La Vopa - Conceiving A Public. Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Koselleck and Habermas

Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society by Reinhart
Koselleck; The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society by Jurgen Habermas; Thomas Burger; Frederick Lawrence; Jack R. Censer;
Gail W. O'Brien
Review by: Anthony J. La Vopa
The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Mar., 1992), pp. 79-116
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Review Article
Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in
Eighteenth-CenturyEurope*
Anthony J. La Vopa
North Carolina State University
To studentsof eighteenth-century
Europethereis somethingoddly familiarabout
recent events in the Soviet Union and its formersatellites. We recognize the
appealsto the "public"as a collectiveconscienceandto "publicopinion"as the
recordof its judgments;the faithin openness,or "publicity,"as the high roadto
reform;the politicallychargedcensureof governmentin the languagesof fiction
andphilosophy.Wereit not for the obviousdifferencesbetweenthe EastBloc and
the ancien regime, we mightbe temptedto regardglasnost as a telescopedreplay
of an eighteenth-century
script.
It was in eighteenth-century
Europe,and particularlyin England,France,and
the Germanstates, thatthe "public" firstassumeda recognizablymodernshape
andbecamea powerfulideologicalconstruct.Thatconstructwas a characteristic
product of the Enlightenment,and it marked one of the critical zones of
intersectionbetween Enlightenmentdiscourse and a broad range of socioeconomic and institutionalchanges.To appreciatethe semanticshift, one need only
considerhow the meaningof "opinion"changedas it was pairedwith "public."
As late as the mid-eighteenthcentury,"opinion"usuallyconnotedthe fickleness
and the narrow particularismof prejudice, in contrast to the unchanging
universalityof truth.By the end of the century,however,opinionin its "public"
guise was endowedwith a rationalobjectivityopposedto the blindadherencethat
traditionalauthoritycommanded.Publicopinionwas the authoritative
judgment
of a collective conscience, the rulingof a tribunalto which even the state was
subject.1
* The works reviewed in this essay areReinhartKoselleck, Critiqueand Crisis: Enlightenment
and the Pathogenesisof Modern Society (1959; English trans., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1988), pp. x + 204; and JurgenHabermas,The StructuralTransformationof the Public Sphere:
An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, with the assistance of
Frederick Lawrence (1962; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), pp. xix + 301. A
special word of thanks is due Jack R. Censer and Gail W. O'Brien, who provided needed
criticism and encouragementin the initial draftingof the essay. The research and writing were
made possible by a fellowship at the WoodrowWilson InternationalCenter for Scholars and by
a grant from the American Philosophical Society.
1 See, esp., Lucian Holscher, Offentlichkeit und Geheimnis: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche
Untersuchung zur Entstehung der Offentlichkeit in der fruhen Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1979),
pp. 81-117, and "Offentlichkeit," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe:Historisches Lexikon zur
[Journal of Modern History 64 (March 1992): 79-116]
? 1992 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/92/6401-0004$01.00
All rights reserved.

80
La Vopa
observers were quick to remarkthat the public was a

Eighteenth-century
mysterious, not to say miraculous,phenomenon.Somehow myriad personal
judgments,each formedautonomouslywithin the innersanctumof conscience,
coheredinto a collective will with a credibleclaim to rationalobjectivity.The
public will confrontedthe state as a social entity, a civil society assertingits
independencefrom state tutelage;but its moralauthorityrestedon a metasocial
claim to transcendthe particularityof any and all social divisions and interests.
This transcendencemadethe publicinherentlyuniversal;and yet the promiseof
universalitycoexisted with the assumptionthat an entire society could be
by one or anotherof its parts.
represented,crediblyand indeedauthoritatively,
As printbecamethe primarymediumfor the creationof a public,the paradoxes
multiplied.Publiccommunicationpromisedto makean entiresocietytransparent
to itself, but its typicalformswere the solitaryacts of readingand writing.Like
the oratorsof the ancientpolis, modem authorswere expectedto forge a public
consensus;but they faced a mass of readers"who [were] never assembledas a
whole, and whose expressionas a whole [was] neverheard."2Preciselybecause
the public consensus was "invisible," it was easily abused. "Friends of the
Revolution,"ChristianGarveobservedin the immediateaftermathof the Terror,
"takerefugeinpublicopinionas a Qualitasoccultathatcanexplaineverything-or
as a higherpowerthatcan excuse everything."3
books on the emergenceof
The two most imaginativeand thought-provoking
the modem public-Reinhart Koselleck's Kritik und Krise and JurgenHaberder Offentlichkeit-haverecentlyreceivedEnglishtranslamas's Strukturwandel
tions.4They exploreparadoxesin the constructitself as it emergedin the course
politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart
Koselleck (Stuttgart,1978), 4:413-67; WolfgangKroger,Das Publikumals Richter:Lessing und
die "kleinerenRespondenten"im Fragmentenstreit(Nendeln/Liechtenstein,1979); Eric Walter,
"L'affaire La Banfe et le concept d'opinion publique," in Le journalisme d'Ancien Re'gime:
Questionset propositions, ed. PierreRetat (Lyon, 1982), pp. 361-92; Mona Ozouf, "L'opinion
publique," in The Political Culture of the Old Regime,.ed. Keith Michael Baker, The French
Revolution and the Creationof a Modem Political Culture, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 419-34;
Keith Michael Baker, "Politics and Public Opinion under the Old Regime: Some Reflections,"
in Press and Politics in Pre-RevolutionaryFrance, ed. Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), pp. 204-46; Daniel Gordon, " 'Public Opinion' and the
Civilizing Process in France:The Example of Morellet," Eighteenth-CenturyStudies 22, no. 3
(Spring 1989): 303-28; EdoardoTortarolo, " 'Opinion Publique' tra antico regime et rivoluzione francese: Contributoa un vocabolario storico della politica settecentesca," Rivista Storica
Italiana 102, no. 1 (1990): 5-23.
2 This observation was made by Johann Christoph Adelung in the third volume of his
Worterbuch,as quoted in H6lscher, Offentlichkeitund Geheimnis, p. 88.
3 Quoted in ibid., p. 113.
4 Scholars are indebted to the MIT Press for publishing translationsof these and many other
seminal Germanworks in its series Studies in ContemporaryGermanSocial Thought, edited by
Thomas McCarthy.The introductionsby Victor Gourevitch (Critique and Crisis) and Thomas
McCarthy(StructuralTransformation)identify theoreticalissues concisely, though they may be
disappointingto scholars interestedin the contexts in which these books were written and their
significancefor historicalresearch.Both Thomas Burgerand the translatorof Critiqueand Crisis
(who ought to have been named) had to contend with the reified abstractionsand convoluted
syntax of academic German. It would probably be unreasonableto expect the results to be

Conceivinga Public
81
of the eighteenthcenturyandin the social andinstitutionalprocessesthatexplain

its emergence.Both books have become standardcitationsin eighteenth-century
studies,butuntilrecentlyneitherhadreceivedthe criticalscrutinyit deserved.A
Frenchtranslationof Strukturwandel
did not appearuntil 1978, and Kritikund
Krise was not availablein Frenchuntil a year later. Aside from the language
barrier,the books had also attractedlittle attentionin France because their
philosophicalpreoccupationsand their approachesto ideology cut against the
grainof the reigningAnnalesSchool paradigm.Only in recentyears, in the wake
of the debate provoked by FranqoisFuret's reinterpretationof the French
Revolution,have FrenchscholarsdiscoveredCritiqueand Crisis.
As for Habermas,the bulgingliteratureon his contributionsto CriticalTheory
hardly acknowledgeshis initial exercise in historical sociology in Structural
Transformation,
thoughit was arguablythe criticalfirststep in his development
as a theorist.5Historianshave foundhis conceptof "representativepublicness"
especiallyuseful;but therehas been little attentionto how this element, or any
other,fits into the largerstructureof his argument.
The new English translationswill surely help remedy this neglect. Even in
English,however,theseproductsof GermanWissenschaftmaystrikereadersmore
as philosophicalmeditations,or as ideologicallyinspiredpolemics, than as historicalmonographs.Bothreflectthe politicalpreoccupations
of the 1950s, though
fromoppositeendsof theideologicalspectrum.Andbothremindus that,untilquite
recently,Kantianphilosophyand its nineteenth-century
offshootswere centralto
Germanmodes of historicaland sociological explanation.ThoughCritiqueand
Crisis became a broad-rangingintellectualhistory,beginningwith Hobbes and
Locke and ending with Raynaland Paine, Koselleckhad originallyintendedto
investigatethe "politicalfunction"of Kant'sCritiques.It was in the prefaceto
theCritiqueofPureReason(1781)thatKoselleckfoundtheculminatingexpression
of the Enlightenment'sideal of public criticism(pp. 1, 121).6
In StructuralTransformation
Englandis the "model case" and Germanylags
well behindit; but Habermas'sconceptualhinge was the philosophicaldiscourse
extendingfrom Kant (who gave "the idea of the bourgeoispublic sphere" its
readableas well as clear by English standards.But one wishes that the translationof Critiqueand
Crisis had been less faithful to Koselleck's syntax; German constructionsdesigned to convey
paradoxessometimes become contortedEnglish. And it is regrettablethat Koselleck's Burger (as
well as Staatsburgerand BurgerlicherMensch) becomes simply "citizen," while Burgertumis
renderedas "bourgeoisie" and burgerlichas "bourgeois." On the complexities of this semantic
field, see the translator'snote in StructuralTransformation,p. xv.
S The importance of Strukturwandelfor Habermas's subsequent thinking is acknowledged,
albeit very briefly, in David Ingram,Habermasand the Dialectic of Reason (New Haven, Conn.,
1987), pp. 4-5; Thomas A. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge,
Mass., 1978), pp. 11-12, 381-83; Rick Roderick, Habermas and the Foundationsof Critical
Theory (New York, 1986), pp. 42-43.
6 This aspect of Kant's thought has received renewed attention in John Christian Laursen,
"The Subversive Kant: The Vocabulary of 'Public' and 'Publicity,' " Political Theory 14
(November 1986): 584-603, and "Scepticism and Intellectual Freedom: The Philosophical
Foundationsof Kant's Politics of Publicity," History of Political Thought 10, no. 3 (Autumn
1989): 439-55; Onora O'Neill, "The Public Use of Reason," in her Constructionsof Reason:
Explorationsof Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 28-50.

82
La Vopa
"theoreticallyfully developed form") to Hegel and Marx (who exposed its

ideologicaldistortions)(pp. 102-29).7
Thisreviewwill explainthe theoreticalagendasthatinformCritiqueand Crisis
andStructuralTransformation,
thoughwithdue solicitudefor readersnot at home
in the Germanphilosophicaltraditionandin any case moreinterestedin historical
implicationsthanin philosophicalpremises.The review will also approachboth
books as historicaldocumentsin their own right. With a distanceof thirty-odd
years,we arein a positionto appreciatehow the ideologicalclimateof the postwar
era at once enrichedand limitedtheirscholarship.
My focus, however, will be on the continuingrelevanceof these books to
eighteenth-century
studies.Koselleckand Habermasused the eighteenth-century
constructionof a "public" as a prism to direct light onto an entire range of
subjects-and these still command our attention. Should we think of the
Enlightenmentas an integralpart of the Old Regime or as a movementpitted
squarelyagainstOldRegimecorporatevaluesand"absolutist"lines of authority?
Canthe Enlightenmentin Franceandthe Germanstatesbe said to havemounted
a "political" opposition to absolutism? Critique and Crisis and Structural
Transformationwere pathbreakingbecause, in the very ways they posed such

questions, they conceived of the Enlightenmentas a social as well as an
intellectualmovement. Each charted new territoryin our explorationof the
relationshipbetweennew ideas and social change.8
Kosellecktakesus into the milieusof Enlightenment"sociability,"particularly
by pryingopen the closed doors of freemasonry.Habermastracesthe growthof
a printmarketand a readingpublic, and he findsboth groundedin the family's
new role as a nest of intimacyand a unit of consumption.In both cases we
confrontthe task of identifyingan emerging"bourgeois"society, thoughfrom
radicallydifferentangles. And thattask in turnrequiresa close look at the kind
of society and polity impliedin eighteenth-century
conceptionsof a public. Did
such conceptionspoint to a democraticfuture,or at least to an egalitarianone?
Did they justify new forms of exclusive authorityand power for a modernizing
elite? Behindthe promiseof consensuswe findtensionsbetweenuniversalityand
exclusiveness,opennessand closure. The tensionspointto a historicalreconfigurationof class relationsand, no less revealingly,to a historicalredefinitionof
gender roles.9
7 See also Habermas's"Publizitatals Prinzipder Vermittlungvon Politik und Moral (Kant),"

in Materialien zu Kants Rechtsphilosophie, ed. Zwi Batscha (Frankfurt am Main, 1976),
pp. 175-90.
8 The implications of Haberinas's argumentfor the historiographyof the French Revolution
will receive relativelylittle attentionin this essay. The subjecthas been ably exploredin Benjamin
Nathans, "Habermas's 'Public Sphere' in the Era of the FrenchRevolution," French Historical
Studies 16, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 620-44.
9 Even if limited to the above themes, a complete bibliographywould be enormous. My rule
of thumbhas been to limit citations to the most relevantbooks and articles publishedin the last
two decades.

Conceivinga Public
83
Critiqueand Crisis beganas a dissertationat Heidelberg,acceptedin 1954. As

the conflictsbetweenthe new superpowershardenedintothe ColdWar,Koselleck
was struck by the binary opposition between their "utopian" scenarios for
progress, each refusing to recognize the other as a legitimate opponent but
"liv[ing] by thatother'simaginedreaction"(pp. 5-6).10 This was the perspective of a young Germanscholarwitnessingthe bifurcationof his nationin the
ideological stand-offbetween American-stylecapitalistdemocracyand Sovietstyle communism.
Ironically,the other agenda Koselleck recalls in his preface to the English
edition-the need to explain historically the "Utopian self-exaltation" in
nazism-had a less distinctly German point of departure(p. 1). Koselleck
proceededfromthe assumption,by no meanslimitedto WestGermanscholarship,
that fascism and communismwere the two sides of the same totalitariancoin,
mirroringeach otherin theircontemptuousdismissalof mere"politics" to justify
one-partydictatorship.Accountingfor the Nazi horrorwas obviouslyan urgent
hadprobably
taskin the early 1950s, but Koselleck'sdiagnosisof totalitarianism
been shapedas powerfullyby his image of the Marxist-Leninist
vanguardparty.
To Koselleckthe essence of modemtotalitarian"ideology" in all its varieties
was an exclusivelymoralvision, self-deludingin its blindnessto its own political
will to power and self-righteousin its refusal to grant moral legitimacy to
"political" alternatives.The ascendancyof ideology in this sense explainedthe
permanentstate of "crisis" or "civil war" that characterizedmodernity.Like
J. L. Talmon,Kosellecksoughtthe genesisof this pathologyin the Enlightenment
andfoundits firstfull-blownmanifestation-the one thatpointedunmistakablyto
the totalitarianhorrorsof this century-in the Jacobinideology of the French
Revolution.11WhereasTalmonattributeda totalitarianmomentumto the underlying logic of Enlightenmentthought, however, Koselleck found the same
momentumemergingfrom the relationshipbetweenthe state and society in old
regimeEurope.
This contextualexplanationtook the formof an ironicnarrative,with its point
of departurein the religiousstrifethatplaguedEuropein the sixteenthand early
seventeenthcenturies.To end the religious "civil war" the seventeenth-century
stateclaimedfor itself a "supra-religious"and "rationalistic"jurisdiction,where
"politics could unfold regardlessof moralconsiderations."Hobbes spelled out
the mostfatefulconsequenceof this "absolutist"conceptof statesovereignty:the
splittingof the self into the "public" (or outward)obedienceof the subjectand
the "private"exerciseof conscience.It was fromthe "privateinnerspace" that
the publiccriticismof the Enlightenmentemanated(pp. 23-40).
In the course of the eighteenth century the private enclaves constituted
themselvesas the tribunalof publicopinion-the collective conscienceto which
the statewas morallyaccountable.In Englandthe emergenceof a criticalpublic
10 See alsotheprefaceto Reinhart
Koselleck,KritikundKrise:EineStudiezurPathogenesis
der burgerlichen
Welt(Suhrkamp
Taschenbuch,
1973), pp. ix-xi, whereKoselleckrelateshis
in globalconflict.
of the Enlightenment
to morerecentdevelopments
interpretation
Democracy(New York,1960).
1 J. L. Talmon,TheOriginsof Totalitarian

