinism in its coverage of the Falklands War in May 1982, gloating over the sinking of the Argentinean battle cruiser Belgrano, in which over three hundred men lost their lives, with the banner headline “GOTCHA!”18

The Politicization of Culture and the Construction of Counterfeit Reality It was not only the newspaper press that became more highly politicized in the interwar period. A similar polarization occurred among the intellectuals, especially after the Social Democrats were voted into power in what became known as “Red Vienna.” One by one, the individualists emerged from their isolation, committing themselves to social causes. The most innovative spirits, from Kraus and Arnold Schönberg to Freud and Arthur Schnitzler, strove to maintain their independence, but they could not ignore the pioneering achievements of municipal socialism. From the very beginning the Social Democratic Party had seen education and science as the means of creating a new world order. Antiauthoritarian forms of schooling were introduced by Otto Glöckel, while there was a renewed interest in child development, led by the psychologists Charlotte and Karl Bühler. “Education is power” became the motto of the Austrian labor movement, and Max Adler, the leading theoretician of Austro-Marxism, saw culture as the key to the creation of a revolutionary working class.

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This resulted in an alliance between workers, party officials, and reformminded intellectuals, coordinated by the Social Democratic Kunststelle under the direction of the musicologist David Josef Bach. The intellectual climate in Red Vienna was very different from that in the capital of the declining Habsburg empire. Around 1910, cultural innovation had unfolded within a series of inward-looking circles, each centered on a powerful personality. The cross-fertilization between the different groups generated exceptional creative energy, comparable to that of a condensed system of microcircuits. But those earlier Viennese circles were only marginally affected by the political events of the day.19 In postwar Vienna the situation was transformed. For example, the Psychoanalytic Association split into several subgroups, the most socially committed being the followers of Alfred Adler, who supported educational projects and set up counseling centers in the proletarian suburbs. More formally constituted groups were required to register under the Law of Association, and no less than 1,500 such Vereine were linked to the Social Democratic Party, giving its members, as Joseph Buttinger recalls, a sense of collective purpose and cohesive identity.20 Kraus insisted that he did “not feel particularly close to the socialist cultural ideal.”21 But he recognized the need for radical reforms in the fields of welfare, medical care, and education. Thus in any map of the cultural field, the sphere of influence of Die Fackel intersects with that of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and the party’s cultural center, the Kunststelle. Moreover, the convergence of antisocialism with anti-Semitism and antimodernism prompted reactionaries to fantasize about a Jewish takeover of Austrian culture. Thus it was difficult to stand aloof from the ideological struggle between Catholicism and socialism, communism and fascism, as the “field of cultural production,” to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, became inextricably involved with the “field of power.”22 Thus culture of Vienna during the 1920s is pictured in my second volume as a network of circles suspended between competing ideological poles (Figure 8.4). The network is remarkable not only for its complexity, but for the way certain groups combined intellectual innovation with political commitment. The philosophers who met in the Boltzmanngasse under the aegis of Moritz Schlick, internationally known as the Vienna Circle, made a public impact through the educational work of Otto Neurath. In 1925, with the support of the municipality of Vienna, Neurath founded the Museum of Economy and Society, developing innovative techniques of visual education. Even atonal composers attempted to reach out to working-class audiences. The concerts organized between February 1919 and December 1921 by Schönberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances

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Figure 8.4

were intended for an elite, but his collaborator Anton von Webern included avant-garde compositions in the programs of workers’ symphony concerts and the Workers’ Choir. Even the young Karl Popper was a socialist for a time, working as a volunteer in Alfred Adler’s child guidance clinics, as well as attending Schönberg’s Private Musical Performances and immersing himself in the ideas of the Vienna Circle.23 This thriving culture was sustained by a network of small publishers, some of which also engaged in the ideological struggle. Thus the avant-garde reached out to a wider public, creating a counterculture that challenged the reactionary values of Catholicism and German nationalism. Interwar Vienna remained a cosmopolitan city with intellectual life centered in the coffeehouses, still forming (in Habermas’s sense) a public sphere free of government control and conducive to rational debate. This was a milieu that inspired witty apercus and incisively condensed forms of writing, from the polished essays of Alfred Polgar to the satirical glosses of Kraus.24 The Café Herrenhof, favorite haunt of the Expressionist generation, formed a hub for cultural gossip and artistic innovation. Even a more conservative author such as Heimito von Doderer was continuously in and out of coffeehouses, as we know from his diaries, debating with friends like the painter Paris Gütersloh and reading the latest liter-

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ary magazines. Where members of the Berlin cultural elite, such as Count Harry Kessler, liked to meet over breakfast, Kraus’s circle would gather in the Café Parsifal at nightfall to dissect the latest news.25 Habitués of the coffeehouse could read not only the Austrian papers, but also the Prager Tagblatt, the Pester Lloyd, or the Czernowitzer Morgenzeitung. In cultural terms, as Kraus’s friend Friedrich Torberg has argued, the multinational heritage continued to flourish, with the coffeehouses at the vortex of a thriving system of communication.26 Compared with prewar Vienna, however, the situation had become dangerously polarized, as the left-right axis of Figure 8.4 suggests. The success of the Social Democrats in mobilizing progressive intellectuals provoked a backlash, as the Christian Social Party strengthened its own institutions in order to resist the advance of socialism. There were over a thousand youth groups associated with the Imperial Federation of Catholic German Youth of Austria, an organization created by the anti-Semites Anton Orel and Leopold Kunschak.27 The Catholics were less effectively organized in Vienna than in the Austrian provinces, but their control of universities, state theaters, and radio enabled them to mobilize writers and thinkers on the conservative side. During the 1920s a number of notable figures aligned themselves with the conservative cause, including Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt through their productions at the Salzburg Festival, Anton Wildgans as Director of the Burgtheater, Franz Werfel, who gravitated toward Catholicism under the influence of Alma Mahler, and Richard von Kralik through his Grail Fraternity. Kralik’s villa in Döbling became the scene of a regular Tuesday evening salon, attended by right-wing Catholics like Max Mell and Hermann Bahr.28 The appointment of Richard Strauss as director of the Vienna Opera in 1919 gave a distinctly conservative flavor to state-subsidized musical culture. Moreover, the Catholic faction had its own Kunststelle, directed by Hans Brecˇ ka, cultural editor of the right-wing Reichspost. Although initially less successful than its socialist rival, this Kunststelle für christliche Volksbildung came into its own during the 1930s, when it promoted first the values of Christian Austria and then—still under Brecˇ ka’s leadership—those of Nazi Germany.29 The German nationalist camp had its own cultural organizations, labelled großdeutsch or deutschnational, represented by best-selling authors like Rudolf Bartsch and Karl Hans Strobl. They made no secret of their antidemocratic and anti-Semitic aims, as can be seen from the statutes of the Deutschvölkische Schutz- und Trutzbund. Announcing its program in the Deutschösterreichische Tageszeitung in January 1922, the Trutzbund proclaimed the ideal of German racial purity, insisting on its members avoiding Jewish shops and never consulting a Jewish doctor. Nationalistic gymnas-

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tic clubs in Austria were even more determined than those in Germany to exclude Jews from membership, since no Jew could truly be a “German.”30 These organizations, which at certain points overlapped with those of the Christian Social Party, provided the primary conduits for popular antiSemitism. No less than a thousand deutschvölkisch clubs and associations existed in Austria in 1933, according to a contemporary survey.31 Even the internationally renowned Alpine Club did its best to exclude Jews and bar them from its mountain refuges. The government was precluded by the Treaty of Saint Germain from discriminating against minorities, but this restriction did not apply to registered clubs and societies, many of which, following the example of the Austrian student corporations of the 1890s, proudly incorporated anti-Semitic aims in their statutes. Within this differentiated model of the evolving public sphere we can extend our focus on Kraus’s media criticism, taking account of the growing influence of völkisch ideas. A number of studies, including the recent book by Jacques Bouveresse, have dealt with the early phases of his campaign around 1900, when the hollow rhetoric of liberal journalism formed his main target.32 Far more significant, in my view, is his critique of patriotic propaganda in the First World War period, analyzed in the first volume of Karl Kraus—Apocalyptic Satirist. In autumn 1914, he deconstructed the ubiquitous war euphoria in the ironically titled polemic “In This Time of Greatness.” As the propaganda machine swung into action in every belligerent country, he was duly skeptical about anti-German propaganda, especially the reports of German atrocities. The press, in his view, was an “international disgrace.”33 But his main task was to expose the falsifications emanating from German and Austrian sources. The second volume concentrated on the interwar period, stressing the paradigmatic value of Kraus’s critique of militarism and the media. The issues he raised about the control of public space have an enduring significance, not least his analysis of “counterfeit” or (as we might now say) “virtual” reality. His most subtle satire focuses on the less obvious corruptions of public discourse through the hidden persuaders: what he calls Phrasen—slogans and clichés. Looking back in February 1929, he recalled that his essential idea had been to identify the war as the “unleashing of prefabricated clichés.” Through this process of brainwashing, the press had become “the lethal organization of moral and intellectual irresponsibility, itself creating events.”34 The greatest damage, he claims, is done by the journalistic corruption of language, especially by clichés. Are clichés really so destructive? There are two sides to this argument. From the perspective of sociolinguistics, clichés may have a constructive function. They promote cohesion in an unstable world. During periods of rapid modernization, we are reminded, clichés “gain in importance as fixed

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points of orientation”—“reified chunks of past experiences” that help to fill the “institutional void.”35 They organize experience into predigested segments, encouraging predictable and conformist modes of behavior. Society could hardly function without a linguistic safety net of this kind, with nodal points formed by proverbs like “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Such expressions draw on a homely practical wisdom to establish links between the domestic and the public sphere—even politicians may require a “new broom.” Because Kraus regarded language as the repository out of which ideas arise, we might have expected him to be less hostile toward proverbial expressions. But he draws a distinction between verbally sensitive creativity and seductive platitudes. Wars occur because irresponsible politicians “can claim to represent the will of a nation which they have first intoxicated with clichés.”36 This would not be possible without the inherent capacity of clichés to promote patterns of collective thinking that are remote from the realities of political action. Kraus’s most compelling example, as noted above, is the phrase “standing shoulder to shoulder.” This is cited in Die Fackel more than a hundred times.37 The politician who proclaims that Austria and Germany—or indeed Britain and the United States—should stand shoulder to shoulder, fails on almost every count. This is not simply a cliché but a political slogan, using the tone of schoolboy bravado to distract attention from the realities of modern warfare. During the 1920s there was a change of emphasis as Kraus highlighted not merely hollow clichés, but mind-numbing slogans. This kind of sloganizing was particularly evident in the campaign for Anschluss—the unification of Austria and Germany. Kraus opposed the Anschluss campaign, especially when it was promoted by people who claimed to be socialists, but were actually extremely nationalistic. The most important slogan was the one that was to dominate the political discourse of National Socialism: das deutsche Volk. The word Volk, with its populist, nationalistic, and racist implications, shows how a single word can shape a destructive worldview. During the 1920s it was already a key term in the discourse of national identity, undermining Austrian autonomy and preparing the ground for the annexation of Austria by the German Reich. This is the context for a prophetic article published in Die Fackel in May 1926. This article foreshadows the phenomenon of virtual reality in the sense of media-generated images that create a world of plausible delusion. Responding to press headlines about the possibility of a union between Austria and Germany, Kraus suggests that the hypnotic power of newsprint has created a “counterfeit reality” (vorgetäuschte Wirklichkeit). Newspapers in Berlin and Vienna, by quoting each other’s use of