84
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was entirely compatible with the politics of the post-1688 regime. On the
Continent,criticismcollided head-onwith absolutismand had to containitself
within the private enclaves of the Enlightenment'sbourgeois and aristocratic
elites. The resultwas the pathological"moraldualism"thatwould characterize
modem ideology. Convincedof his own moral innocence, the rationalistcritic
condemnedan amoral,calculating,power-hungrystate and made the abuse of
power identicalwith its very exercise. Kosellecktracesthe developmentof this
dualism,with its hypocritical"politicsby indirection,"fromits late seventeenthcenturyemergencein the thoughtof PierreBayle to its culminationin Kant's
Critiques.He findsthe symptomswrit large in continentalfreemasonry,with its
cult of secrecy,andin the secretorderof Illuminatifoundedby AdamWeishaupt,
a young Bavarianprofessor,in 1776 and suppressednine years later.
If masonic secrecy was a shield against the absolutiststate, it was also an
instrumentof self-deception.Secrecywas emblematicof the fact thatEnlightenment criticism,in its condemnationof politics from a positionof pristinemoral
innocence,blindeditself to its own politicalmotives and ambitions-and hence
the ultimate secret was its own lack of "self-insight" (pp. 118-19). The
corollaryof secrecy was the Enlightenment'sphilosophyof history,which was
centralto the thoughtof, amongothers, Turgotand Raynaland foundvisionary
expression in Weishaupt'splans for the Illuminati. A "utopian" vision of
progress,this philosophyjustifiedbehind-the-scenesplanningby the select few
who understoodthe courseof historybut at the same time absolvedthem of the
need to accept responsibilityfor political decisions. Its posture of moral
innocence, combinedwith its assumptionof historicalinevitability,veiled the
politicalnatureof the crisis engulfingthe Old Regime-and, in its very failureto
confrontthe politicalreality,it made the crisis all the more intense.
In 1789 the crisis explodedinto revolution."All parties,"Koselleckobserves
in a note on France in the early 1790s, "became the victim of a mutually
intensifying and compulsoryresort to ideology which has characterizedthe
modemage ever since" (p. 151).12 The absolutistdichotomybetweenthe public
and the private,the politicaland the moral,had endedone kind of civil war but
haddrivencontinentalEuropeinexorablytowardanother.A historicalprocessthat
beganwiththe extrusionof "the privateinnerspace" frompoliticsendedwiththe
totalpoliticaloccupationof thatspace. Deprivedof a politicaloutlet, the critical
conscienceof the Enlightenment
politicizedeverythingin the nameof morality.It
did so-and here is the finalirony-because, in its dialecticalconfrontationwith
absolutistpolitics, it could not confrontits own politicalwill to power.
His protestationsto the contrary,Koselleckhaddrawnup an indictment.Aside
fromthe obviouspresenceof Hobbes,therewerealso strongechos of Machiavelli
and Burkein his thesis. But the most obvious inspirationwas the "decisionist"
12
Koselleck's footnotes warrantcareful reading. Aside from offering strikingformulationsof
his argument(some of which ought to have been in the text), they record his hermeneutical
encounterswith a wide range of seventeenth-and eighteenth-centurytexts. They exhibit the same
concern with continuitiesand changes in contextualmeaning that would inform his later agenda
for a "history of concepts" (Begriffsgeschichte).

Conceiving a Public
85
theoryof Carl Schmitt,the jurist and politicalphilosopherwho had provideda

seductivejustificationfor the transitionfromthe WeimarRepublicto Nazi dictatorship.13 Itwas notsimplythatKoselleckhadborrowedtheconceptof "civil war"
fromSchmitt.In his Der Leviathan,Schmitthadarguedthatthe "reservation"of
"inner"freedomof consciencein Hobbes'sconceptof sovereigntyhadcontained
the "seeds of death" (Todeskeim)
for absolutism,the first "greatbreachfor the
modemliberalism"thatwould reversethe absolutistrelationshipbetweenpublic
andprivate.It was this basic plot line, with its ironicdenouement,thatKoselleck
elaborated.He also sharpenedthe focus. WhereasSchmittsaw "the secret"as one
of severaldimensionsof the "innerreservation,"Koselleckmadeit the paradigmatic symptomof the Enlightenment'spathology.Schmitt's "carriersfor the
developmentof [the] innerreservation"included,along with freemasonry,Protestantsects and, in a languageresonatingwith racistconspiracytheory,the "restless" (and "liberal") spiritand "unerringinstinct" of the Jew.14 To Koselleck
freemasonryrepresentedan entirelynew social phenomenon,essentiallydifferent
from sectarianism;and he had no sympathywith Schmitt'sdilutedbut still poisonous anti-Semitism.
Habermaspouncedon Koselleck'sdebtto Schmittin his reviewof Critiqueand
Crisis. The implicationof Schmitt's thought, he observed, was that civil war
couldnow be overcomeonly "in the formof the totalitarianstate."15 Habermas's
point may do justice to Schmitt'sintellectualcareer,but it rides roughshodover
Koselleck'sview of totalitarianism
as a pathologyof the Rightas well as the Left.
On one level Critiqueand Crisis can be readas the modem liberal'sdefense of
politics against the metapolitics-or, perhaps better, the antipolitics-of all
varietiesof totalitarianideology. Koselleck'spoint is thatthe only way to avoid
civil war is to acceptthe realityof politicalinterestsand conflictsand to remain
awarethatall the playersaremakinga bid for power.And yet Critiqueand Crisis
is also an attackon the secularjustificationsfor individualfreedom(including
freedomof conscience)to which modem liberalismtracesits origins. Koselleck
rootednot in a reactionagainstEnlightenmentrationalism
found totalitarianism
but in the Enlightenmentitself. Is the implicationthat the injectionof morality
into politics inevitablyacquiresa totalitarianmomentum?If one acceptsKoselleck's versionof the dialecticbetweenabsolutismand Enlightenmentcriticism,
13 Schmitt no longer held a university position after the war, but he remained a prolific and
highly controversial author. In the preface to the first edition of Kritik und Krise (1959),
Koselleck thankedSchmitt, who (in Koselleck's words) "posed questions [to him] in conversations and helped seek answers." See also Keith Tribe's informative biographical sketch in
Reinhart Koselleck, FuturesPast: On the Semanticsof HistoricalTime,trans.-Keith Tribe
(Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. vii-xvii. For a judicious assessment of Schmitt's thought and
career, see Joseph W. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, Theoristfor the Reich (Princeton, N.J., 1983).
14
CarlSchmitt,Der Leviathanin derStaatslehredes ThomasHobbes:SinnundFehlschlag
eines politischen Symbols (Hamburg, 1938), pp. 82-93. On Schmitt's opportunisticadoptionof

anti-Semitismin response to attacksfrom within the Nazi regime, see Bendersky,pp. 226-42.
15 JurgenHabermas, "Zur Kritikan der Geschichtsphilosophie(R. Koselleck, H. Kesting),"
in his Kultur und Kritik: VerstreuteAufsatze (Frankfurtam Main, 1973), p. 363. Despite its
simplistic conflationof Koselleck's "political anthropology" with Schmitt's, this is a trenchant
critiqueof Kritik und Krise.

86
La Vopa
how is the emergence of a pluralisticconcept of political contestationto be

explained?The readerhas to supplyhis own answers.
Despite its elusive political agenda, and in part because of it, Critiqueand
Crisis offereda strikinglyoriginalalternativeto the conventionalwisdomof the
1950s. On both sides of the Atlantic, scholars were busy tracingGermany's
deviationfromthe EnglishandFrenchpathsto a modernliberalsocietyandpolity.
One of the culturalmarkersfor this Sonderwegwas the retreatinto apolitical
"inwardness"by eighteenth-century
Germanintellectuals.In Koselleck's comparativeframeworkthere was nothingexceptionalabout GermanInnerlichkeit;
the same apparentlyapoliticalposturecharacterizedthe thoughtof the French
Enlightenment,and indeedit was typicalof Enlightenmentcriticismas a whole.
Whereasotherscombedthe Enlightenmentfor anticipationsof modernpolitical
"isms," he was struckby the pervasivenessof an avowedlyunpoliticalidealism.
Unlikemanyof his colleaguesin the Germanhistoricalguild, however,he did not
acceptthatidealismon its own terms.His indictmentwas framedto remindus that
a principledrejectionof politicsis itself a politicalact andthatit can involvea lack
of self-awarenesswith dire politicalconsequences.
Thoughits selectionof authorsandtexts now seems quiteconventional,not to
say old-fashioned,Critiqueand Crisis rested on the audaciousclaim to have
discovered "the unity of the Enlightenmentas it happenedin the absolutist
state." Other eighteenth-centuryauthors, Koselleck noted, could easily have
been substitutedfor the dozen or so he had singled out (pp. 8-9). He found
"unity," one suspects, because he projectedbackwardand outwardfrom his
verdict on Kant's CriticalPhilosophy.The entire argumentcan be read as a
refutationof Kant's famous essay on "theory" and "practice" (1793), which
had as one of its subtitles"AgainstHobbes." In the face of Kant's appealto a
priori moral norms, Koselleck was vindicating what he saw as Hobbes's
unflinchingrealism.16
In the light of more recent research, Koselleck's confidentdiscovery of a
unitaryEnlightenmentseems naive. The historicalconsciousnessof the Enlightenmentin Franceandthe Germanstatescannotbe reducedto a "utopian"vision
of universal progress. Faith in progress had its counterpointin a persistent
pessimism about the directionof change and in that fascinationwith cultural
specificitythatwouldcharacterizenineteenth-century
historicism.17 The Lutheran
of the Germanstates did not emulate the Frenchphilosophes' war
Aufkldarer
againstl'infame;theircautiousreformism,aimedat rationalizingthe established
churchesfromwithin, typifiesthe moderationof a distinctlyProtestantvarietyof
16
ImmanuelKant, "On the CommonSaying: 'This may be truein theory,but it does not apply
in practice,' " in Kant'sPolitical Writings,ed. Hans Reiss and trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge,
1977), pp. 61-92.
17 See, esp., Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenmentand the Rise of Historicism
(Berkeley, 1975); Hans Erich B6deker, George G. Iggers, JonathanB. Knudsen, and Peter H.
Reill, eds., Aufkldrungund Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaftim 18.
Jahrhundert(Gottingen, 1986).

Conceiving a Public
87
Enlightenment.18 When we take soundingsinto the undercurrents,

we find still
anothervariety of Enlightenmentsor, perhapsbetter in this case, of counterEnlightenments,with social and political colorationsthat make the standard
galaxy of philosophesseem very tame indeed.19
And yet Critique and Crisis seems prescient from this distance, since it
identifiedissues that still demandour attention.Subsequentresearchhas vindicated Koselleck's focus on the masonicmovement.Whetherone considersthe
proliferationof local lodges, or the impressivegrowth in membership,or the
social profile of the members,it is clear that by mid-centuryfreemasonryhad
becomethe most widespreadand inclusiveformof the new sociabilityon which
the French and German Enlightenmentswere grounded. As eclectic as its
ideologybecame,freemasonryusuallyremainedcommittedto the moralidealsof
Enlightenmentrationalism.How thendo we explainits relianceon secrecy,both
as a protectivewall against the "profane" outside world and as an ordering
principlefor the lodges' internalritualsandhierarchies?Does thecult of the secret
not standin blatantcontradictionto the principleof openness,of "publicity,"that
the Enlightenment
posed againstabsolutistandcorporateconcealment?Is not the
lodge, as a crypto-public,a case of the Enlightenmentviolatingits own ideals?
Koselleck'sindictmenteffectivelydramatizedthis issue but gave it a one-sided
resolution.To Koselleckthe tragicironyof the secretwas that,in posinga barrier
againstabsolutistintrusions,it also allowedthe "private"subjectto exercisehis
conscience critically without acceptingpolitical responsibility.The Enlightenment's "cloak of moral innocence and political absence" became its veil of
self-deception(pp. 70-97). This charge of "hypocrisy" substitutesa moral
categoryfor contextualanalysis. It fails to take into accountthat the resort to
secrecybecamean objectof controversyin Enlightenmentdiscourse.
The controversyhas a long history,and in Germanyit clearlyintensifiedin the
wake of the Bavariangovernment'sexposureof the Illuminati'sconspiratorial
plans in the mid-1780s. Even at that late date some observersstill foundvirtue,
or at least practicaladvantage,in masonicsecrecy;but to othersthe principleof
18
Roy Porter and Mikulaas Teich, eds., The-Enlightenmentin National Contexts (London,
1981). On the distinctive characteristicsof the GermanProtestantEnlightenment,see also Reill;
Franklin Kopitsch, ed., Aufkldrung, Absolutismus und Burgertum in Deutschland (Munich,
1976); JonathanB. Knudsen, Justus Moser and the GermanEnlightenment(Cambridge, 1986);
Anthony J. La Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-CenturyGermany(Cambridge, 1988).
19 MargaretC. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment:Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans
(London, 1981), focuses on the religious dissidents and publishers who formed the "radical
underside" of Dutch freemasonry.On the French lawyers who used highly publicized trials to
flail the Establishment,see Darlene Gay Levy, The Ideas and Career of Simon-Nicolas-Henri
Linguet (Urbana,Ill., 1980); Sara Maza, "Le tribunalde la nation:Les memoiresjudiciaires et
l'opinion publique a la fin de l'Ancien R6gime," Annales 42 (1987): 73-90; Jean Starobinski,
"La Chaire, la Tribune,le Barreau,"in Les Lieux de Memoire, ed. PierreNora, vol. 2: La Nation
(Paris, 1986). Robert Darnton, "The High Enlightenmentand the Low-Life of Literature,"in his
TheLiteraryUndergroundof the Old Regime (Cambridge,Mass., 1982), pp. 1-40, reconstructs
the mentalityof the denizens of Paris's "Grub Street" on the eve of the Revolution.

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publicitymade such secrecyboth indefensibleand obsolete. Therewere parallel

debatesaboutanonymousand pseudonymouspublication:while some regarded
these expedientsas perfectlylegitimateformsof self-defense,otherscondemned
themas hypocriticalviolationsof principle,likely to erodeauthors'credibility.20
The point is that there was a perceivedtension between critical openness and
secrecyin Enlightenment
discourse,andthatit pointsto a level of self-awareness,
perhapseven of self-insight,thatKoselleckignored.A thoroughexplorationof
thattensionwouldtell us a greatdeal aboutthe ambitionsandthe inhibitionsthat
were shapingemergingconceptsof a public.
In anothersense, though, Critiqueand Crisis anticipatedour more recent
of the publicandpublicopinionas Enlightenmentideals. We now
understanding
know that, thanksto religious and constitutionalcontroversiesfrom the 1750s
onward,the FrenchHigh Enlightenmentdevelopedin a context of increasingly
open opposition to the Crown. Against this backdropKoselleck's view of
"criticism" as a pretensionto moral innocence in the face of politics seems
simplistic;it was the politicalthrustof criticism,afterall, thatforcedthe Crown
itself to enterthe arenaof politicalcontestation,even thoughit denied the very
existenceof that arenain principle.And yet the appealsto the tribunalof "the
public" reveal a profound ambivalence, a simultaneousplunging into and
shrinkingfrom the modernpoliticalarenathatwas beginningto take shape. The
sacredcenter-the monarchy-was being strippedof its auraand was losing its
powerto controlpublicmeanings,but the publicloomedas the consensualcenter
of a secularorderin the making.Even as criticsof the Crownassumedan openly
confrontational
posture,they soughtto dispel the specterof open dissensionand
conflictwith theirnew ideal of a unitaryand transcendentpublic conscience.
Whatneeds furtherhistoricalexplanationis not a hypocriticalstance, vulnerable to exposureon its own terms, but a tension-riddenposturereflectingthe
complexitiesof its context. Koselleck's insight-that Enlightenmentcriticism
couldnot confrontits own politicalmotivesandimplications-identifiedone side
of the tension. The French concept of "public opinion," Keith Baker has
concluded, projected "a politics without politics"; in correctingKoselleck's
one-sidedindictment,Bakerconfirmedhis insight.21
20
See, e.g., EberhardWeis, "Der Illuminatenorden(1776-1786): Unter besondererBerucksichtigung der Fragen seiner sozialen Zusammensetzung, seiner politischer Ziele und seiner
Fortexistenznach 1786," in Aufklarungund Geheimgesellschaften:Zurpolitischen Funktionund
Sozialstrukturder Freimaurerlogenim 18. Jahrhundert,ed. Helmut Reinalter(Munich, 1989),
pp. 94-96; ManfredAgethen, Geheimbundund Utopie: Illuminaten,Freimaurer und deutsche
Spataufklarung(Munich, 1984), pp. 127-33; Rudolf Vierhaus, "Aufklarungund Freimaurerei
in Deutschland," in Das Vergangeneund die Geschichte, ed. Rudolf von Thadden, Gert von
Pistohlkors, and Hellmuth Weiss (G6ttingen, 1973), pp. 32-33. Vierhaus reminds us that the
relationshipbetween the Enlightenmentand freemasonrywas one of "affinity," not identity.
21 Baker, "Politics and Public Opinion underthe Old Regime" (n. 1 above), p. 246. See also
Ozouf (n. 1 above); and Jeffrey W. Merrick,The Desacralizationof the French Monarchyin the
Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1990), which emphasizes the role of the government
itself, the parlements, and intrareligiousconflict in desacralizingthe monarchy.

Conceiving a Public
89
If Koselleckhad simplygeneralizedaboutthe Enlightenmentfroma small and

arbitrarysampleof thinkers,his book wouldnot continueto sendripplesthrough
eighteenth-century
studies.Critiqueand Crisis was seminalabove all in pointing
the way to a new understanding
of the Enlightenmentas a social movement.As
archaicas it may at firstseem, Koselleck'sview of Enlightenmentcriticismas a
modeof "bourgeois"self-assertiondid not implya crudelyreductionistapproach
to ideas as rationalizations
for class interests.Insteadhe saw criticismgrounded
in a new kind of social communicationor, in currentparlance, in a new
"sociability,"extendingto the aristocracybut given its ethos by an educatedand
propertiedbourgeoisie.Here again freemasonry,for all its fondness for occult
ritualsand feverish mysticism, typifieda largertrend;it belonged in the same
milieuas the academies,the literarysocieties, the clubs, and the coffeehouses.22
Whatis strikingfrom this distance, though, is that the promiseexceeded the
execution.As innovativeas Koselleck's methodologywas, it had to conformto
the terms of his indictment.Intenton reconstructingthe frameworkin which
"moraldualism" had emerged,Koselleck assumeda strictdichotomybetween
the publicsphereof the absolutiststateand the privatespace formedby the new
social milieus. The groups who constitutedthe "new elite," he argued, had
varyinginterestsbut shared"the fate of being unableto find an adequateplace
withinthe AbsolutistState'sexisting institutions"(pp. 62-66). In fact, though,
Koselleckhadnot definedabsolutismby referenceto its institutionalstructure,or
even by referenceto its official ideology. He had simply equatedthe absolutist
statewith Hobbes'stheoreticaljustificationfor its claims to sovereignty.
Koselleck'sdichotomytendsto dissolveundercloserscrutiny.The bureaucratic
apparatusof the new statedevelopedin partialfusionwiththe elites at the summit
of the corporatehierarchy.Absolutistauthorityand power flowed downward
throughthe court and its networksof aristocraticfamilies; througha corps of
bourgeois administrativeand judicial officials (many of its families recently
ennobled);throughthe universitiesthat trainedthem; throughthe established
churchandits clericalhierarchy;throughlocal office-holders.It was preciselythis
multitieredservice elite, more or less directly implicatedin the workings of
"absolutism,"that formed the center of gravityfor the Enlightenment'snew
sociability.By andlargethe new social spaces, masoniclodges prominentamong
them, were occupiedby the groupswho constitutedthe state. If they wereprivate
retreatsfrom absolutism,they were also its informalextensions.
22
On the new "sociability," see esp. Richardvan Dulmen, "Die Aufklarungsgesellschaften
in Deutschlandals Forschungsproblem,"Francia 5 (1977): 251-75, and Die Gesellschaft der
Aufkldrer:Zur burgerlichenEmanzipationund aufkldrischenKultur in Deutschland (Frankfurt
am Main, 1986); Ulrich Im Hof, Das gesellige Jahrhundert:Gesellschaft und Gesellschaftenim
Zeitalterder Aufklarung(Munich, 1982); Etienne Francois, ed., Sociabilite et socie6tebourgeoise
en France, en Allemagne et en Swisse, 1750-1850: Geselligkeit, Vereinswesenund burgerliche
Gesellschaft in Frankreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz, 1750-1850 (Paris, 1986).

90
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It is hardlysurprising,then, thatin the face of absolutismthe Enlightenment

assumedan inherentlyambivalentposition, combiningcriticaldetachmentand
symbioticidentification.The ambivalenceis conveyedwith rarenuancein Daniel
Roche'ssynthesesof his researchon the Frenchprovincialacademies.Mostof the
provincial academies were virtually exclusive domains of the service elite,
including its clerical and aristocraticbranches(ca. 20 percent of the entire
membership,includinghonorarymembers,were clergymen,and ca. 37 percent
were noblemen).These institutionsenteredthe eighteenthcenturyas embodiments of absolutism's"modernizedideologicaljustification"
-exemplifying a
"politics of the public welfare and of monarchicalservice" in their very
insistenceon excludingpolitical (as well as religious)dissension. Beneaththis
conformistsurface, the academies incubatedan alternativemode of political
discourse,basedon "egalitarian"procedures.On the eve of the Revolutionthey
were pulled betweentheir newly assumedrole as guides of popular"opinion"
andtheirassignedmissionas a "directingclass," the "ideologicalmanifestation
of enlightenedabsolutism."23
Unlikethe Frenchacademies,which were publicinstitutionssponsoredby the
Crown and responsive to its expectations, masonic lodges were intent on
constructingand sealing off a privatespace. The lodges also had a broaderand
deepersocial reach,usuallyincludingat leasta minorityof commercialpatricians
and, less often, artisansand shopkeepersfrom the lower bourgeoisranks. But
with the exception of some lodges in commercialmetropolises,French and
Germanfreemasonrywas dominatedby the same service elite that virtually
monopolizedthe Frenchacademies.24This mixed elite clearly needed a refuge
fromthe intricatepeckingorders,the rigidformalism,andthe incessantintrigues
23
Daniel Roche, "Die 'Soci6t6s de pensee' und die aufgeklartenEliten des 18. Jahrhunderts
in Frankreich," in Sozialgeschichte der Aufklarung in Frankreich, vol. 1, ed. Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht,Rolf Reichardt,and Thomas Schleich, (Munich, 1981), pp. 77-115, and "Acad6mies et politique au siecle des lumieres: Les enjeux pratiquesde l'immortalite," in Baker, ed.
(n. 1 above), pp. 331-44. See also the portrait of Jean-Sylvan Bailly in George Armstrong
Kelly, Victims,Authority,and the Terror:TheParallel Deaths of d'Orle'ans,Custine, Bailly, and
Malesherbes(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), pp. 149-210, 288-90.
24 Im Hof, pp. 163-225, is a succinct introductionto eighteenth-centuryfreemasonry.Roche,
"Die 'Soci6t6s de pens6e' und die aufgeklartenEliten des 18. Jahrhundertsin Frankreich,"uses
a sampling of French lodges to provide a thorough analysis of their social composition, with
attention to local variations in the structureof the educated and propertiedelite. In the court
towns of the territorialstates and ecclesiastical principalities of western and southwestern
Germany,it was often the court nobility (or indeed the princehimself!) who organizedthe lodge,
though bourgeois officials were included (see Winfried Dotzauer, "Freimaurergesellschaftenim
Rheingebiet:Die Anfange der Freimaurereiim Westen des Alten Reiches," in Freimaurer und
Geheimbundeim 18. Jahrhundertin Mitteleuropa, ed. Helmut Reinalter [Frankfurtam Main,
1983], pp. 140-76). On the social composition of Central European lodges, see Winfried
Dotzauer, "Zur Sozialstrukturder Freimaurerin Deutschlandim 18. Jahrhundert,"pp. 109-49;
and Eva Huber, "Zur Sozialstrukturder Wiener Freimaurerlogenim JosephinischenJahrzehnt,"
pp. 173-87, both in Reinalter,ed., Aufklarungund Geheimgesellschaften.For general observations on the social structureof English freemasonry,see Jacob, TheRadical Enlightenment(n. 19
above). MargaretC. Jacob's Living the Enlightenment:Freemasonry in 18th-CenturyEurope
(New York, 1992) appearedtoo late to be considered in this essay.

Conceivinga Public
91
of theirpublicworlds.It is all the morestriking,then, thatin the way it filledthat

needthroughfreemasonrythe elite continuedto identifywith absolutism.Implicit
in the principledexclusion of all political (as well as confessional)controversy
fromthe lodge was a condemnationof courtfactionalismandits cabals.And yet,
in its very rejection of the behind-the-scenesreality of absolutist politics,
freemasonryconfirmedabsolutist ideology. The lodges, like the academies,
idealizedthemselvesas microcosmsof the consensual,conflict-freeworld over
which absolutismaspiredto reign.
In its dense contextualism,and in the subtlety of its conclusions, Norbert
Schindler'sanalysisof Germanfreemasonryoffers strikingparallelsto Roche's
work. Schindlerremindsus thatour fascinationwith masonicsecrecy shouldbe
complementedwith attentionto the public posture that the lodges, like the
academies,assumedin ceremoniesand festivities. Focusingon the Johannisfest
stagedby the Bayreuthlodge in 1753, he reconstructsthe dialecticof "integration" and "exclusion" (Ausgrenzung)in freemasonry'srelationshipto the
"profaneworld," includingabsolutism.Preciselybecausemasonicfestivals, on
theirmost obvious symboliclevel, revealeda naturalimpulseto assimilateinto,
and to borrowprestigefrom, the "representativepublicness"of the court, their
subtextcouldbe "a subtlemorallecture."Theyprojectedan alternativeto courtly
hierarchyimplicitly,in the distinctiveways ceremonialformswere appropriated,
ratherthanin explicit moralcensure.
In this approachsecrecybecamecriticalto freemasonryas the instrumentof a
subtle dialectic, and not as the expressionof Koselleck's dichotomybetween
moralityand politics. Only when we appreciatethe efficacy of an "exercise and
routinizationthroughbehavioralpractice"do we comprehendwhy freemasonry
was able "to integrateinto the traditionalcultureand, from within it, to set in
motion that relatively unbroken,long-term learning process from which the
emergingbourgeoisculturefinally profited.'25 Schindler'sunderlyingmethodological point is thatthe ritualsof masonicbrotherhoodcannotbe understoodin
terns of the rationalargumentationand the "cognitive learningprocess" that
preoccupy conventional intellectual history. Ironically, the point applies to
criticism.
with the social milieusof Enlightenment
Koselleck,despitehis concemn
Koselleckinferredmeaningfrom-or, perhapsbetter,imposedmeaningon-the
sheerfact of masonicsecrecy,findingin it a heightenedexpressionof the same
25
Norbert Schindler, "Freimaurerkulturim 18. Jahrhundert:Zur sozialen Funktion des
Geheimnisses in der entstehendenburgerlichenGesellschaft," in Klassen und Kultur:SozialanthropologischePerspektivenin der Geschichtsschreibung,ed. Robert M. Berdahlet al. (Frankund Geheimnis im
furt am Main, 1982), pp. 206-11. See also NorbertSchindler, "Aufkldarung
Illuminatenorden,"in Geheime Gesellschaften,ed. PeterChristianLudz, WolfenbuttelerStudien
zur Aufklarung,vol. 5/1 (Heidelberg, 1979), pp. 203-29, and "Der Geheimbundder Illuminaten:Aufklarung,Geheimnis und Politik," in Reinalter,ed., Freimaurerund Geheimbundeim
18. Jahrhundertin Mitteleuropa, pp. 284-318. Schindler's approachhas been eclectic, but he
has been particularlyconcerned with advancing a Germantraditionof historical sociology. See
und offenlicheMeinung:Studienzur Soziologie der Offentlichesp. ErnestManheim,Aufkldarung
keit im 18. Jahrhundert,ed. NorbertSchindler(1933; reprint, Stuttgart, 1979), which contains
a wealth of ideas about eighteenth-centurysociability and public communication.

92
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puristcensureof absolutismthatseemedto pervadethe Enlightenment'sprogrammaticrhetoric.Shiftingour focus to the ethos embodiedin masonic sociability,
Schindlerreinsertssecrecyinto a field of symbolicpractices.The cult of secrecy
was, fromone angle, a kind of emulation,borrowingon the awe attachedto the
arcanumof absolutiststatecraftand on the glitterof courtentertainmentswith a
penchantfor self-mystificationand concealment.For that very reason, secrecy
could also be a "frictionless" way of walling off an alternativesocial space,
wherethe "social imagination"couldbe "unbounded"andthe mixedelite could
be socializedinto a recognizablymodernbourgeoisethos of moralself-discipline
and self-cultivation.26
This is why AdamWeishaupt'splanto supercedefreemasonrywith the orderof
Illuminati,as puerile as it was, has a largersignificance.Weishaupt'scurious
brainchildrepresents,in a heightenedand often caricaturedform, the tension
between critical detachmentand symbiotic identificationthat characterized
Enlightenmentsociabilityas a whole. Unlikefreemasonry,Weishaupt'sorderwas
to be a genuinelysecret society, keeping its very existence concealed. Carrying
the hermeticaspectsof masonicinitiationto an extreme,Weishauptalso planned
to make his recruitsthe object of an invisible tutelage on the path to selfenlightenment.Internal secrecy would create a pedagogical utopia, and its
productswould in turnbe the leavenfor universalmoralenlightenment.27
Weishaupthad concludedthat enlightenmentcould not be spreadsimply by
individualexample,as freemasonsstill assumed.But the significanceof his shift
to a collective strategyshouldnot be exaggerated.The 600-oddIlluminatiwere
drawnoverwhelminglyfromthe aristocraticandbourgeoisbranchesof the service
elite. Their mission as products of Weishaupt'sinvisible pedagogy was, in
Koselleck'sapt phrase,"the indirect,silentoccupationof the State"-a process
in whichtheabsolutiststatewouldbe "absorbedfromtheinside"by its ownpersonnel (pp. 91-95). Schindleraddsthatthisstrategy,even as it expresseda conviction
utopia
of moralsuperiorityto absolutistpolitics,projected"an administrative-elite
of the officialdomgatheredin the vestibulesof power."28The objectivewas not
to replaceabsolutism,butto purifyit morallyandtherebygive it a new legitimacy.
There remains the issue of the relationshipbetween freemasonryitself (as
opposed to the Illuminati)and revolutionaryideology. Did not the fictionalor
artificialequalityfabricatedwithinthe lodge walls preparethe way for the Jacobin
ideology of politicaldemocracy?Was not the "democratic"impulsein freema26
im 18. Jahrhundert,"pp. 211-16.