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the concepts Volkstum, das deutsche Volk, and das Volk Deutschösterreichs, generate a circular discourse that has no basis in any actual political or diplomatic event. The Austrian chancellor is on a visit to Berlin, but he and his German counterpart have not yet met, let alone released a communiqué. To fill the vacuum, the press is recycling slogans deriving from “the latest beer-hall conversations of the two realms.” Kraus’s comments are incisive: The reality suggested and created by journalism, strangling the imagination and murdering men, thrives and expands on the basis of nothing except the principle of providing bold headlines for empty opinions. … [G]arbage of a counterfeit reality … “Never will the German-Austrian Volk tolerate a policy that gives the faintest impression that it might possibly be directed against the German Volk.” … A world is created out of headlines and sound-bites where nothing is real except lies. Through their emphasis on the word “Volk,” a tendentious concept implying both political solidarity and biological homogeneity, the media are creating a frame of reference that is essentially fictitious. The problem is that this gigantic apparatus has the capacity to turn non-events into “action and death.”38

Kraus’s critique of the relationship between militarism and the media forms one of the most prophetic elements in his account of the changing public sphere. A final example may be cited to illustrate its paradigmatic value: his analysis of the Friedjung Affair. In 1908 the neoconservative historian Heinrich Friedjung published an article in the leading daily newspaper, the Neue Freie Press, citing documents that supposedly proved that Austria was threatened by treason and conspiracy in the Balkans. The aim was to justify a preemptive attack on Serbia, but the war scare passed and Austria succeeded in annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina without the expected military conflict. A year later Friedjung was sued for libel by Croatian politicians whom he had falsely accused of treason. His documents were exposed as forgeries, fabricated by the Austrian Foreign Office, and he was publicly humiliated. This affair prompted Kraus to write his most important political analysis of the period before the First World War, “The Friedjung Case” (December 1909): Austria is the most willing victim of the media; it not only believes what it sees in print, but also believes the opposite, when it sees that in print, too. … “Austria is in danger!” they cried, and the people said “Whatever next!” Then they cried: “Austria was never in danger!” and the people said: “Whatever next!”39

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Sadly, as Kraus observed in this essay, the political lessons of the Friedjung Affair were ignored. We may turn, in conclusion, to the most recent parallel—the fabrications of the British and American governments in the run-up to the Second Gulf War. The evidence used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 has proved just as fraudulent as that cited by Friedjung. But no British or American court has succeeded in impeaching the political leaders responsible for an unreal scenario that has cost countless lives. The photographs of enemy bases, displayed by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, at the United Nations to justify the attack on Iraq, owed more to slick public relations than to reliable intelligence. We now know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein had no connection with al-Qaeda, let alone the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001. But for months on end these myths were so insistently repeated by the patriotic media that a majority of the British Parliament and the American Congress came to believe them. The Friedjung fiasco was being repeated, but it was now America that was allegedly “in danger” and Britain that was standing “shoulder to shoulder” with the dominant military power. At least there was a modicum of logic in the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia in August 1914, as the plot to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand really was hatched in Belgrade. But how can an act of terrorism committed by Saudis trained in Afghanistan justify the invasion of Iraq? This is counterfeit reality on a global scale. It is possible that Colin Powell, like Heinrich Friedjung almost a century earlier, actually came to believe the falsehoods that he was projecting into the public sphere. But that is precisely the paradox formulated in Kraus’s prophetic aphorism of November 1915. It deserves to be quoted again, as it provides a neat summary of my theme. “How is the world governed and made to fight wars? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and believe them when they see them in print.”40

Notes 1. Karl Krauss, ed., Die Fackel (Vienna, 1899–1936). 2. The complete, searchable text of Die Fackel, compiled by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, is available online at http://www.aac.ac.at/fackel. 3. Edward Timms, Karl Kraus—Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 1, Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, CT, 1986); and Edward Timms, Karl Kraus—Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 2, The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika (New Haven, CT, 2005).

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4. Timms, Karl Kraus—Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 1, 5–8. 5. For a different account of German crowd behavior in July and August 1914, see Jeffrey Verhey, ed., The Spirit of 1914 (Cambridge, 2000), 22–96. See also Alice Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848–1914 (Washington DC, 2000). 6. Alisa Douer, Wien Heldenplatz: Mythen und Massen 1848–1998, photographic documentation with texts in German and English (Vienna, 2000), and Charlie Jeffery, Social Democracy in the Austrian Provinces: Beyond Red Vienna (London, 1995), 32–34 and 67–69. 7. Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 106 and 171–72. 8. Kraus, Die Fackel, 712–16: 95. 9. Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 20. 10. Kraus, Die Fackel, 800–5: 22. 11. Ludwig Wittgenstein to G. E. Moore, 3 October 1931, in G. H. von Wright, ed., Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore (Oxford, 1974), 139. 12. Kraus, Die Fackel, 404: 12. 13. Kraus, Die Fackel, 404: 9–10. 14. Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time: Containing an Assortment of the Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War (London, 1928), 11. See also Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo (London, 2000). 15. Kraus, Die Fackel, 406–12: 106. 16. Timms, Karl Kraus—Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 2, chap. 5. 17. For further details, see Josef Seethaler and Gabriele Melischek, Demokratie und Identität: Zehn Jahre Republik in der Wiener Presse 1928 (Vienna, 1993); and Josef Seethaler and Gabriele Melischek, Die Wiener Tageszeitungen: Eine Dokumentation, vol. 3, 1918–1938 (Frankfurt am Main, 1992). 18. Robert Harris, GOTCHA! The Media, the Government and the Falklands Crisis (London, 1983), chap. 3. 19. Timms, Karl Kraus—Apocalyptic Satirist, vol. 1, 7–9. 20. Under the authoritarian regime of Engelbert Dollfuss, all these Social Democratic associations were banned. See Joseph Buttinger, Am Beispiel Österreichs: Ein geschichtlicher Beitrag zur Krise der sozialistischen Bewegung (Frankfurt am Main, 1972), 29–30. 21. Kraus, Die Fackel, 521–30: 62. 22. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge, 1993), 37–40. 23. Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (London, 1976), chaps. 8, 9, 11, and 16. 24. For a selection of these writings in English translation, see Harold B. Segel, trans. and ed., The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890–1938 (West Lafayette, IN, 1993). 25. For an account of one of Kessler’s breakfasts, including a discussion of foreign policy with Gustav Stresemann, see Harry Graf Kessler, Tagebücher, 1918–1937, ed. Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli, 3rd ed., rev. ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1961), 232. 26. Friedrich Torberg, Die Tante Jolesch oder der Untergang des Abendlandes in Anekdoten (Munich, 1975), 296. 27. Ludwig Reichold, “Die christlich inspirierten Jugendorganisationen in Österreich,” in Geistiges Leben im Österreich der Ersten Republik, eds. Isabella Ackerl and Rudolf Neck (Vienna, 1986), 313–30. 28. Judith Beniston, “Welttheater”: Hofmannsthal, Richard von Kralik, and the Revival of Catholic Drama in Austria, 1890–1934 (London, 1998), 195.

182 • Edward Timms

29. Judith Beniston, “Cultural Politics in the First Republic: Hans Brecˇ ka and the ‘Kunststelle für christliche Volksbildung,’” in Catholicism and Austrian Culture, eds. Ritchie Robertson and Judith Beniston (Edinburgh, 1999), 101–18. 30. Rudolf G. Ardelt, Zwischen Demokratie und Faschismus: Deutschnationales Gedankengut in Österreich, 1919–1930 (Vienna, 1972), 98–102. 31. See Karl Wache, ed., Deutscher Geist in Österreich: Ein Handbuch des völkischen Lebens der Ostmark (Vienna, 1933), 62. 32. Jacques Bouveresse, Schmock ou le triomphe du journalisme: La grande bataille de Karl Kraus (Paris, 2001). 33. Kraus, Die Fackel, 404: 11. 34. Ibid., 800–5: 23–25. 35. Anton C. Zijderveld, On Clichés: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity (London, 1979), 46–47. 36. Kraus, Die Fackel, 697–705: 113. 37. For a comprehensive picture of Kraus’s permutations on formulaic expressions, see Werner Welzig, ed., Wörterbuch der Redensarten zu der von Karl Kraus 1899 bis 1936 herausgegebenen Zeitschrift “Die Fackel” (Vienna, 1999). 38. Kraus, Die Fackel, 726–29: 59–61. 39. Ibid., 293: 1–2. 40. Ibid., 406–12: 106.

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CONTRIBUTORS



Nicholas Boyle is Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge. A Fellow of the British Academy, he is the author of several books, including the first two volumes of the award-winning intellectual biography, Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume 1, The Poetry of Desire (1749–1790) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume 2, Revolution and Renunciation (1790–1803) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). He is also the author of Who are We Now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), Sacred and Secular Scriptures. A Catholic Approach to Literature (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004; University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) and German Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Peter Burke is Professor Emeritus of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. He is the author of twentythree books on European cultural and social history as well as historical method, including, most recently: The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Polity Press, 1999); Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001); What is Cultural History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); History and Social Theory, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2005); Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); together with Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008); and A Social History of Knowledge, vol. 2: from the Encyclopedie to Wikipedia (2012).