Schindler, "Freimaurerkultur
There was an official investigation in Bavaria, and it provokedboth apologias by some of
the order's faithful and exposes by disillusioned members. As a result, the order is far better
documented than freemasonry. A sample of the documentation is included in Richard van
Duilmen,Der Geheimbundder Illuminaten:Darstellung, Analyse, Dokumentation(Stuttgartand
Bad-Cannstatt, 1975). See also Agethen (n. 20 above); Schindler, "Der Geheimbund der
Illuminaten";Weis (n. 20 above); Michael W. Fischer, Die Aufklarungund ihr Gegenteil:Die
Rolle der Geheimbundein Wissenschaftund Politik (Berlin, 1982).
28 Schindler,"Der GeheimbundderIlluminaten,"pp. 300-302. See also Agethen,pp. 295-303.
27

Conceivinga Public
93
inversionof absolutism,at once negatingandmirroring

sonrya proto-totalitarian
absolutistsovereignty?It was above all in this sense that Koselleck saw the
Revolutionas the culminationof one era and the plungeinto another.Conceived
in an argumentwith Kant, Koselleck's indictmenthad found its most dramatic
proofin Rousseau'sconceptof the generalwill. Rousseau'ssearchfor "the unity
of moralityandpolitics" had endedwith the "total state," a formof democracy
"under constantpressureto create ideology." The Revolutionhad sucked all
partiesintothe ideologicalmaelstrom;buthis primeexhibitwas theJacobinparty,
with its Rousseauianideology of unconditionaland unmediatedpopularsovereignty (pp. 162-67).29
This lineage will be recognizableto anyone familiarwith Fran9oisFuret's
Penserla RevolutionFranVaise,publishednearlytwo decadesafterCritiqueand
Crisis. FuretadaptedAugustinCochin's politicallychargedapproachto prerevolutionary"societies of thought,"and he does not seem to have realized that
Koselleck(who also drewon Cochin'swork)hadalreadypointedthe way. Buthe
sharedwith Koselleck a teleologicalperspectivethat made the Enlightenment's
"democraticsociability,"particularlyin its masonic form, the progenitorof
modem totalitariandemocracy.30The new sociability generateda new and
"confused" concept of "opinion." In the vortex of the Revolution, opinion
becamethe "imaginaryabsolutepower" of "puredemocracy"- the fictionwith
which the Jacobindictatorshipjustifiedthe Terror.31
Again freemasonrybecomes the focal point for a verdicton the ideological
significanceof Enlightenmentsociability. Leaving aside the treacherousterm
"democracy"for a moment,we can at least ask whethertherewas an egalitarian
dimensionto the new sociabilityand the conceptof a publicit generated.Since
the seventeenthcentury,scholarsandgens de lettreshad imagineda "republicof
scholars"(or a "republicof letters")in which communicationwould be free of
29
Jeremy Popkin kindly allowed me to read his unpublishedpaper, "The Concept of Public
Opinionin the Historiographyof the FrenchRevolution:A Critique," which argues persuasively
for the centralityof a Rousseauianmodel in Koselleck's analysis of the eighteenth-centurypublic,
as in Furet's.
30 On the eve of the Revolution, Koselleck argued, French freemasons saw themselves as
'citizens of Masonic democracy' " (Critiqueand Crisis, p. 80). Still anothervariationon the
freemasonry-revolutionaryideology lineage, with particular attention to the Illuminati, is
James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the RevolutionaryFaith (New York,
1980), esp. pp. 92-99.
31 FrangoisFuret,Interpretingthe French Revolution, trans. ElborgForster(1978; translation,
Cambridge, 1981), esp. pp. 37-52. See also Ran Halevi, Les loges ma,conniquesdans la France
d'Ancien Re'gime:Aux origines de la sociabilite' de'mocratique(Paris, 1984), p. 1, and "Les
origines intellectuelles de la Revolution Frangaise: de la magonnerie au Jacobinisme," in
Frangois, ed. (n. 22 above), p. 195. Citing Koselleck as well as Furet, Halevi finds in French
freemasonrythe "embryonic forms" of "a social praxis that Jacobin France will push to its
extremepoint"-though he also concedes that we have yet to define the relationshipbetween the
masonic "system of disponible values" and "the social groupingit was intendedto model." For
sobering contrasts to this approach, see Pierre Chevallier, Histoire de la franco-ma,onnerie
fran,caise, vol. 1: La ma,connerie:tcole de l'egalite6,1725-1799 (Paris, 1974), esp. pp. 293305; LenardR. Berlanstein, The Barristers of Toulousein the EighteenthCentury(1740-1 793)
(Baltimoreand London, 1975), pp. 123-26.

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the termsof authorityanddeference,poweranddependence,thatpervadedsocial

relationsin the corporatehierarchyof the Old Regime. In this socially neutral
zone intellectualproperty,like landedpropertyin classicalrepublicanism,assured
equalityof citizenship.The sheercogency of ideas-regardless of the social rank
andpowerof theiradvocates-would yield a consensus.In the eighteenthcentury
this ideal extended its appeal to a wider social field-a proto-publicbinding
scholarlyinstitutions(the academies,the universities,etc.) and literarycircles to
the educatedstratawho formed a new audiencefor "useful" scholarshipand
belles lettres.One of its social loci in Francewas the salon, wherenew normsfor
polite conversationformedin reactionto the politesseof the court. As formalas
it mightappearto us, salonreparteewas seen as a relativelyegalitarianaltemative
to the courtlyobsessionwith rank.32
Freemasonrywas distinguishedby the self-consciousnesswith which it made
the new principleof communicationcentralto its ethos of "brotherhood"and
"friendship."The "republic"of the ideallodge was analogousto the idealpublic
(or republic)constitutedby print communication.Authorand readercould be
equalcitizensbecauseprint,as an impersonalmedium,abstractedtheirrelationship from the hierarchicaltermsof any specific social setting. The paradoxical
appealof masonicbrotherhoodwas that, in the obviouslycontrivedsettingof the
lodge, the samedomination-free
exchangecouldassumesocial andeven personal
forms. To recalla leitmotivof the era, lodge memberswere bondedhorizontally
by theirpure "humanity."
This elementof masonicideology can fairly be called egalitarian,thoughnot
withoutconsiderablequalification.The popularclasses were effectivelyexcluded
by explicit social restrictionsor, more often, by an implicit expectationof
respectabilitycombined with the need for connectionsand the means to pay
admissionfees. If the ritualizationof masonicbrotherhood
was designedto bridge
social chasms, it also insuredagainstthe kinds of informalcontactacrosssocial
boundariesthatmightbe all too intimate.In any case, masonicsociabilitywas,
afterall, a fictionor a gameconfinedto an artificiallysegregatedzone. The fiction
was viable precisely because the participantsput it behind them when they
reenteredsocial reality.Whenthese obviousinconsistenciesand limitationshave
been acknowledged,however,the fact remainsthatfreemasonrywas committed
to bringing together noblemen and educated and propertiedcommonerson
entirelynew termsof interaction.It was not simply that in principlethe lodges
ignoredthe legal privilegesattachedto rank. Their memberswere expectedto
transcendthe corporateidentities-the self-definitionsin terms of distinctive
linguisticstyles, tastes, and moralcodes-that legal inequalitydemarcated.
In the 1770s and 1780s freemasonsoccasionallydescribedthis "republican"
ethos as "democratic."33When contemporaryhistorianscharacterizethe inner
32
See, e.g., H6lscher, Offentlichkeitund Geheimnis (n. I above), pp. 92-95; van Duilmen,
"Die Aufkldrungsgesellschaften in Deutschland als Forschungsproblem" (n. 22 above),
pp. 256-57; Im Hof (n. 22 above), pp. 216-17. The new ideal of salon conversation and its
political implications are explored insightfully in Gordon (n. 1 above).
33 See, e.g., Helmut Reinalter, "Freimaurerei und Demokratie im 18. Jahrhundert,"in
Reinalter,ed., Aufkldrungund Geheimgesellschaften(n. 20 above), pp. 43-46.

Conceivinga Public
95
workingsof freemasonryas democratic,however,the word unavoidablycarries

the freightof politicalmeaningsthathave attachedto it since the Revolution.It
may be besidethe point, of course, thatfreemasonrydid not commititself to any
political alternativeto absolutism.Freemasonrywas not an incipientpolitical
partywith its own program,butits vision of a new moralorderdid havepolitical
implications.
Werethoseimplicationsdemocratic?If the issue is ever to be resolved,we will
haveto bringto centerstage a questionthatis usuallyrelegatedto the historyof
education.How was knowledgeto be distributedsocially?To put it anotherway,
In Enlightenment
how was accessto knowledgeto be structured?
discourse,virtue
(i.e., moralexcellence)was pairedwith knowledgeratherthanwith pedigreeor
inheritedproperty.The implicationwas that education,in the broadestsense,
legitimatedthe exercise of power. In the meritocraticversion of this pairing,
everyoneis, in principle,equallyentitledto highly valuedknowledge,thoughde
facto disadvantages-lack of the requisite wealth or of the requisitecultural
patrimony-severely restrictthe access of the great majority.The meritocratic
ideal may be said to justify modernsocial inequality,but it does so in a way that
has provedentirelycompatiblewith Westerndemocraticpolitics. But therewas
anotherway of drawingthe triangleof virtue, knowledge,and power-one that
marked a profoundly paternalisticand blatantly antidemocraticimpulse in
Enlightenmentdiscourse. An enlightenedelite not only claimed the right to
educate the masses on its own terms; it also reserved for itself a "higher"
knowledgethatwas too dangerousto disseminatebroadly,andit soughtto insure
againstbroaddisseminationof thatknowledgethroughformalcontrols.
The meritocraticideal was a powerfulbondingagentfor the aristocratsandthe
educatedand propertiedcommonersbroughttogetherin Enlightenmentsociability. As the new ethos helped fuse these elites, its ideal of enlightenedselfcultivationand self-disciplinealso markedtheir new sense of distancefrom the
crudityandviolence, the superstitionand "enthusiasm,"of plebeianculture.34It
is fromthis perspectivethat"popularenlightenment"becamea high priorityon
the reformagendasof the Frenchand GermanEnlightenments.What kind of
educationwouldtameplebeianculture,andindeedharnessit to the requirements
of a progressiveorder, without weakening traditionalconstraintson popular
behavior?The standardsolutionwas to administera safe dose of enlightenmentone thatwouldpurifybutnot eradicatetraditionalreligiousbeliefs andthatwould
avoida dangerousinflationof popularexpectationsby limitingthe lowerordersto
"useful" knowledgeof directrelevancein theirinheritedoccupationalspheres.35
34 See esp. HarryC. Payne, "Elite versus PopularMentality in the EighteenthCentury,"in

Studies in Eighteenth-CenturyCulture, ed. Roseann Runte (Madison, Wis., 1979), 8:3-32.
35 See, e.g., GerhardSauder, " 'VerhiiltnismassigeAufkldarung'-ZurburgerlichenIdeologie
am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts,"Jahrbuchder Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft9 (1974): 102-26; Eckhart
Hellmuth, "Aufklarung und Pressefreiheit: Zur Debatte der Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft
wahrend der Jahre 1783 und 1784," Zeitschriftfur historische Forschung 9 (1982): 315-35;
Werner Schneider, Die wahre Aufklarung: Zum Selbstverstdndnisder deutschen Aufkldrung
(Freiburgand Munich, 1974). ForFrenchvariationson the same theme, see HarveyChisick, The
Limits of Reform in the Enlightenment:Attitudestoward the Education of the Lower Classes in

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This strategyand its axiomaticassumption-that knowledgemustbe distributed

proportionallyand at a safe pace, underthe tutelarycontrolof an enlightened
elite-underlay the conventionaldistinctionbetweenan educatedpublic and the
uneducatedmass. The mission of an academy,d'Alembertobserved,was to be
"[an] organof reasonby duty and of prudenceby estate." It would not provoke
"the multitude"by "throwingthe truthbrusquelyinto (its) midst."36
Whendisgruntledlodge membersandoutsidecriticsattackedthe exclusiveness
of masonic secrecy, their grievance was that an invidious distinction, a line
dividingthe deservingand the unworthy,was being drawnthroughthe educated
public. Seen withinthe frameworkof the largersociety, masonicsecrecywas an
unintendedcaricatureof the Enlightenment'stutelary,quasi-hermeticimpulse.
The hermetictraditionassumedan attenuatedformin the effort to insurethat, in
a revelationcarefully staggeredover generations,masonic knowledge would
enlightenthe profaneworld without blinding it. Weishaupt'sstrategyfor the
Illuminatiwas a characteristically
extremevarianton this vision of enlightened
progress.The new orderwas to be, among other things, a kind of multidisciplinaryacademydevotedto discovering,preserving,andgraduallydisseminating
new truths.Forthe core insights, Weishauptdrew on the materialistpsychology
of Helvetiusand otherFrenchphilosophes.In his naively provincialvision, this
commonplaceidiomof the FrenchEnlightenmentformedthe kernelof the secret,
oracularwisdom to which initiates would ascend. Its corrosive attack on the
authority of traditionalreligion-the feature that made it so suitable for
Weishaupt'sidealof a morallyautonomousvanguard-madeit seemtoo dangerous
for mass consumptionin the foreseeablefuture.37
communication,since it
Freemasonrywas a safe experimentin domination-free
was confinedto a select brotherhoodandconductedin quasi-hermeticwithdrawal
from the profanemass. At least until the 1780s we find a paralleldualityin the
lodges' internalorganization,thoughit generatedanobvioustensionandprovoked
chargesof inconsistency.In the FrenchandGerman"systems," in contrastto the
Englishvariety,the progressin knowledgeand virtue was an intricatelygraded
ascent to masonic secrets. The "grades" (levels of initiation)stood in curious
juxtapositionto the "dignities"(thehierarchyof electedofficers),andtherewere
recurrenteffortsto harmonizethemwithelaborateconstitutionalstructures.In the
dignities, leadershiptook the form of a representativebody, accountableto its
electorate;in the grades,leadershipmeanta guidingauthority,meritingunquestioningobedienceby virtueof its superiorenlightenment.38
Eighteenth-CenturyFrance (Princeton, N.J., 1981); HarTyC. Payne, The Philosophes and the
People (New Haven, Conn., 1976).
36
Roche, "Academies et politique au siecle des lumieres" (n. 23 above), p. 340.
37 See esp. Agethen(n. 20 above), pp. 133-87; van Dulmen, "Die Aufldarungsgesellschaften
in
Deutschlandals Forschungsproblem,"
pp. 264-65; Fischer(n. 27 above), pp. 215-38.
38
Especially lucid on the mix of egalitarianand elitist impulses in freemasonryis Wolfgang
Hardtwig, "Eliteanspruchund Geheimnis in den Geheimgesellschaftendes 18. Jahrhunderts,"in
Reinalter, ed., Aufklarung und Geheimgesellschaften, pp. 63-86. The conflicts among the
Germanlodges are exploredin detail in Ludwig Hammermayer,Der WilhelmsbaderFreimaurerKonventvon 1782: Ein Hohe- und Wendepunkt
in der Geschichteder deutschenund europaischen

Conceivinga Public
97
Once again Weishauptand his acolytes, in their aspirationto supercede

freemasonry,heightenedone of its inherenttensions.Forthe Illuminatusthe road
to self-educationwas mappedby superiorswhom he did not know, and whose
interventionwas invisible.39Theexposureof thisinvisibleempireby the Bavarian
governmentprovokedan examinationof conscienceamongGermanfreemasons.
Wastherenot a laughablecontradictionbetweentheirown tutelaryhierarchies
with their implicationthat truth was a carefully guarded privilege and an
instrumentof manipulation-and the ideal of personalautonomyand interpersonal equalitythatmasonicbrotherhoodwas supposedto embody?
CanJacobinismbe saidto havegrownout of the masoniccrypto-public?-and,
if so, whereexactlydoes the continuitylie?40The issue is still farfromresolution,
andthatis in partbecauseit hingeson a priorquestion-one Furetposedapropos
Cochin.If the masonicethosdid give rise to a radicallydemocraticideology,why
did it do so in Franceand not elsewhere?This particularfiliationremainsto be
demonstrated.Admittedlythe concernwith reconstitutinga unitaryconsensuswith dispellingthe specterof open contestationbetweenconflictingintereststhatbecameobsessivein Jacobinismcan also be foundin freemasonry,as in other
formsof Enlightenmentsociability.But are we justifiedin puttinga democratic
label on the masonicversionof this unitaryideal?We cannotsimplypoint to the
Geheimgesellschaften(Heidelberg, 1980). For an explicit corrective to Furet's argument, see
GerardGayot, "Les relationsde pouvoir dans la franco-maconneriefrancaise, 1750-1850," in
Frangois, ed. (n. 22 above), pp. 203-13; GerardGayot, ed., La franc-maConneriefran!aise:
Texteset pratiques(XVJIIe-XIXesiecles) (Paris, 1980). In Gayot's view, freemasonry'sinternal
hierarchiesreproducedthe hierarchicalprinciples of the old regime; this oversimplifiesmasonic
elitism and overlooks its modern features.
39 It is striking that Adolph von Knigge protested against Weishaupt's despotic system of
subordinationwithin the order; but, like Weishaupt, he assumed that "only so much [of the
order's wisdom] would have been communicatedto the world as would have seemed useful in
each era, with regard to the need for and the degree of enlightenment" (quoted in Agethen,
p. 184).
40 Ironically, recent monographic research has told us much more about freemasonry in
England, the Netherlands, and the German states than about the French variety. Jacob (The
Radical Enlightenment [n. 19 above]) focuses on a group of refugees and publishers in the
Netherlandsand emphasizes their heady mix of pantheism and republicanism. But Jacob also
drawsa sharpcontrastbetween her small cohort of radicalsand "official" masonry,and she links
the radicals to the militantly anti-Christian(but not republican)thought of d'Holbach's coterie
ratherthan to the "gutter Rousseauism" that contributedto Jacobin ideology. See also Alan C.
Kors, D'Holbach's Circle:An Enlightenmentin Paris (Princeton,N.J., 1977), which emphasizes
that d'Holbach and his "circle" were comfortably integrated into le monde and that their
philosophical assault on Christianityshould not be mistaken for social or political radicalism.
Also relevant is research on the relationshipbetween freemasonryand Jacobinism in Central
Europe, as exemplified in Helmut Reinalter,ed., Jakobiner in Mitteleuropa(Innsbruck, 1977).
Reinalter (n. 33 above), pp. 50-51, concludes that in Central Europe there was a "tight
connection" between Jacobinism and freemasonry,though in the latter the "understandingof
democracy" was "moral" rather than "political." The connection becomes problematic,
however, when one recalls thatthe greatmajorityof CentralEuropeanfreemasonsdid not become
Jacobins. In any case it is doubtfulthat Reinalter'sJacobins were democraticin the same sense
as theirnamesakes. On the need to maintaina strictdefinitionof Jacobinism,see Vierhaus(n. 20
above), p. 37.

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fact that masonic and Jacobinideology converge in justifying a monopoly of

power (or at least of "imaginary"power)by a small elite. The issue is not the
effect but the logic of justification.Jacobinism,afterall, contradictedfreemasonry's elitistdirigismenot only with its commitmentto popularsovereigntybutalso
with its tendencyto equaterepublicanvirtue with the naturalsimplicityof the
uneducated.It upturned,in other words, the meritocraticideal and its social
distributionof power. As the Jacobins' internal war on "conspiracy" and
"aristocracy"gained momentum,the institutionsof Enlightenmentsociability
became highly vulnerabletargets.There could be no secrecy, and indeed very
little privacy,in the Jacobinvision of a completelytransparent
body politic.4'
If a straightline connectsthe republicof the lodge to the Republicof Virtue,
the transitionfromthe one to the otherrequireda dramaticleap. More likely we
will have to explaina wrenchinginversionof values.
Like Koselleck,Habermasconceivedof historicalanalysisas an explorationof
pathogenesis;but, as a second-generation
practitionerof the FrankfurtSchool's
Critical Theory, he judged the Cold War environmentof the 1950s from a
radicallydifferentperspective.Drawingon his mentors'eclectic neo-Marxism
and neo-Freudianism,
Habermassoughtto explainthe hegemonicascendancyof
the modern"cultureindustry"withina long-termhistoryof structuralchange.42
Hence in his diagnosisthe ideologicalsyndromewas not that rationalcriticism
had degeneratedinto utopian fanaticismbut that modern capitalist societies
precludedthe very possibilityof seriouscriticism.With the rise of commercialized massculture,publiccommunicationhadbecomea narcotic,andit seemedto
seep intoeverynookandcrannyof privateas well as publiclife. By the late 1950s
the UnitedStates,the most advancedconsumersociety, seemedto haveentereda
completely anaesthetizedstate; and the FederalRepublic, on the crest of its
economicmiracle,seemedreadyandeagerto follow. WhenHabermasthoughtof
the totalitarianfuture,he saw an endlesssea of suburbanhomes. Theirinhabitants
staredout at him vacantlyfrom the "floodlit privacy" of consumerism.They
spenta good deal of their"leisure" time being inundated,in bovineisolation,by
commercialson the boob tube.
StructuralTransformation
has been incorporatedpiecemealinto the historical
literature;even in eighteenth-centurystudies, where its impact has been most
41 Furet's reworking of Cochin's argumentis
dubious, but his analysis of Jacobin ideology
remains illuminating. See also Nathans (n. 1 above), pp. 640-42; Jack R. Censer, Prelude to
Power: The Parisian Radical Press, 1789-1791 (Baltimore, 1976); Kelly (n. 23 above), esp.
pp. 18-23, 281 -98; LynnHunt, Politics, Culture,and Class in the French Revolution(Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1984); Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of
Politics in the French Revolution(Ithaca, N.Y., 1986); Brian C. J. Singer, Society, Theoryand
the French Revolution:Studiesin the RevolutionaryImaginary(New York, 1986). Also relevant
is Gary Kates, The "Cercle Social," the Girondins, and the French Revolution(Princeton,N.J.,
1985), pp. 89-92, which emphasizes the differences between the secrecy and elitism of Old
Regime freemasonryand the democraticideology developed during the Revolution.
42 Especially relevant is Max Horkheimerand Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
trans. John Cumming (1944; reprint, New York, 1972), pp. 120-67.

Conceiving a Public
99
dramatic,therehas been little appreciationof the sweep and the intricacyof its
argument.43
HabermashadreadCritiqueand Crisis, andit may haveencouraged
him to elaboratehis own ironic varianton the historicaldialectic between the
publicandthe private.In his version,as in Koselleck's,the publicemergedfrom
the private;but it was the expanding capitalist sphere of "commodity and
informationexchange,"and not the fracturedlandscapeof religiousbelief, that
acquired a new public status under the aegis of the absolutist state. The
mercantilistpolicies of the earlymodemerademarcatedthis sphereas the private
"addressee"of publicauthorityand, in so doing, gave it a new publicrelevance.
The result was a momentousshift in the meaning of "publicness" and
"publicity."In the publicsphereformedby the absolutiststateandthe corporate
hierarchyon which it rested,the functionof publicitywas to exhibitthe political
authoritythatadheredto corporatestatus.The social worldof the princelycourt,
displayingitself before a mass of excluded spectators,epitomizedthis "representativepublicness."By aimingto stimulatecapitalistinitiative,andby relying
on detailedregulationto do so, the mercantiliststatecreateda publicthatwould
becomecriticalof its own interventionism.Withthe rise of a literarymarketand
a bourgeoisreadingpublicfromthe late seventeenthcenturyonward,the private
societyof marketexchangeformeditself into a networkof publiccommunication,
generatedits own "universal" moral standardsthrough the communicative
process, and eventually applied those standardscritically to the state and its
policies. The "addressee"of state authoritybecame its "adversary"(Kontrahenten),the tribunalto which it was morallyaccountable.
directsour attentionto an underlyingsocial change
StructuralTransformation
thatKoselleckhadignored.AdaptingHannahArendt'sperspectivein TheHuman
Condition,Habermasgroundedthe emergenceof a criticalpublic in a startling
revaluationof the "private" household.44The ideal citizen of the Greekpolis
exercisedhis freedomin publiclife by virtueof his statusas householdpatriarch,
butthe householditself-the worldof the women, children,andslaves-was the
privatesphereof necessity,governedby the unbendingimperativesof biological
and social reproduction.As an expandingmarketexchange "burstout of the
confinesof the householdeconomy,"a new family type-the bourgeois"conjugal family"-differentiated itself from both material productionand social
reproductionby virtue of its relative independence. Commodity exchange
detacheddomesticlife fromthe verticalhierarchiesof the corporatestructureand
at the sametime gave it a new measureof autonomyvis-A-visthe state. Whathad
beenthe netherworldof coercionbecamean "intimate"retreatof "saturatedand
free interiority"(p. 28).
As illusoryas the bourgeoiscult of domesticitymay have been, its "publicoriented subjectivity" yielded a moral ideal-an ideal of purely "human"
freedom and self-realization-with claims to universal and hence to public
43 A lucid synopsis and critique of StructuralTransformationis Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The
Institution of Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1982), pp. 247-49. For a trenchant
reformulation of Habermas's argument about the literary public, see Terry Eagleton, The
Function of Criticism:From "The Spectator" to Post-Structuralism(London, 1984).
4Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), esp. pp. 22-78.

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applicability.The ideal originally entered and shaped public communication

throughthe literarymarketandits new fictionalgenre,the novel. As the worldof
bourgeoisdomesticityreflectedon itself, its values informedfiction and in turn
acquiredauthorityas rationalnormsin the publicdiscussionof fiction.In England
the next stage was alreadyunderwayby the earlyeighteenthcentury;the "public
of literaryreasoning" was developing into a "politically reasoningpublic,"
structuredarounda nationalrepresentativebody and officially recognizedas its
"discussionpartner."
In its failureto unmaskitself, Koselleckhad charged,the eighteenth-century
WhatstruckHabermaswas
conceptof a criticalpublichadbeenself-contradictory.
the consistency,andindeedthe credibility,of the sameconcept.The demandthat
governmentbe accountableto publicopinionwas groundedin, andlegitimatedby,
two eminentlyKantianaxioms.Judgmentcouldbe rationalandhenceauthoritative
only when it was formedin and throughpublicdiscussion;and such discussion,
if it was to yield conclusionsof universalapplicability,hadto be in principleopen
to all.45
How had this classic "liberal" model of the bourgeoispublicspheredegenerated into the "sham public" of the twentiethcentury?By the mid-nineteenth
centuryit was apparentthatthe prerequisitesof propertyandeducationeffectively
disqualifiedthe great mass of the population.As the masses were drawninto
politics, the tensionbetweenabstractinclusivenessandde facto closurebecamea
blatantcontradiction;liberalslike Mill and Tocqueville,fearingthata democratizedpublicopinionwouldbe the instrumentof "compulsiontowardconformity,"
soughtto concentrateauthorityin moreor less esotericpublics. Fromthe 1870s
onward,with the rise of large-scalecorporatecapitalism,the structuralcontext
changeddrastically.Therewere now obvious conflictsof interestamong social
groups,and they had to be mediatedby the "social-welfarestate" as well as by
new corporateenterprises.Penetratedby public and quasi-publicbureaucracies,
the familyexchangedits genuineprivacy-the kind on which the autonomyof a
critical public had rested-for an illusory privacy as a passive consumerof
newspapers
services.The rise of the cultureindustry-first with mass-circulation
and periodicals,then with the electronicmedia-completed this transformation
and "hollowed out" the substanceof the classic public. The originallycritical
functionof publicitybecamea "manipulative"function,and the public sphere,
in this travestyof itself, became a vast platformfor advertisingand public
relations.While the "scope" of the public sphere"is expandingimpressively,"
Habermasobserved, "its function has become progressively insignificant"
(p. 4).
still readsas
Nearlythirtyyearsafterits appearance,StructuralTransformation
a trenchantcritiqueof our commercializedcultureand its publicityindustry.The
critiquehas becomeall the morerelevant,in fact, as politicalpackaginghas been
45 Ironically,the concept of a "public sphere" that Habermasfound in the eighteenthcentury
was more Kantian than Koselleck's, despite the latter's starting point in Kant's Critiques. To
appreciatethe difference, cf. Habermas's discussion of Rousseau (StructuralTransformation,
pp. 96-99) with Koselleck's (Critiqueand Crisis, pp. 162-67).

Conceivinga Public
101
reducedto soundbites and photo opportunities.The issue here, however,is the

persuasivenessof Habermas'shistoricalargument.In StructuralTransformation,
as in Critiqueand Crisis, the historicalcenter of gravityis eighteenth-century
Europe. To Habermasthe classic public that emerged in England and, less
dramatically,in France and the Germanstates markeda unique moment in
collective self-awareness.From its summitwe could appreciatehow steep the
slide into our currentnarcoticstatehad been.
It was this perspectivethat drew the fire of Germancritics in the 1960s and
1970s. While liberalsfaultedHabermas'sleftist utopianism,Marxistsfrom the
New Left regrettedhis failure to expose the classic bourgeois public as an
ideologicalcamouflagefor class hegemony.Both sides foundhim guiltyof elitist
nostalgia,andthatverdictwas not entirelyoff the mark.46Like Adornoandother
FrankfurtSchool luminaries,the young Habermascombinedtwo personae.One
was the leftist critic, unmaskingbourgeoishegemonywith an eclectic but uncompromisingneo-Marxism.The otherwas the academicmandarinwho, for all
his skepticismaboutthe pretensionsof "high" culture,remainedattachedto the
literaryand philosophicaltraditionin which he had been reared. From both
standpoints,thecommercializedmasscultureof his own eraseemedcontemptible;
but the artifactsof the classic bourgeoispublic were anothermatter.
Habermasacknowledgedthat the internalstructureof the property-owning
bourgeoisfamily reflectedits subordinationto coercive marketforces. Nonetheless, he insisted,the new idealsof personalautonomyand self-cultivation"were
surely more thanjust ideology." Bourgeoisdomestic intimacyhad produceda
credibleand hence efficaciousillusion of individualfreedom-one which, in its
"transcendence"of the constraintsimmanentin social reality, revealed "the
elementof truththatraisedbourgeoisideology above ideology itself" (pp. 46value-this capacityto evoke a purely
48).47The expressionsof thistranscendent
humanideal, with potentiallyuniversalapplication-includedRousseau'sPour
Heloise, Kant's CriticalPhilosophy,and the literaryclassicism of Goethe and
Schiller. If the leftist critic approachedcanonicaltexts with an eye for their
"bourgeois"self-delusions,the academicmandarinstill reveredthem as monumentsto the authoritativevalue of high culture.48
Nostalgiaaside, Habermashad a methodologicalreason for surroundingthe
classic publicwith an auraof sanctity.If he had simplytakenhis cue fromKant,
he wouldhaveconstructedan a priorimodelof rationaldiscussionandwouldhave
pilloriedthe "sham"modempublicin the lightof its standards.Butto this student
of Adomosucha purely"transcendent"critiquewouldhavebeenas self-deluding
as a merely "immanent"one. The dialecticalchallengewas to fuse immanence
and transcendence.Habermassought to achieve this fusion with the genuinely
46 Hohendahl,pp. 250-68, conveniently summarizesliberalas well as Marxistcriticisms. On
the Germanpolitical background,see ibid., pp. 30-39.
47 As Habermasacknowledged, Max Horkheimerhad attributedthis duality to the bourgeois
family (ibid., p. 48, n. 48).
48 Habermas'sreverencebecame quite explicit when he contrastedthe reading societies of the
late eighteenthcentuiryand modem book clubs (StructuralTransformation,pp. 165-67).

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historicalsociologythatis rarelyfoundin theworkof his Frankfurt

Schoolmentors.
If therewas any escape fromthe soporificembraceof the cultureindustry,it lay
in recoveringtheemancipatory
potentialof an actualhistoricalmoment,albeitone
thatKant'sCriticalPhilosophyhadrecordedwithuniqueclarity.Bourgeoisculture
was to be confrontedwith its own vision of transcendence,which lay in its own
self-generatednorms.49 Hence the eighteenth-century
public had to retain its
normativeauthority,even thoughinherentcontradictionshad madeits disintegration inevitable.
Historiansshouldbe glad Habermaschose this route. In the last threedecades
interdisciplinary
researchhas become a matterof course, but few scholarshave
matchedHabermas'sskill in integratingcontributionsfrom a wide range of
disciplinesinto a coherentargument.Indeed,his eclecticismled him into several
new areasof researchthat have since become growthindustries.The historical
sociology of literature;the historyof the family;the historyof the book and of
reading;the historyof the press;the historyof popularcultureandconsumerismin all these fields, andperhapsin a few more, will findsomethingto
practitioners
ponderin StructuralTransformation.
exercisehas come to serveas an
Unfortunately,this ambitiousinterdisciplinary
all-purposeand all too convenientbackdrop,especiallyfor literaryscholarswho
wish to set theircontributionswithina sociohistoricalcontextbut preferto avoid
moundsof recentlyproducedmonographs.CanHabermas'sbackdropbe adjusted
to suit the new foregrounddetail, or has it outlivedits usefulness?
Manyissues are packedinto this question,but, on the criticalones, we can at
leastexplainwhy Habermas'selaborateinterpretivescaffoldis tottering.To Habermasliterarysubjectivitytransmutedthe valuesof domesticintimacyinto public
norms.This view of the privateand the publicmay proveto be present-minded,
or at least one-sided. Ourcurrentbinaryoppositionbetweenthe public and the
intimatedoes indeed have its origin in the eighteenthcentury, but in much
discoursethe more relevantdichotomystill lay betweenthe
eighteenth-century
universalityof publiccommunicationandthe particularity
(orpartiality)of private
communitiesand institutions(includingmany we would considerpublic).50
A closely related issue is whether Habermasdid justice to the symbiotic
relationshipbetweenthe "literary"andthe "political"in the eighteenthcentury.
On the Continentas well as in England,he argued, the political public grew
49 Especially relevant is Theodor Adorno, Prisms: Cultural Criticism and Society (London,
1967), pp. 19-34. See also Hohendahl, pp. 32-34, 242-46; and Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 111-60.
50 See esp. Ozouf (n. 1 above). The "intimate"and the "particular,"it shouldbe noted, are not
mutually exclusive; and if there is a present-mindedemphasis to Habermas's argument, it is
nonethelessa valuablecorrectiveto ourtendencyto equatethe publicwiththe politicalandthe private
with the unpolitical.See esp. the applicationof Habermas'spublic/privatedistinctionin SaraMaza,
"DomesticMelodramaas PoliticalIdeology:The Caseof the Comtede Sanois,"AmericanHistorical
Review 94, no. 5 (December 1989): 1249-64. I was fortunateto read Dena Goodman's "Public
Sphereand PrivateLife: Towarda Synthesis of CurrentHistoriographicalApproachesto the Old
Regime" (LouisianaStateUniversity,1991, typescript),which furtherelucidatesHabermas'sview
of the eighteenth-century
interactionsbetween the public and the private.