Contributors • 201

Christian J. Emden is Associate Professor of German Studies at Rice University. A former Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, he works in the area of modern intellectual history, in particular cultural studies of science and the history of modern political thought. He is the author of Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), Walter Benjamins Archäologie der Moderne: Kulturwissenschaft um 1930 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), and Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). His current research is concerned with the visual culture of the natural sciences, Nietzsche’s naturalism, and he is working on a book about political realism in German thought since Kant. Martina Lauster is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on nineteenth-century German and European literature and is editor of a critical edition of Karl Gutzkow. She is the author of two books: Die Objektivität des Innenraums: Studien zur Lyrik Georges, Hofmannsthals und Rilkes (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1983) and Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and its “Physiologies”, 1830– 50 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). David Midgley is Reader in German Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. John’s College. He has published several books on modern German literature, including Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). He is currently writing a book on the works of Alfred Döblin. Edward Timms is a Fellow of the British Academy and Research Professor in History at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, University of Sussex. He is best known as the author of Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986–2005), 2 vols. Further details can be found in his autobiography Taking up the Torch: English Institutions, German Dialectics and Multicultural Commitments (Brighton, Portland, OR, and Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2011) Sarah Westphal is Associate Professor of German at Washington University, St. Louis. A scholar of medieval and early modern Germany, she is the author of Textual Poetics of German Manuscripts, 1300–1500 (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993) and coedited Feminist Theory in Practice and Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Her latest book, coauthored with Ann Marie Rasmussen, is Ladies,

202 • Contributors

Harlots, and Pious Women: A Sourcebook in Courtly, Religious, and Urban Cultures of Late Medieval Germany (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010). Joachim Whaley is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and of the Royal Historical Society. The author of Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–1819 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), which has also been translated into German, and the two-volume Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). John H. Zammito is John Antony Weir Professor of History at Rice University. His research centers on the German Enlightenment, especially Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder, and the history and philosophy of the biological sciences. His publications include: The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1992), Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (2002), and A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (2004), all from University of Chicago Press. His current research focuses on the relation between developments in the life sciences and philosophy in the Enlightenment.

INDEX

A absolutism, 17, 24–5, 27, 60, 80, 82, 87 Achebe, Chinua, 131–2 Things Fall Apart, 131 Addison, Joseph, 166 Addison, Thomas, 143, 154, 156 Adelung, Johann Christoph, 25 Adenauer, Konrad, 16 Adler, Alfred, 174–5 Adler, Max, 173 Adler, Victor, 167 Adorno, Theodor W., 4, 16 Al Qaeda, 180 Albrecht IV, Duke of Bavaria, 7, 36–44, 47–8, 50 Alexander, Jeffrey, 105 almanacs, 21, 37 Althusser, Louis, 105 Amelot de la Houssaie, Abraham Nicolas, 60, 62 ancien régime, 93 Annales School, 92, 107 Anz, Thomas, 135 arcana imperii, 25–6, 58 Arendt, Hannah, 3 The Human Condition, 3 Auerbach, Erich, 125–6 Austen, Jane, 130–31 Mansfield Park, 131

B Babinger, Franz, 41 Bach, David Josef, 174 Bahr, Hermann, 176 Baker, Keith, 96–7, 99 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 125, 132 Balzac, Honoré de, 132 Barbin, Claude, publisher, 63 Baroness D’Aulnoy, see Le Jumel, Marie–Catherine Barthes, Roland, 105–6 Bartsch, Rudolf, 176

Basnage, Jacques, 63 Baudelaire, Charles, 127 Les Fleurs du mal, 129 Bauer, Otto, 168 Bayle, Pierre, 63–4 Beamte, 80 Bédacier, Catherine, 63 Begriffsgeschichte, 90 Behringer, Wolfgang, 20 Belisarius, Flavius, 62 Bell, David, 93 Bentham, Jeremy, 145 Bentley, Richard, publisher, 63 Bildung, 24, 83 Bildungsbürger, 77 Blake, William, 127 Blanning, Timothy Charles William, 78–9, 81 Bloch, Ruth, 93 Bolingbroke, Viscount Henry St John, 144, 150 Bourdieu, Pierre, 106–7, 174 bourgeois, 15, 92, 95–6, 99–100, 109, 111 bourgeoisie, 3, 7, 17–8, 79–80, 84, 86, 88, 95, 97 Bouveresse, Jacques, 177 Brecˇka, Hans, 176 Brednich, Rolf Wilhelm, 36 Brewer, John, 18 broadsheets, 22, 26, 37, 45 Brontë, Charlotte, 130 Jane Eyre, 130 Brooke, John, 93 Bubis, Ignatz, 134 Büchner, Georg, 127 Bühler, Charlotte, 173 Bühler, Karl, 173 Bulwer, Edward Lytton, 9, 142, 146 Devereux, 143–5, 147–8, 150–56, 158 Pelham or Adventures of a Gentleman, 145

204 • Index

Burger, Thomas, 124 bürgerlich, 2, 28, 77, 87 bürgerliche Gesellschaft, 28, 76–7 Bürgerlichkeit, 24, 28 Bürgertum, 28, 83 Burke, Edmund, 86 Burkhardt, Johannes, 23 Burnet, Gilbert, 60, 63, 65 Buttinger, Joseph, 174