Conceivinga Public
103
naturallyout of a literaryVorform-thoughthe timingof this two-stagesequence

varied. "Literaryreasoning" had lacked explicit political content, but it had
generateduniversalmoralnormsfrom which governmentcould not be exempt.
Habermasdid notintenda rigiddichotomy;one of the advantagesof his approach,
in fact, is thatit alertsus to the implicitpoliticalsignificanceof fictionaltextsthat
focus on privateexperienceand avoid public issues. But is his basic distinction
betweenthe literaryand the politicalviable?The distinctionseems commonsensical enoughwhen the referentsare, on one side, intimateepistolarynovels and,
on the other,an openlypartisanpress;butit tendsto blurwhenwe enterthe lower
reachesof the literarymarket.We encounterhybridforms, and they make us
wonderwhetherHabermasunderestimatedthe immediatepolitical volatilityof
eighteenth-century
literarysubjectivity.
One such hybridis the judicialme'moire,as it evolved in the Frenchscandal
trialsof the 1770s and 1780s. SaraMazafindsthatin the 1780s politicalthemes
becamemoreexplicit in the me'moiresandthatat the sametime a theatricalstyle
gave way to the narrativestrategyof the autobiography-confession.
Now the
lawyer's politically chargedjudgmentswere legitimatednot only by his legal
expertisebutalso by the intimaciesof his stylizedintrospection.This is a case, we
might conclude, in which public discoursewas politicized in and throughan
intensifiedliterary subjectivity.51 And how are we to classify the "political
pornography"churnedout by France'sGrub Street scribblersfrom the 1770s
onward?This quasi-fictionalpamphletliteratureexposed sexual exploits as well
as politicalintrigues.Like Habermas'snovels, it transmutedintimatedetailinto
publicdiscourse.WhereHabermascreditedliteraturewith articulatingthe moral
normsby which governmentwould in due coursebe judged, however,the detail
of the expose was politicallychargedin a moredirectandmoresubversivesense.
Now the functionof publicitywas to unmaskthe corruptionof an entireestablishment,and therebyto call into questionits very rightto exist.52
The largerissue concernsthe definingcharacteristicsof a "political" public
and the timingof its emergence.In Habermas'scomparativetimetable,England
completedthe transitionto a politicalpublic as early as the firstdecadesof the
Maza, "Le tribunalde la nation" (n. 19 above).
See esp. Darnton, "The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature" (n. 19
above). Also relevantare Robert Darnton, "Trade in the Taboo:The Life of a ClandestineBook
Dealer in PrerevolutionaryFrance," in The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of
Literaturein Eighteenth-CenturyEurope, ed. Paul J. Korshin(Philadelphia, 1976), pp. 11-83,
and "Philosophy underthe Cloak," in Revolutionin Print: The Press in France 1775-1800, ed.
Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), pp. 27-49. By
emphasizing the pornographicvenom of prerevolutionarylibelles, and by tracing them to the
frustrationsof an alienated "Grub Street" intelligentsia, Darntonmay distort the largerpicture.
His view has been challenged forcefully in Jeremy Popkin, "PamphletJournalismat the End of
the Old Regime," Eighteenth-CenturyStudies 22, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 351-67, which argues
that the libelles of the 1770s and 1780s were vehicles of "substantive political polemic,"
representing"the diversity of elements within France's elites willing to appeal to the growing
force of public opinion to settle their disputes" (pp. 360, 363). See also Darnton's view of the
literaryintelligentsiain his "The Facts of LiteraryLife in Eighteenth-CenturyFrance," in Baker,
ed. (n. 1 above), pp. 261-91; and Nathans(n. 8 above), pp. 629-31.
5'
52

104
La Vopa
eighteenthcentury.In France,on the otherhand, an equivalentpublichad begun

to emerge at mid-centurybut had not been "effectively institutionalized"by
1789; and in Germanyits emergencewas still more belated. As valid as this
comparativegeneralizationprobablywas, it was all too easy; it seemedto obviate
the needto developdenselycontextualizedcriteriafor politicization.The German
Enlightenmentprobablydeservesits reputationfor politicaltimidity,but some of
its more successfulpublicistshad clear (thoughmoderate)agendasfor constitutionalreform.53Moreimportant,the entireprocessin whichthe educatedGerman
elite constituteditself as a public is now being characterizedas a "political
mobilization"that was well underwayby 1789.54
The morearrestingcase is France.In Habermas'snarrativeit was not untilthe
early1780s,whenNeckerprovokeda debateaboutthebudgetcrisis,that"a breach
[opened]in the absolutistsystemfor a publicspherein thepoliticalrealm"(p. 69).
We now know that the parlements,mixing Jansenistmilitancywith natural-law
jurisprudence,had mounteda formidableconstitutionaloppositionto absolutism
since the 1750s and that an increasinglyintense "politics of contestation"had
Frenchpress
developedaroundthatopposition.55Studentsof the prerevolutionary
would not agree with Habermas'sobservationthatcensorshiphad preventedthe
developmentof "a politicaljournalism"(p. 57). In JeremyPopkin'spersuasive
analyses,as in JackR. Censer'sinitialexploration,officiallytoleratednewspapers
like the Gazettede Leydebecamepoliticalandindeedoppositionaldespitethemselves in the final decades of the ancien re'gime.Committedto an image of
"authoritiesfunctioningwithoutproblem,"they nonethelessreportedand even
favoredthe dissentspearheadedby theparlements.Popkinhas also demonstrated
that in two other widely disseminatedpublications-Mairobert'sJournalhistorique (begun in 1771) and Observateur anglois and Linguet's Annales politiques
(1777-88)-journalism becameovertly ideologicaland indeed "genuinelysub53 See, e.g., Ursula A. Becher, Politische Gesellschaft: Studien zur Genese burgerlichen
Offenlichkeitin Deutschland (Gottingen, 1978); James van Horn Melton, "From Enlightenment
to Revolution: Herzberg, Schlozer, and the Problem of Despotism in the Late Aufkldarung,"
CentralEuropeanHistory 12, no. 2 (1979): 103-23; Diethelm Klippel, "The True Concept of
Liberty: Political Theory in Germany in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century," in The
Transformationof Political Culture:England and Germanyin the Late EighteenthCentury,ed.
EckhartHellmuth (Oxford, 1990), pp. 447-66.
54 See esp. Hans Erich B6deker, "Prozesse und Strukturenpolitischer Bewusstseinsbildung
der deutschen Aufklarung," in Aufkldrungals Politisierung-Politisierungals Aufkldrung,ed.
Hans Erich Bodeker and Ulrich Hermann (Hamburg, 1987), pp. 10-31, and "Journals and
Public Opinion: The Politicization of the German Enlightenment in the Second Half of the
EighteenthCentury,"in Hellmuth, ed., pp. 423-45. On the variety of political (and unpolitical)
postures among the German intelligentsia, see also Rudolf Vierhaus, ed., Burger und Burgerlichkeit im Zeitalter der AuJflarung(Heidelberg, 1979).
ss Carroll Joynes, "The Gazette de Leyde: The Opposition Press and French Politics,
1750-1757," in Censer and Popkin, eds. (n. 1 above), pp. 133-69; PierreRetat, L'attentatde
Damiens: Discours sur l'evenement au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1979); Dale K. Van Kley, The
Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Regime, 1750-1770 (Princeton, N.J., 1984),
and "The JansenistConstitutionalLegacy in the French Revolution," in Baker, ed., pp. 169202; William Doyle, "The Parlements,"in Baker, ed., pp. 157-68.

Conceivinga Public
105
versive."56And such examples, it should be stressed, keep us at the level of

officiallytoleratedpublications.Habermaswas awarethatthe Frenchpublicalso
hada largeappetitefor clandestineliterature,suppliedfromthe "fertilecrescent"
of extraterritorial
printinghouses;but, in theabsenceof detailedresearch,he could
not have realizedthe scale and importanceof a clandestineliterarymarketthat
includedradicallyanti-Christian
philosophicaltractsas well as scabrousattackson
the royal family and the court.57
Thepointis not thatHabermas'scomparativescheduleis in needof adjustment,
but that the fundamentalterms of his comparativeanalysis are misleading.
StructuralTransformationreminds us that until recently Marxist historians
appliedthe sameinstitutionalcriteriato gaugepoliticization(or politicalmodernization)as did theirliberalantagonists,albeit from a radicallydifferentvantage
point.TakingEnglandas the "modelcase" (Habermas'sterm)andthepacesetter,
they assumedthat a public became political as it developedinto a "discussion
partner"for a nationalrepresentative
body. In its politicalmaturitysuch a public
reflectedthe structuralevolution of a parliamentaryand constitutionalgovernment, with its organizedpartiesandincreasinglydemocraticelectoralpolitics. If
France(or indeedin
we approachthe formationof a publicin eighteenth-century
eighteenth-century
Germany)in searchof this institutionalpattern,we will be
blind to what was politicalaboutit. On the Continent,as in England,political
meaningswere contested;but the social and institutionalconfigurationsvaried,
and hence the termsof contestationswere, quite simply,different.
It is not surprisingthatHabermasglossed over salientdifferencesin national
context. His comparativeframeworkrested on the assumptionthat the critical
factor-the axis for a comparativeanalysis-was the developmentof a capitalist
marketeconomyin clearlydiscerniblestages.The inadequaciesof this single-axis
approachare nowheremore apparentthan in his social typology. Fromthe late
56
Jack R. Censer, "Die Presse des Ancien Regime im Ubergang-eine Skizze," in Die
Franzosische
als Bruch,desgesellschaftlichen
Revolution
Bewusstseins,ed. ReinhartKoselleck
and Rolf Reichardt (Munich, 1988), pp. 127-52, and Censer's further remarks in ibid.,
pp. 179-81; Jeremy D. Popkin, "The PrerevolutionaryOrigins of Political Journalism," in
Baker, ed., pp. 203-23, "The Gazette de Leyde and French Politics under Louis XVI," in
Censer and Popkin, eds., pp. 75- 132. Also relevantare Popkin's remarkson the partisanshipof
the Gazette in his News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac's Gazette de Leyde
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1989). On the eighteenth-centuryperiodical press, see also Stephen Botein,
Jack R. Censer, and HarrietRitvo, "The Periodical Press in Eighteenth-CenturyEnglish and
French Society: A Cross-CulturalApproach," ComparativeStudies in Society and History 23
(1981): 464-90; Jean Sgard, "Journale und Journalistenim Zeitalter der Aufklarung," in
Gumbrecht, Reichardt, and Schleich, eds. (n. 23 above), 2:3-33; Pierre Retat, ed., Le
journalisme d'ancien riegime(Lyon, 1982); Claude Labrosseand PierreRetat, eds., L'instrument
p&riodique:La fonction de la presse au XVIIIe si&le (Lyon, 1985); Nina Rattner Gelbart,
Feminineand OppositionJournalismin Old RegimeFrance: "Le Journal des Dames" (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1987); Daniel Moran, Towardthe Centuryof Words:Johann Cotta and the
Politics of the Public Realm in Germany, 1795-1832 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990).
57 See esp. Damton, The Literary Undergroundof the Old Regime (n. 19 above); and, for
needed correctives to Damton's approach, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Print Culture and Enlightenment Thought(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986).

106
La Vopa
nineteenthcenturyonward,Habermasargued,the public spherebecamea sham

as it expandedto encompassnew strataof middle-classfamilies, dependenton
salariedemploymentin governmentand in corporatebureaucracies.What was
lost was preciselywhat had given the classic bourgeoispublicits independence:
the powerto disposeof propertyin marketexchange.
England,
This meaningof "bourgeois"is apt enough for eighteenth-century
where periodicalsand newspapersappealedto a readingpublic crowdedwith
free professionals,merchants,shopkeepers,andcraftsmen.58
gentlemen-farmers,
But, as Habermasrealized,the bourgeoisied'ancienre'gimehad a quitedifferent
profilein Franceandthe Germanstates.Whetherwe turnto the subscriptionlists
for the quartoedition of the Encyclopedieor to the membershiprolls for the
readingsocieties that sproutedacross the Germanlandscapein the 1780s and
1790s, we encounterthe dominantpresenceof the serviceelite.5 The greatbulk
of readers were governmentofficials, judicial officials and lawyers, local
office-holders,clergymen, professors, and teachers. These groups occupied a
world of intricatehierarchiesand multifacetedincomes, where the disposal of
capitalistwealthwas inseparablefromcorporateprivilegeandthe publicsecurity
of office (particularlywhenthe office was a heritableproperty,as was usuallythe
case in France).Neithervariantson a commercialbourgeoisienorearlyspeciesof
the salariedmiddleclass, they simply defy a one-dimensionaltypology.
For Habermas, as for Koselleck, there was something egalitarianabout
publicity.WhereasKoselleck tracedthe egalitarianspirit to
eighteenth-century
Enlightenmentsociability,Habermasfocused on the communityformedby the
new print market. And where Koselleck identified an incipient pathology,
Habermasfound an unfulfilledpromise. As "bourgeois" as it was, Habermas
insisted,the publiccommunicationof literarysubjectivitythroughprinteffected
a new kind of purely human intimacy,insulatedfrom the hierarchicalpower
relationshipsthat pervadedsocial reality.Likewise the issues discussedbecame
"general"not merelyin theirsignificancebut also in theiraccessibility;no one
could be barredlegally from fulfillingthe prerequisitesfor participation.Within
a Kantian(andliberal)frameworkof legal equality,marketcompetitionmadethe
acquisitionof propertyand educationpossible in principlefor all. Hence it was
58
Botein, Censer,and Ritvo. This thoroughlyresearchedcomparativeanalysis concludes that,
in contrast to the "aristocratic" orientation of the French press, the English press of the
mid-eighteenthcentury"articulatedthe normsand aspirationsof the middlingclasses.thatformed
the bulk of their audiences" (ibid., p. 490). See also John Brewer, "Commercializationand
Politics," in The Birth of a ConsumerSociety, ed. Neil McKendrick(Bloomington, Ind., 1982),
pp. 197-262.
59 For a social profile of the readershipof the Encyclope6die,see Robert Darnton,The Business
Mass.,
1775-1800 (Cambridge,
A Publishing
Historyof the "Encyclopedie,"
of Enlightenment:
1979), pp. 524-31. On Germanreading societies, see esp. Otto Dann, ed., Lesegesellschaften
Eine europaischerVergleich(Munich,1981);andOttoDann,
Emanzipation:
undburgerliche
"Lesegesellschaften im 18. Jahrhundert:Ein Forschungsbericht,"InternationalesArchiv fur
der deutschenLiteratur14, no. 2 (1989):45-53.

Sozialgeschichte

Conceivinga Public
107
crediblein context(thoughultimatelyillusory)to equatepropertyownershipwith

"humanity"(pp. 102-17).6?
Habermaswas well awarethathe was walkingan ideologicaltightrope.In an
effort to planthis argumenton firmground,he madethe distinctionbetweenthe
eighteenth-century
bourgeoisieand the modem salariedmiddleclass turnon the
mode of consumption.Literaryfiction became a commodityin the eighteenth
centuryonly in the sensethatthe formof its distributionwas commercialized,with
the resultthatit becamean accessibleobjectof publicdiscussion.Thanksto the
economicindependenceof property-owning
families,the substanceof literaturethe meaningauthorsputintoit, andthe meaningreadersderivedfromit-was not
commodified.Hence, in contrastto the conflationof shampublicityand illusory
privacyin themoderncultureindustry,eighteenth-century
fictioneffectively"conjoined"genuineprivacyandtrulypubliccommunication.Thepurelyhumanvalues
of intimacywere transmutedinto normsof publicdiscoursewithoutlosing their
authenticity(pp. 159-75).
If the logic was neo-Marxist,the perspectivewas unmistakablynostalgicand
eminently mandarin.There was a qualitativedifference, Habermasassumed,
betweenparticipationin high cultureand mass consumption.The formerwas an
active, demandingprocess of self-educationand self-determination.In mass
consumptionaccess to culturalgoods is facilitated"psychologically"as well as
"economically."The consumerstagnateswithin an endless roundof effortless
entertainmentsand is oblivious to their manipulativeeffect. New historical
approachesto consumerismsuggest that this contrastis simplisticat both ends.
Theremay be modes of active appropriation
in modernconsumerism-ways in
which the consumercreates intersticesof personalautonomywithin the larger
frameworkof mass conformity.Moreto the point, Habermas'sroseateimage of
the eighteenth-century
literarymarketskews our vision in two closely related
ways. It is too narrowlyfocused on a subsequentlyestablishedcanonof fiction;
and it drawsinferencesfrom abstractmodels of marketexchange, ratherthan
explaininghow specific social and culturalcontexts shapedeighteenth-century
readers'receptionof texts.
Even in the Germanyof Goetheand Schillereducatedmen probablydevoted
little of theirreadingtime to fictionand still less to literarycriticism.The typical
publicationsavailablein theircoffeehouses,theirclubs, andtheirreadingsocieties
were newspapersand periodicals,and theirmainfare was politicalandcommercial reportage,social commentary,advertising,and obituaries.If Habermas's
distinctionbetween form and substancedissolves in the face of this reading
material,its applicationto fictionmaybe hardlyless problematic.In England,and
to a lesser extent on the Continent, the eighteenth-centuryliterary market
expandedas an integralpartof an emergingleisureindustry.6'As readingbecame
60 Habermas'stortuousvia media-his view of the "bourgois" concept of a public as illusory
(and indeed self-contradictory)but credible in context-is slighted in the otherwise insightful
critique in Nathans(n. 8 above).
61 See, e.g., J. H. Plumb, "The Public, Literature,and the Arts in the EighteenthCentury,"
in The Emergenceof Leisure, ed. Michael R. Marrus(New York, 1974), pp. 11-37.