C Calhoun, Craig, 4 capitalism, 17, 28 Cary, Joyce, 132 Censer, Jack, 98, 111 censorship, 143 charisma, 91–2, 95 Charles II, King of England, 60–61 Charles XI, King of Sweden, 60 Chartier, Roger, 99 Christian of Anhalt, 59 Christina, Queen of Sweden, 61 civil society, 16, 28 Civil War, English, 85 class, 29, 96–7, 104, 109, 111 coffee houses, 85, 123, 147–8, 151, 155–6, 166–68, 175–6 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 65 Cole, Stephen, 105 Colley, Linda, 102 Comazzi, Giovanni Battista, 64 communication, 5, 6, 9 Conrad, Joseph, 132 Heart of Darkness, 132 Cott, Nancy F., 103 Cowan, Brian, 93, 100, 101, 102 Crouch, Nathaniel, 63

D d’Argonne, Noël, 63 D’Israeli, Isaac, 66 Dahlmann, Peter, 62 Daniel, Gabriel, 63 Dann, Otto, 18 de Kérouaille, Louise Renée de Penancoët, see Duchess of Portsmouth de Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse, 66 de Lussan, Marguerite, 63 de Retz, Jean François Paul de Gondi, cardinal, 65 de Sandoval, Prudencio, 64 de’ Medici, Cosimo, 61 de’ Medici, Francesco, 61 de’ Medici, Lorenzo, 63

Debord, Guy, 4 Defoe, Daniel, 63, 65, 125 Denzin, Norman, 105 Derrida, Jacques, 105 Desan, Suzanne, 98–101, 111 Desbordes, Henri, publisher, 63 Desjardins, Marie-Catherine (Mme Villedieu), 63 Deutsch, Karl, 18 Devereux, Robert, 9, 144 Doderer, Heimito von, 175 Dooley, Brendan, 20 Douglas, Mary, 106 Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste, 63

E Eichendorff, Joseph von, 82 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 20 Eleonore of Portugal, 35 Eley, Geoff, 18, 95 Elizabeth, Queen of England, 60 English Revolution, 95 Enlightenment, 2, 4–5, 15, 27–9, 79, 85–7, 92, 94–5, 97, 99, 124, 135 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 45

F family, 17 fascism, 16 Fauré, Christine, 100 feminism, 92–3, 95, 99–104 Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, 59 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 83–4 fiction, 65 Flaubert, Gustave, 129 Madame Bovary, 129 forgeries, 42 Forster, Edward Morgan, 127–8 Foucault, Michel, 92–3, 95, 103–7, 110 Fowler, Alastair, 130 Fraisse, Geneviève, 100 Frankfurt School, 16, 91 Fraser, Nancy, 4, 5, 95 Frederick V, Elector, 59 free cities, 38 French Revolution, 8, 28, 82, 84, 87, 92, 96–101, 110 Freschot, Casimir, 62 Freud, Sigmund, 167–8, 170, 173 Friedjung, Heinrich, 179–80 Friedrich III, Emperor, 7, 35, 38, 40–42, 44, 46 Fuhr, Eckhard, 135 Fukuyama, Francis, 96 Furet, François, 92, 96–8, 100, 110

Index • 205

Fuxstainer, Hans, Mayor of Regensburg, 39, 44–6

G gazettes, 64 Gebildete, 28, 80–82, 84, 86–7 Geertz, Clifford, 8, 107 Gelehrte, 77, 80, 86 Georg, Duke of Bavaria-Landshut, 40 Gerth, Hans Heinrich, 80, 81 Gestrich, Andreas, 24, 25 Giddens, Anthony, 8, 105, 107 Gide, André, 127, 129 Giesecke, Michael, 20 Gilbert, Sandra M., 130–31 Glöckel, Otto, 173 Glorious Revolution (1688), 85 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 28, 83, 133 Die Leiden des jungen Werther, 126 Goldenbaum, Ursula, 95 Goodman, Dena, 100 Gordon, Daniel, 101 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 19 Gouldner, Alvin, 105 grand narratives, 97 Grass, Günter, 9, 136–8 Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 137 Im Krebsgang, 136–38 Greenblatt, Stephen, 103 Gubar, Susan, 131 Gutenberg, Johannes, 20 Gutzkow, Karl, 9, 142, 146 Die Zeitgenossen, 146 Richard Savage, 142–4, 146–9, 152, 157–9

H Habermas, Jürgen, 1–2, 4–9, 15–6, 19–20, 22, 24–5, 30, 57, 75–8, 80, 83–7, 91–2, 94–5, 103, 106–7, 109–10, 123–6, 135–6, 142–3, 175 discourse ethics, 29 The Divided West, 4 Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 2 Öffentlichkeit, 144, 164 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1–2, 4–5, 8–9, 15–8, 26, 28–30, 75–8, 80, 83–8, 91–6, 99–101, 103, 106–7, 108–10, 124, 126, 130, 144, 147–51, 154, 159, 166 Theory of Communicative Action, 2 Habsburg, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, 180 Hall, Stuart, 105

Handwerker, 79 Hanley, James, 127 Hardenberg, Karl August von, 26 Hardy, Thomas, 132 Hauke, Hermann, 50 Hayek, Friedrich August von, 170 Hearst, William Randolph, 170 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 18, 28, 30, 79 Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 3 Heine, Heinrich, 127 Heller, Deborah, 102 Herzl, Theodor, 167 Heywood, Eliza, 63 Higonnet, Patrice, 96 Hobbes, Thomas, 16 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 176 Holborn, Hajo, 78 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 127 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 83–4 Holy Roman Empire, 21–4, 27, 36–8, 40–50 Horkheimer, Max, 4, 16 Hufton, Olwen, 104 human rights, 27 humanism, 21 Hunt, Lynn, 96, 98–9, 101, 103, 107, 110 Hussein, Saddam, 180 Hutten, Ulrich von, 45

I Industrial Revolution, 79 institutionalization, 91 internet, 20–21, 29

J James II, King of England, 60–61 John, King of England, 85 Johnson, Hiram, 171 Johnson, Samuel, 146–7 Jones, David, 62 Joseph II, 27 journals, 65, 102 Joyce, James, 127 Joyce, Patrick, 97 Julian (the Apostate), Roman Emperor, 40

K Kafka, Franz, 127 Kale, Steven, 101 Kant, Immanuel, 2–3, 16–8, 26–30, 80, 86, 94, 124, 135 An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, 3, 86 Kerber, Linda, 102–4 Kessler, Count Harry, 176

206 • Index

Klein, Lawrence, 101–2 Kleist, Heinrich von, 82, 127 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 82 Knigge, Adolph Freiherr von, 28 Kopitzsch, Franklin, 18 Körber, Esther-Beate, 24–5 Koselleck, Reinhard, 2, 15, 24, 90, 92 Kritik und Krise, 2, 91 Kralik, Richard von, 176 Kraus, Karl, 9, 164, 180 Die Fackel, 9, 164, 168, 170–71, 173–4, 177–8 Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, 9, 168–70 Kuhn, Thomas, 91 Kunigunde, Archduchess of Austria, 35–7, 40–44, 46–9 Kunschak, Leopold, 176

L La Bruyère, Jean de, 143 La Force, Charlotte Rose de Caumont de, 63, 65 Lacan, Jacques, 103, 105–7 Lamont, Michèle, 106 Landes, Joan, 8, 92, 95, 99–101, 104 Latour, Bruno, 104 LaVopa, Anthony, 92 Law, John, 104 Lawrence, David Herbert, 127–8 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 128 Lawrence, Frederick, 124 Le Jumel, Marie-Catherine, Baronne d’Aulnoy, 63 Le Noble, Eustache, 63 Le Sage, Alain René Gil Blas, 152 Le Vassor, Michel, 62 Leclerc, Jean, critic, 65 Leers, Arnout, publisher, 63 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 23, 65 Leo X, Pope, 61 Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor, 64 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 79 Leti, Gregorio, 63, 64 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 105 liberalism, 2, 9, 97, 100–101 Liliencron, Detlev von, 36, 48, 51 Lippmann, Walter, 3 The Phantom Public, 3 literacy, 6, 37, 124–5, 170 literature, 6, 8–9, 17, 19, 23–4, 35, 50–51, 57, 59, 66, 94–5, 102, 123–38 Locke, John, 30 Loewenstein, Joseph, 93

Löffler, Sigrid, 135 Loos, Adolf, 170 Louis XIV, King of France, 25, 62, 64 Louvois, François-Michel le Tellier, marquis de, 62, 65 Lutheranism, 22 Lynch, Michael, 104 Lyotard, Jean-François, 97

M Mah, Harold, 108–10 Mahler, Alma, 176 Maimbourg, Louis, 65 Manheim, Ernst, 3, 15 Die Träger der öffentlichen Meinung, 3 Manley, (Mary) de la Rivière, 63 Mansfeld, Ernst von, 59 Marvell, Andrew, 60, 62 Marx, Karl, 18, 28, 30, 79 Marxism, 15–6, 29, 94–7, 106–7 mass media, 4 Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, 35–7, 40, 42–4, 46, 48–9 Maza, Sarah, 97, 100 McLuhan, Marshall, 20 Mehmed the Conqueror, 41 Mell, Max, 176 Melton, James Van Horn, 95 Melville, Herman, 127 Ménage, Gilles, 63 Mercier, Louis–Sébastien, 143 Metternich, Prince Klemens Wenzel von, 146 Mill, James, 145 Mill, John Stuart, 30 Money, John, 18 Moser, Johann Jacob, 21 Mostl, Ulrich, 48–9 Mouffe, Chantal, 5 Münchhausen, Gerlach Adolph Freiherr von, 23

N natural law, 27 Neurath, Otto, 174 news management, 22 newsletters, 25, 65 newspapers, 9, 21, 23–4, 26, 63–5, 67, 164, 169–73, 177–79 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 127 Noelle–Neumann, Elisabeth, 20 Norbrook, David, 101 Northcliffe, Alfred Lord, 170 novels, 60, 63, 65–6

Index • 207

O

R

öffentliche Gewalt, 76 Öffentlichkeit, 6, 15, 18–20, 24–5, 57, 87, 103 Ong, Walter, 20 oral communication, 45–6 Orel, Anton, 176 Osuna, see Téllez–Girón, Don Pedro, Duke of Ozouf, Mona, 96

Rabinovitsch, Eyan, 93 Rabutin, Bussy, 64 Rawls, John, 2 A Theory of Justice, 2 reading public, 23–4, 37, 63, 76–7, 80–81, 84–6 Rechtsstaat, 76, 84 Reddy, William, 108, 110 Reemtsma, Jan Philipp, 135 Reformation, 21, 37 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, 133–6 Reinhardt, Max, 176 Revel, Jacques, 107 Richardson, Samuel, 125, 149 Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, 149 Richter, Simon, 95 Riezler, Sigmund von, 50 Rimbaud, Arthur, 127 Roth, Joseph, 127 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 126 La nouvelle Héloïse, 126 routinization, 91–2, 94, 109 Ryan, Mary, 95, 103