108
La Vopa
a formof mass entertainment(albeiton a muchsmallerscale thanin our culture

industry),the texts thatwouldbecome "classics" had to competewith a flood of
"vulgar" fictionthatcateredto marketdemand.At the same time the reception
of futureclassics like La NouvelleHeloise andWertherwas surelyconditionedby
commercialdistribution-probablyin ways thatbluntedthe emancipatoryimplicationsthatHabermasfoundin them. Therewere rupturesas well as continuities
in the transmutation
of literarysubjectivityfrom its privatesourcesin domestic
intimacy and letter-writingto its public status as an "anonymous" object of
consumptionand discussion.62
Intenton reproachingmodempublicitywith the purityof its origins,Habermas
overlookedthese dimensionsof commercialization.As a resulthe also oversimauthorstowardthe new literarymarket.
plifiedthe posturesof eighteenth-century
evoked,andwithgreatinsight,was
Whathis descriptionsof intimacy-made-public
the author'saspirationto bond with readersin transparentcommunication,to
achievethemetasocialintimacythatprint,in its positiveguise, seemedto promise.
But this was only one side of an intenselyambivalentliteraryreactionto print
technologyandthe marketit created.In 1784 Schillerhailedthe Publikumas his
"sovereign"andhis "tribunal"(as well as his "confidante,"or Vertrauter),but
fifteenyearslaterhe wrotethat"waris the only relationshipto the publicthatone
cannotregret."63
The new printmarketofferedeighteenth-century
authorsan objectifiedpublic
witha mass
prospectsfordirectcommunication
identityandopenedunprecedented
audience.On both counts the marketpromisedliberationfrom the aristocratic,
self-enclosedworldof courtlyletters.Oftenenough, though, authors'reverence
for the idealPublikummarkedtheiralienationfromthe actualreadingpublic.The
egalitarianmomentumof the markethad its darkside; it threatenedto reducethe
writerto a hirelingof fickle consumersandgreedypublishersandto trivializehis
work as one more ephemeralcommodity. In the face of this specter many
eighteenth-century
literarymen became all the more self-consciousaboutmainin some cases even as they were being
tainingthe pose of a gentleman-amateur,
reducedto GrubStreethacks.64
62
See, e.g., Klaus R. Scherpe, Wertherund Wertherwirkung:Zum Syndrom burgerlicher
Gesellschaftsordnungim 18. Jahrhundert (Bad Homberg, 1970); Claude Labrosse, Lire au
XVIIIesiicle: La Nouvelle Heloise et ses lecteurs (Lyons and Paris, 1985).
63
Quotedin HelmuthKiesel and Paul Munch, Gesellschaftund Literaturim 18. Jahrhundert:
Voraussetzungenund Entstehung der literarischen Markt in Deutschland (Munich, 1977),
pp. 98-99. On Schiller's attitude toward the reading public, see also Klaus L. Berghahn,
"Volkstiimlichkeitohne Volk? Kritische Uberlegungen zu einem KulturkonzeptSchillers," in
Popularitdtund Trivialitat,ed. Reinhold Grimmand Jost Hermand(Frankfurtam Main, 1974),
pp. 51-75; John A. McCarthy, "Die republikanischeFreiheit des Lesers. Zum Lesepublikum
von Schillers Der Verbrecheraus verlorenerEhre," WirkendesWort1/79 (1979): 28-43. There
is a wealth of well-documented information on the French literary market and the changing
circumstancesof French authorsin the eighteenth century in John Lough, Writerand Public in
France: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Oxford, 1978), pp. 164-274.
64 Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and Readers in Eighteenth-Century
England (Leicester and New
York, 1982), provides valuable detail on eighteenth-centurywriters' relationships with their
publishersas well as their reading publics. On the commercializationof literatureand authors'
reactions to it, see Hans J. Haferkom, "Zur Entstehungder burgerlich-literarischen
Intelligenz

Conceiving a Public
109
The intimacybetween authorand readerwas anonymous,impersonal,artificial. Thismadefor an alluringparadox;printseemedto effect a kindof egalitarian
transparencythat face-to-facecommunicationin everydaysocial relations,with
its pervasivelyhierarchicalterms, did not admit. But there was also a sense in
whichthe purifiedintimacyof print-and the rhetoricof shared"humanity"that
conveyedthat intimacy-opened the readerto instructionon the author'sterms.
That was the other reason why Samuel Johnson'sfaith in "common readers,"
whosejudgmentswere "uninstructedby precept"and "unprejudicedby authority," was precociouslymodem. The image of the common readerannounced
Johnson'sreadinessto exploit the egalitarianpotentialof the printmarket,and
indeedto acceptmass approvalas the final arbiterof literaryquality.But it also
markedhis strategyfor dispellingthe egalitarianthreat.The public of common
readerswould "pass the last sentenceon literaryclaims"; but it would play the
role of incorruptibletribunalprecisely because "criticism" would "establish
principles"and "improveopinion into knowledge."65
It is this fine balancebetween an egalitarianrejectionof traditiqnalaesthetic
thatAlvin Kemanhas conveyed
standardsand a new "criticalauthoritarianism"
in his recentstudy of Johnson'sliterarycareer.One of the lessons of Johnson's
careerwas thatprintwas not simply a leveling agent;it also had the capacityto
endow a new breedof authorsandcritics, includingthose of obscureoriginsand
marginalstatus, with a new kind of literaryauthority.This was in part because
print projectedthe "authorialdignity" of the competentprofessionaland the
"intriguingpersonality,"independentof any social milieu. There was also the
standardizedfixity of mass production,which deprivedthe ancienttexts of their
sacredaurabut also workedto "remystify" or "privilege" the purely literary
text. Thanksto this capacityof printtechnology,a new literarycanon, produced
in authoritativescholarlyeditions, could be elevated above the flood of typographicalephemera-and the criticswho were its guardianscould legitimatetheir
claim to independentauthority.66
We finda similarimplicationin plansfor a constitutionalreformof absolutism
andin effortsto modernizeacademiclearningand its professionalapplicationsin
the secondhalf of the eighteenthcentury.It was not simplythat,for the greatmass
und des Schriftstellersin Deutschlandzwischen 1750 und 1800," in Deutsches Burgertumund
literarische Intelligenz, 1750-1800, ed. BermdLutz, Literaturwissenschaftund Sozialwissenschaften, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1974), pp. 113-275; Wolfgang von Ungarn-Stemberg, "Schriftsteller und literarischerMarkt," in Hansers Sozialgeschichteder deutschen Literatur vom 16.
Jahrhundertbis zur Gegenwart, ed. Rolf Grimminger(Munich and Vienna), 3:133-85; Kiesel
and Munch, esp. pp. 84-104, 155-70; Alvin Keman, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print
(Princeton, N.J., 1987), esp. pp. 7-17, 62-90.
65 Quoted in Kernan, pp. 19, 226-27. On the issue of literary authority and the role of
criticism, see also Klaus L. Berghahn, "Von der klassistischen zur klassischen Literaturkritik,"
in Geschichteder deutschen Literaturkritik(1730-1980), ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (Stuttgart,
1985), pp. 10-75.
" Keman, esp. pp. 16-23, 107-72, 219-40. Keman's book is refreshinglyinterdisciplinary,
especially in its use of key concepts from Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent
of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979). On Johnson's literarystrategy, see also ClarenceTracy,
"Johnson and the Common Reader," Dalhousie Review 57, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 405-23.

110
La Vopa
of the population,propertyand educationwere de facto barriersto participation

public. Habermas(like Koselleck)ignoredthe normain the eighteenth-century
tive discourseswith which propertiedand educatedelites soughtto embodythe
for the entiresociety, even as they
publicconscienceandto speakauthoritatively
positionedthemselveswithin a theoreticallyopen public.
Coulda partspeakcrediblyfor the whole?This issue hadalwayslurkedbehind
the apotheosisof the public, andit was beginningto takeon recognizablymodem
contours.In its pureversion(theone Habermassoughtto recover),the conceptof
public opinion can be said to have denied a legitimaterole to any part. Public
opinionhadunimpeachablemoralauthoritybecauseit formedout of an aggregate
of morallyautonomousindividuals,each arrivingat his (or her?)judgmentin
splendid isolation. Somehow in public discussion individualjudgments were
transformeddirectlyinto the consensusof a totality-which is to say that social
solidarities were short-circuitedand social interests were transcended.This
prospect was not simply an appealing alternativeto the fragmented,tunnelvisioned corporatismof the Old Regime; it was also posed against new
manifestationsof the selfish, often fanaticalspiritof "party" and "faction." It
was no accidentthatpublicopinionwas idealizedas a courtof appealas the spirit
of partyseemedto expandfromthe religiousbattleground,whereit hadoriginally
rearedits head, to the emergingarenaof modem politics.
In the final decades of the eighteenthcentury,however, the image of a pure
consensus-or, perhapsbetter,of a metasocialconsensus-also assumedsocially
concentratedforms. A case in pointis the "social theoryof representation"Keith
Baker has traced through the French Enlightenment,from the Physiocrats'
originalversion to the Abbe Sieyes's more flexible variation.A representative
assemblywouldconcentratea new kindof collectivedecisionmaking,free of the
stigma of "privilege" attachedto old-style corporaterepresentationbut at the
sametime detouringaroundthe Rousseauianprinciplethatelectedrepresentatives
shouldbe boundby popularmandates.Whethersuch an assemblywas conceived
as the preserve of landed proprietorsor as an arena for men of wealth and
education,its memberswere assumedto embodythe only social "interests"that
could rise above the particularismof self-interestandachievea rationalvision of
the publicwelfare.Properlyorganized,theirinternaldeliberations(like the ideal
form of Enlightenmentsociability,or the ideal printcommunication)would lay
barethe inherentcogency of ideas. Hencethey couldbe reliedon to constitutethe
publicconsciencesimply by voting theirconsciences.67
Historiansof the professionshavefounda similarlogic takingshapeamongthe
lawyers, scholars, physicians, teachers, and even clergymen who aspired to
modem "professional" status in the last third of the eighteenthcentury.The
sharedaxiomof theirprofessionalideologieswas thatinductioninto a specialized
academicdiscipline,like propertyownership,insureda kindof privilegedinsight
into the naturalorder of things, a disinterestedpublic vision to which mere
interestscouldnot ascend.The inherentauthorityof thatvision was reinforcedby
67
Keith Michael Baker, "Representation,"in Baker, ed. (n. 1 above), pp. 469-92.

Conceiving a Public
111
the fact that modem professionalexperts-unlike the caste-likeparlementsand

the exclusiveacademiesthathadclaimedto speakfor "the nation"in eighteenthcenturyFrance-formed a meritocraticelite, membersof a set of careersopen to
talent.68
MissingfromHabermas'sclassic publicarethe complexrelationshipsbetween

the publicand the marketthatthese discoursesimplied. "Social" representation
andprofessionalismweremodernformsof closurewithinthepromiseof openness,
and as such they were centralto the eighteenth-century
self-representations
of an
"enlightened"or "educated" public. They offered alternativesnot only to a
Rousseauianideal of directand all-encompassingpopularsovereigntybut also to
the egalitarianmomentumof free-marketcommodityexchange.Theirefficacylay
in attachingthe capacity for rational(or disinterested)objectivityto attributes
(propertyownership,academiceducation,professionalexpertise) that could be
consideredrelativelyinvulnerableto thecoercivepressuresof themarket,oratleast
uniquelydeservingof such invulnerability.
Andyet therewas also a sense in whichthesediscoursesworkedto domesticate
the principle of market competitionby concentratingit within micropublics
perchedabove the masses. Thanksto its independencefrom the electorate,the
new representativeassembly would form a self-enclosedmarketplaceof ideas;
thatwas why it could be countedon to producethe rationalconsensusthe word
"public" promised.Similarly,the ethos and the internalstructureof a modern
professionmade for a market-likecompetitionof ideas on issues of vital public
importance.Popularwhims might prevail in an increasinglycommercialized
culture, but knowledge that survived the filteringprocess of the profession's
internalmarketwas, in the ideal, authoritative.Since professionalswere trained
to judge ideas purely on their merits, the lay public-the consumers of
professional services-should defer to their collective judgment as the best
availableopinion.69
Well before Mill and Tocquevillesounded their alarms about the threatof
democracy,the privilegingof moreor less partialandesotericpublicshadbegun.
This dimensionof the eighteenth-century
public is perhapsbest characterizedas
a neocorporaterationalefor paternalism.It was reminiscentof Old Regime
corporatism,despite its principled rejection of old-style exclusiveness and
of freemasonry-though
secrecy.It also had affinitieswith the quasi-hermeticism
the enlightenedelite, in its professionalprofiles,wouldserveas the filteringagent
for a purifiedpublicconsensusratherthanas a self-enclosedvanguard.How was
' See, e.g., Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis
(Berkeley, 1977); La Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit (n. 18 above), pp. 287-350, and "The
Politics of Enlightenment:Friedrich Gedike and German Professional Ideology," Journal of
Modern History 62, no. 1 (March 1990): 34-56.
69 On the domesticationof the marketmodel in modernprofessionalism, see esp. Thomas L.
Haskell, "Professionalismversus Capitalism:R. H. Tawney,Emile Durkheim, and C. S. Peirce
on the Disinterestednessof Professional Communities," in The Authorityof Experts: Studies in
History and Theory,ed. Thomas L. Haskell (Bloomington, Ind., 1984), pp. 180-225. Haskell
focuses on the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, but his insights are also relevant to
the emergence of professional ideologies in the late eighteenth century.