P pamphlets, 21–2, 24–6, 36–8, 44–5, 47–8, 50, 66 paparazzi, 67 parliament, 88 Pascal, Blaise, 64 Pateman, Carole, 95, 100–101 Patin, Guy, 63 patriarchy, 47, 76, 84 Paumgarten, Karl, 173 Peters, Bernhard, 4 Philip II, King of Spain, 65 Philip III, King of Spain, 64 Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans, 151 pietism, 81 Pinard, Ernest, 129 Pincus, Steven, 102 Placcius, Vincentius, 62 Plato, Georg Gottlieb, 49–51 Pliny the Younger, 126 Plumb, John Harold, 18, 66 Polgar, Alfred, 175 political economy, 17, 28 Pope, Alexander, 166 Popper, Karl, 175 pornography, 66 postal system, 21 postmodernism, 93, 97, 106–8, 110–11 poststructuralism, 92, 95–7, 100, 105–8, 110 Powell, Colin, 180 printing, 20–22, 25–7, 29, 37, 45, 63, 65 Priorato, Galeazzo Gualdo, 64 Procopius, 60, 62, 66 Protestantism, 22, 95 public opinion, 3–5, 9, 19–20, 27, 44–5, 50–51, 84–5, 87, 95, 146, 150, 157, 164 public spaces, 169 public, 4–6 Publikum, 19 Publizität, 86 Pufendorf, Esaias, 62 Pufendorf, Samuel, 27, 64

S Sagarra, Eda, 78–9 Saintonge, Louise-Geneviève Gillot de, 63 Saint-Réal, César Vichard de, 62, 64–5 Sallust, 62 salon, 102 Sarpi, Paolo, 58 Savage, Richard, 146, 148–9 Schiller, Friedrich, 81–4 Schirrmacher, Frank, 134–5 Schlick, Moritz, 174 Schlosser, Johann Georg, 27 Schmitt, Carl, 2–3 Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus, 3 Schnitzler, Arthur, 167, 173 Schöffler, Herbert, 81 Schönberg, Arnold, 173–5 Schubarth, Christian Friedrich Daniel, 27 Schwitalla, Johannes, 36, 45 Scott, Joan, 100 Scott, Walter, 65, 152–3 secret histories, 7, 57–67 secularization, 24, 81–3 Seidman, Steven, 105–6 Seipel, Ignaz, 168 Sénard, Marie-Antoine Jules, 129 Sewell, William, Jr., 97, 99, 105–6 Shevelow, Kathryn, 102 Siri, Vittorio, 62

208 • Index

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 103 Sobieski, Jan, 60, 63, 65 Somers, Lord John, 62 Somers, Margaret, 90–91, 98, 111 Sonnenfels, Joseph von, 19 Soviet Union, 92, 96 Ständestaat, 79, 82 Stedman Jones, Gareth, 97 Steele, Richard, 9, 143–4, 146–7, 156, 166 Stendhal (= Henri Beyle), 127 Stevens, Paul, 93 Stieler, Caspar, 21 Stifter, Adalbert, 83 Stopes, Marie, 128 Strauss, Richard, 176 Strobl, Karl Hans, 176 Sturm, Jacob, 50 Swift, Jonathan, 166

T Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 59–60, 126 Taylor, Charles, 5 television, 67 Téllez-Girón, Don Pedro, Duke of Osuna, 62 Thale, Mary, 102 theaters, 58 Theodora, Empress, 60, 66 Theophrastus, 143 Thirty Years War, 21, 23, 59 Thomasius, Christian, 23, 27 Thompson, Edward Palmer, 97 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 3 Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung, 3 Torberg, Friedrich, 176 Trilling, Lionel, 126 Trivialliteratur, 83 Tully, James, 4 Turing, Alan, 20

U

Vertot, René Aubert de, 62 Vickery, Amanda, 102–4 Vierhaus, Rudolf, 79–80 Vigneul-Marville, see d’Argonne, Noël Villedieu, Mme, see Desjardins, MarieCatherine Villiers, Pierre de, 60

W Wagner, Otto, 167 Waldstreicher, David, 93–4 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 111 Walpole, Sir Robert, 150 Walser, Martin, 9, 133–6 Tod eines Kritikers, 133–4 Walsingham, Edward, 65 Walter, Bruno, 167 Warenverkehr, 76 Watt, Ian, 124–6 The Rise of the Novel, 124–5 Weeks, Jeffrey, 128 Wehler, Hans–Ulrich, 18 Weininger, Otto, 170 Weise, Christian, 21 Weiss, Hans, Regensburg notary, 36 Welter, Barbara, 103 Werfel, Franz, 176 Whaley, Joachim, 37 Whigs, 97 Wilde, Oscar, 128 Wildgans, Anton, 176 Williams, Raymond, 18, 124 Wilson, Kathleen, 102 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 81 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 170 Wolff, Christian, 27 women in the public sphere, 23, 36–7, 99–102 working classes, 95 Wuthnow, Robert, 106

universities, 22–3, 27

Z V Varillas, Antoine, 61–5

Zahorowski, Hieronim, 58 Zaret, David, 95