112
La Vopa
society to reconstituteitself as a stablehierarchy,and one in which authoritative

(as opposed to authoritarian)guidance from above would insure progressive
change?The professionalanswer was to concentratepublic authorityin arenas
thatwereat once highlyvisible to andsafely bracketedoff fromthe largersociety.
Here again, as in our examinationof Enlightenmentsociability, we are
remindedthat the constructionof a public cannot be understoodsimply as a
movementof oppositionto absolutism.In the logic of professionalism,the part
could speak for the whole because it bridged the division between state and
society and faced in both directions. As an autonomous"communityof the
competent,"a professionembodiedthe independenceof civil society from state
tutelage;but, at least on the Continent,its professionalautonomywas inseparable
from its public authority,and it exercisedthe latterby virtue of its partnership
with, and often its incorporationinto, the bureaucraticstate. Often the need to
justify this mediatingrole, andabove all to win credibilityas an agentratherthan
an objectof statetutelage,shapedthe constructionof professionalknowledge.If
the new professionalswere a meritocraticalternativeto the Old Regime service
elite, they were also its modernbourgeoissuccessor.70
The tensionbetweenuniversalityandexclusiveness,opennessandclosure,has
still anotheraxis. The new reverencefor purehumanityand naturalauthenticity
encompassedwomen, and that is hardlysurprisingin view of their significant
presencein eighteenth-centuryfiction and in an expandingreadingpublic. Yet
womenwerebarredfrompoliticalparticipationin the new publicsphere.Wasthis
a partialapplicationof an entitlementthatwas universalivLnkiJe? (Q %-s thti
exclusion of women inherentin the ideologicalconstructionof a public?
70 The phrase "communityof the competent"is borrowedfrom ThomasL. Haskell,
"Professionalization
as CulturalReform,"Humanitiesin Society 1, no. 2 (Spring 1978):
103-14. Darnton,The Businessof Enlightenment(n. 59 above), pp. 517-19, 538-39,
marksthe continuity
emphasizesthattheemergenceof professionalism
(andnotof Jacobinism)
betweenthe Enlightenment
andtheRevolution.Onthedominating
presenceof thebureaucratic
state in continental"professionalization,"
see DietrichRuschemeyer,"Professionalisierung:
Theoretische
Geschichte
undGesellschaft
Problemefurdievergleichende
Geschichtsforschung,"
and the Learned
6, no. 3 (1980): 311-25; R. Steven Tumer,"The 'Bildungsburgertum'
Professionsin Prussia,1770- 1830:TheOriginsof a Class,"Histoiresociale-Social
History13,
no. 25 (May 1980): 105-35; Ute Frevert,Krankheitals politischesProblem,1770-1880
(Gottingen,1984); GeraldL. Geison, ed., Professionsand the French State, 1700-1900
undProfession(Philadelphia,
1984);WernerConzeandJurgenKocka,eds., Bildungssystem
im 19 Jahrhundert,
pt. 1 (Stuttalisierungin internationalen
Vergleichen,
Bildungsburgertum
how professionalization
as an intellectual
gart, 1985). We are only beginningto understand
process-i.e., as the constructionand applicationof professionalknowledge-servedto
withthe state;see, e.g., JanGoldstein,"Foucaultamongthe
legitimatea privilegedpartnership
The'Disciplines'andtheHistoryof theProfessions,"
HistoryandTheory23, no. 2
Sociologists:
A Professional
(1984):170-92, and" 'MoralContagion':
Ideologyof MedicineandPsychiatry
in EighteenthandNineteenth-Century
France,"in Geison,ed., pp. 181-222; LaVopa,Grace,
Hellenismas ProfesTalent,andMerit,pp. 287-350, and"SpecialistsagainstSpecialization:
sionalIdeologyin GermanClassicalStudies,"in GermanProfessions,1800-1950, ed. Geoffrey
CocksandKonradH. Jarausch(New York,1990),pp. 27-45.

Conceiving a Public
113
On the issue of gender,as on the issue of class, Habermas'svia mediabecame

tortuous.He acknowledgedthatthe propertyowner'sprivateautonomyin market
exchange translatedinto patriarchalauthoritywithin the family-hence "any
pretendedfreedom of individuals[was] illusory" for the wife as well as the
children.But if the family was "an agent of society" in that sense, it was also
"the anticipatedemancipationfrom society." Its memberswere bound to one
anothernot only by "patriarchalauthority"but also by "humancloseness." This
dualityhadits counterpartin women'smode of participationin the publicsphere;
thoughexcluded from "rationalcritical debate in the political realm," female
readers"oftentook a moreactivepartin the literarypublicsphere."In one sense,
the conceptof a single public was a fictioncamouflagingthis sexual division of
labor. In another sense, though, the same concept pointed ahead: women's
potentialinclusionin the politicalpublic was implicitin theirrole as readersof
fiction,alreadycontributingsignificantlyto the directtranslationof humanvalues
into public discourse(pp. 46-51, 55-56).
It is preciselythis dimensionof opennessthatJoanLandesdeniesin herWomen
and the PublicSphere.Focusingon France,Landesreexaminesthe representative
publicnessthatHabermasattributedto the absolutiststateandits court. She reads
this public self-presentationas a patriarchaliconography,and in its light she
Parisas a "potentalterexplainsthe salons thatemergedin seventeenth-century
native." Her view of the salons is strikinglydifferentfrom Habermas'scharacsociety" and
terizationof themas a "bridge"betweenan "aristocratic-humanistic
the bourgeoispublic sphere.She emphasizespreciselywhat he ignored:thatthe
salonswereorganizedby women,andthattheyformeda uniquequasi-publicspace
in which womencould be "purveyorsof culture"as well as "powerbrokers."71
It was this feminine power that made the salons the targetsof an aristocratic
opposition.Adaptingthe rhetoricof classical republicanism,aristocraticcritics
pairedthe "feminization"of public life by salonnieres(as well as by politically
influentialwomen at court) with the emasculatingeffect of absolutism.
As Landes explains it, this modernizationof a "masculinist classicism"
constructionof a bourgeoispublic
entereda new stagewiththe eighteenth-century
andfoundits culminationin Jacobindemocracy."Universalityandreason,"she
writes, "were relied on to sustain, not to eradicate, the (sexual) differences
erectedby the orderof nature."72To exclude womenfromthe rationalactivityof
politicswas simply to bow to the dictatesof nature.Their"natural"role was to
create the domestic environmentin which the emphaticallymale virtues of
republicancitizenshipcould be nurtured.
Centralto the new binaryoppositionbetweenmale andfemale "natures"was
a radicalrevaluationof oralandprintcommunication.Rousseau'sprecocitylay in
71
Joan Landes, Womenand the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1988), pp. 22-24. Comparethe explanationof the salons in Habennas,Strouctural

Transformation,pp. 29-34.
72 Landes,p. 46. As Landesseems to recognize(pp. 57-61), republican
ideology and
feminismwerenotnecessarilyincompatible;
see esp. thediscussionof Madamede Montanclos
in Gelbart(n. 56 above),pp. 185-91.

114
La Vopa
pioneeringan "active textualizationof life"-a new channelof communication

throughprint, linking two human beings in an entirely naturaland indeed
translucentintimacy.By this standard,the highly manneredconversationalart of
the salonniere-and, with it, the femininityshe represented-was artificialand
dissembling.Novel-readingorientedwomenexclusively to the naturalsphereof
"love, marriage,and childbirth."Ironically,"active" textualizationcondemned
womento passivityas the subjectsof a new textual"regime."Theywerereduced
to objectsof male-dominatedtexts. Thanksto the intimateinvolvementwith the
printedpage that Rousseau pioneered, they became actively complicit in this
objectificationof theirdesires.73
Focusingon ideologicalconstructsand eschewingcausalexplanation,Landes
leaves us wonderingabout the relevance of Habermas'sinterlockedstructural
changes-the expansionof marketexchangeand the actualemergenceof a new
kind of family-to her story. Her readingof male perceptionsof salonnieresis
clearlyone-sided;if thephilosopheswho frequentedParisiansalonsin the 1760s
and 1770s resentedfemale domination,they also acknowledgedthat only the
guiding presence of a woman could insure egalitarian exchange in polite
conversation.74Also problematicis the "textualization"Landesfinds in Rousseau'swritings.It pointsaheadto drugstoreromances;whatit tells us (or is meant
to tell us) aboutother species of eighteenth-century
fiction, or indeed aboutthe
strategiesof Enlightenmentdiscourseas a whole, is not clear.
But one need not wade far into the reformthoughtof the Enlightenment
to find
confirmation
thatits universalistlanguage-its normativetriadof reason,humanity,
and nature-was inherentlygenderedto justify a dichotomybetweena "public"
(male)anda "private"(female)sphere.Andit is probablysafe to say thatgendered
discoursehadits corollaryin a new kindof socialsegregation.Withfew exceptions,
theEnlightenment's
micropublics
wereexclusivelymalepreserves.As educatedmen
founda refugefromtherigorsof occupational
life in thenew domesticity,theyfound
a respitefromdomesticityin theirlodges, theirclubs, andtheircoffeehouses.75
To Habermasit was axiomatic that, as the medium for an oppositional
movement against absolutism, the bourgeois public markeda progressive(if
limited)historicalepisode. To Landes,in contrast,the same bourgeoisconstruct
73 Landes, pp. 64-65, 78-89. Landes's concept of textualization was inspired in part by
Robert Darnton, "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabricationof Romantic Sensitivity," in
his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French CulturalHistory (New York, 1984),
pp. 215-56. On women and eighteenth-centuryfiction, see also Samia I. Spencer, ed., French
Womenand the Age of Enlightenment(Bloomington, Ind., 1984); Ruth-EllenBoetcher-Joeresand
Mary Jo Maynes, eds., German Womenin the 18th and 19th Century:A Social and Literary
History (Bloomington, Ind., 1986).
74 For a subtle reading of this alternativeperception, and of salonnieres' self-estimation, see
Dena Goodman, "Governing the Republic of Letters: The Politics of Culture in the French
Enlightenment,"History of European Ideas 13, no. 3 (1991): 183-99.
75 Women were admittedto some masonic lodges, or at least to their festivities, and in France
the masonic movement did recognize a few lodges for women. See Chevallier (n. 31 above),
pp. 200-210; Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment(n. 19 above), pp. 206-8; Gelbart, pp. 204,
287. On coffeehouses, see Hans Erich B6deker, "Das Kaffeehaus als Institutionaufkldarischer
Geselligkeit," in Frangois, ed. (n. 22 above), pp. 75-76.

Conceiving a Public
115
replaced"the older patriarchy"with "a more pervasivegenderingof the public

sphere''76-and, indeed, with a genderingthat became all the more categorical
and virulentwith the shift from the aristocraticversion of republicanismto the
radically"democratic"variety.Habermas'scriticalpublichad its social grounding and its ethical source in bourgeois domesticity. To Landes the same
domesticitywas the ideological productof a male-dominateddiscourseand, as
such, the foil against which an exclusively male public sphere was defined.
Literarysubjectivitydid not transmutethe purely human values of domestic
intimacyinto public norms;rather,it relegatedwomen to a private(and hence
politically powerless) sphere throughthe public process of "textualization."
Likewise the exclusion of women from "natural" political rights cannot be
understoodsimplyas a partialapplicationof a universalideal, to be explainedby
contingenthistoricalobstacles.Exclusionwas inherentin the ideal itself, since its
apotheosisof the naturaldifferentiatedhumannaturesexually.
As the story changes, so does its moral. Habermas'shistoricalexercise was
designed to remindus that a universalpromiseof emancipationhad yet to be
fulfilled. The feminist alternativeconfrontsus with the possibilitythat, by the
very natureof its legitimatingpremises,the classic liberalpublic held no such
promisefor women.
In our age of academicmicrospecialization,sweepinghistoricalinterpretations
aresittingducks,particularlywhenthey addressphilosophicalandpoliticalissues
head-on. Exposed on several fronts at once, they invite the sniper fire of
monographicresearch. The groundbeneath them shifts with our increasingly
frequentchanges in academicprioritiesand in the political preoccupationsthat
informthem. Yesterday'sherculeaneffortat synthesisis today'smonumentto the
naivet6 of our elders. Yesterday'strenchanthistoricalcritique of ideology is
today's exampleof ideologicalmyopia.
Muchof this essay has demonstratedthatthe interpretivestructuresof Critique
and Crisis and StructuralTransformationhave been seriously shaken by new
researchand changingconcerns.And yet, far from being consignedto the slag
heapof periodpieces, they arenow winningwide recognitionon bothsides of the
Atlanticas seminaltexts. The recognitionis well deserved.Whatstrikesstudents
of eighteenth-century
Europeaboutboth books from this distanceis that-even
76
Landes, p. 2. Again the service elite was probably of central importance; its salaried
bureaucraticemployment accelerated the separationof a male public sphere of work from the
female private sphere of the household (see Karin Hausen, "Die Polarisierung der
'Geschlechtscharaktere'-Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben,"
in Sozialgeschichteder Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, ed. WernerConze [Stuttgart, 1976],
pp. 363-93). On the genderedlanguageof natureand naturalrights, see also JoanWallachScott,
"French Feminists and the Rights of 'Man': Olympe de Gouges's Declarations," History
Workshop28 (Autumn 1989): 1-21, and Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988);
DorindaOutram,The Body and the French Revolution:Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New
Haven, Conn., 1989); Ute Frevert, ed., Bdrgerinnenund Burger: Geschlechtsverhaltnisseim 19.
Jahrhundert(Gottingen, 1988).

116
La Vopa
thoughthey exhibitthe ideologicalpreoccupationsand blindersof the Cold War

at its height-they were remarkablyprescientin posing salient questions and
developingimaginativeways to answerthem.
Koselleckmay have misconstruedthe largersignificanceof freemasonry,but
the
furtherstudyof the masonicmovementsurelywill be criticalto understanding
relationshipbetween sociability and ideology, social interactionand symbolic
meaning,in the Enlightenment.His indictmentof secrecymay not be a balanced
historicalverdict;but therewas a tensionbetweenthe Enlightenment'scommitment to openness and its impulses to closure, and furtherexplorationof that
tensionpromisesto tell us a greatdeal aboutthe movement'ssocial perspectiveas
well as its politicalinhibitions.Habermashas inspiredus to take a new look at
fictionaland quasi-fictionaltexts, in an effort to explainhow
eighteenth-century
the values communicatedin literaryforms and meaningsgave modem political
criticismits moralforce. Howevertortuoushis argumentbecame, it pointsus to
the need to understandhow the emergenceof a modernfamily ethos contributed
to the constructionof a modem public-and how the expandingmarketfor print
mediatedthatcontribution.
If specialists now find much to fault in Critiqueand Crisis and Structural
they cannothelp but admirethe sheersweep of theirvision. The
Transformation,
vision is, on one level, historical,but this is historyinformedby an imaginative
powerthatis very rare.It is a measureof thatpower that, as both books accede
to new perspectivesand new research,they still challengeus to supercedethem.
Meetingthe challengewill requirethe same philosophicalawareness,interdisciplinaryversatility,andcomparativebreadththatKoselleckandHabermasbrought
to theirsubjects.


La Vopa - Conceiving A Public. Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Koselleck and Habermas

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La Vopa - Conceiving A Public. Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Koselleck and Habermas

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Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe

This content downloaded from 82.8.95.247 on Wed, 9 Jul 2014 14:31:23 PM

This content downloaded from 82.8.95.247 on Wed, 9 Jul 2014 14:31:23 PM

observers were quick to remarkthat the public was a

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of the eighteenthcenturyandin the social andinstitutionalprocessesthatexplain

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"theoreticallyfully developed form") to Hegel and Marx (who exposed its

Transformationwere pathbreakingbecause, in the very ways they posed such

7 See also Habermas's"Publizitatals Prinzipder Vermittlungvon Politik und Moral (Kant),"

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Critiqueand Crisis beganas a dissertationat Heidelberg,acceptedin 1954. As

This content downloaded from 82.8.95.247 on Wed, 9 Jul 2014 14:31:23 PM

This content downloaded from 82.8.95.247 on Wed, 9 Jul 2014 14:31:23 PM

theoryof Carl Schmitt,the jurist and politicalphilosopherwho had provideda

CarlSchmitt,Der Leviathanin derStaatslehredes ThomasHobbes:SinnundFehlschlag

eines politischen Symbols (Hamburg, 1938), pp. 82-93. On Schmitt's opportunisticadoptionof

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how is the emergence of a pluralisticconcept of political contestationto be

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Enlightenment.18 When we take soundingsinto the undercurrents,

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publicitymade such secrecyboth indefensibleand obsolete. Therewere parallel

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If Koselleckhad simplygeneralizedaboutthe Enlightenmentfroma small and

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It is hardlysurprising,then, thatin the face of absolutismthe Enlightenment

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of theirpublicworlds.It is all the morestriking,then, thatin the way it filledthat

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im 18. Jahrhundert,"pp. 211-16.

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inversionof absolutism,at once negatingandmirroring

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the termsof authorityanddeference,poweranddependence,thatpervadedsocial

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workingsof freemasonryas democratic,however,the word unavoidablycarries

34 See esp. HarryC. Payne, "Elite versus PopularMentality in the EighteenthCentury,"in

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This strategyand its axiomaticassumption-that knowledgemustbe distributed

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Once again Weishauptand his acolytes, in their aspirationto supercede

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fact that masonic and Jacobinideology converge in justifying a monopoly of

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applicability.The ideal originally entered and shaped public communication

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reducedto soundbites and photo opportunities.The issue here, however,is the

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historicalsociologythatis rarelyfoundin theworkof his Frankfurt

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naturallyout of a literaryVorform-thoughthe timingof this two-stagesequence

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eighteenthcentury.In France,on the otherhand, an equivalentpublichad begun

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versive."56And such examples, it should be stressed, keep us at the level of

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nineteenthcenturyonward,Habermasargued,the public spherebecamea sham

der deutschenLiteratur14, no. 2 (1989):45-53.

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crediblein context(thoughultimatelyillusory)to equatepropertyownershipwith

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