Social Structures of the Public Sphere
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
4. Secondary Readings
Jürgen
Habermas. From Part II “Social Structures of the Public Sphere”
from The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society.
Key Terms (tags): prose, romantic age,
public sphere, enlightenment, civil society, deliberative genre
Supporting References:
- La Vopa, Anthony J. "Habermas, Jürgen." Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. : Oxford University Press, 2002. Oxford Reference. 2005. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
- Buchanan, Ian. "Habermas, Jürgen." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 22 Aug. 2013
The following
focuses on the author and not the text.
“Habermas, Jürgen (1929–) Germanphilosopher, best known for
concepts of communicative
action and the public
sphere. An immensely influential figure,
particularly in his native country, Habermas's shadow looms large
over almost every aspect of research in the human and social
sciences. The only comparable figures in terms of impact in this
field are Michel
*Foucault and Niklas Luhmann.
“Habermas was
born in Düsseldorf in Northern Germany, but he spent his early life
in Gummersbach, where his grandfather was the director of a
Protestant seminary. His father was the director of the Chamber of
Industry and Commerce in the neighbouring city of Cologne. In
interviews he has described his father as a Nazi sympathizer and
admitted that like Günter Grass he was a member of the Hitler Youth.
This experience, particularly Germany's defeat and the aftermath,
including the Nuremberg ‘War Crimes’ trials, could not but be
formative for Habermas, and they left him a stern critic of politics.
He completed his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Göttingen
and Zürich, then completed a doctorate in 1954 at the University of
Bonn entitled, Das Absolute und die Geschichte. Von der
Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken (The absolute and history:
on the contradiction in Schelling's thought). In 1956 he moved to
Frankfurt to complete his habilitation at the home of critical
theory, the Institute for Social Research,
under the direction of Theodor
*Adorno and Max
*Horkheimer.
“Interestingly,
although Habermas would remain connected in some way or another to
the Institute for Social Research for the rest of his career, he did
not finish his habilitation there. He fell out with Horkheimer over
the direction his thesis should take, so he transferred to the
University of Marburg. In 1962, at the instigation of Hans-Georg
*Gadamer, Habermas was offered a position at
Heidelberg University, which he accepted, but two years later he was
lured back to Frankfurt by Adorno to take over Horkheimer's recently
vacated chair. He remained there until 1970, when he moved to the Max
Planck Institute in Starnberg. A decade later he returned to
Frankfurt and took over as director of the Institute for Social
Research. Beginning in the early 1980s, Habermas also accepted a
number of visiting professorships in the US.
“Unusually for a
dissertation, Habermas's first work, Strukturwandel der
Öffentlichkeit; Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der Bürgerlichen
Gesellschaft (1962), translated as The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society (1989), proved an enduring success. It
introduces the important concept of the public sphere, which is a
realm in society where citizens can freely express opinions relating
to general or public interest topics. Habermas treats the public
sphere as a historical category and his research focuses on how
specific types of public sphere emerge and correspondingly what
causes their demise.
“Post-structuralist
critics like Jean-François
*Lyotard are sharply critical of the concept's
inherent idealism, but it has nevertheless proven highly useful for
thinking through the transformations that have shaped what is
generally known today as postmodernism.
One of Habermas's most influential pieces of work was a short essay
he wrote entitled ‘Modernity—An Incomplete Project’ (1983),
which was a polemic shot across the bow of postmodernism at the
moment of its birth. Rather than recognize the advent of a new era as
many critics (e.g. Fredric
*Jameson) did at the start of the 1980s,
Habermas took the counter-intuitive position that modernity,
i.e. the logical precursor to postmodernity, had not yet reached its
zenith, and, moreover, that its emancipatory project was worth
continuing with and shouldn't be abandoned so lightly.
“Habermas's
interest in the public sphere developed over the next two decades
into a general theory of society, culminating in his magnum opus
Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns (1981), translated as
The Theory of Communicative Action (1984). Habermas's theory
is that all social life can be explained in terms of the ability of
humans to communicate with one another. Most important for Habermas
is the ability to use language to do things, not merely to command
other people to perform a particular act, but to change the very
symbolic status of a person, place, or object. In this last respect,
he draws on and extends the theory of performative
language developed by J.
L. *Austin and J.
*Searle and Ludwig
*Wittgenstein's theory of language
games. Since the publication of The Theory
of Communicative Action Habermas has tried to use the central
theses of that work to analyse and critique ethical and political
issues relating to contemporary world events. The culmination of this
work is the magisterial Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur
Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats
(1992), translated as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a
Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1998).”
- "public sphere." Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Ed. Calhoun, Craig. : Oxford University Press, 2002. Oxford Reference. 2002. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
The modern public sphere has two
related meanings: it refers both to the open discussion among members
of a collectivity about their common concerns and to the activities
of the state that are central to defining that community. This double
notion has its parallel in the private sphere. The private is
simultaneously that which lies outside the purview of the state and
that which concerns personal ends distinct from the public good—the
res publica or matters of legitimate public concern.
The earliest discussions of the
division between public and private spheres date to ancient Greece,
where public referred to the realm of politics and private
to the areas of family and economic life. Modern political theorists
returned to the notion of the public in their efforts to theorize
democratic rule. From the eighteenth century forward, liberal
political theory has attributed a range of democratic functions to
the public sphere: the business of weighing and formulating opinion,
discussing and redefining the meaning of politics, and compelling the
state to justify its actions.
Jürgen Habermas
is perhaps the foremost contemporary theorist of these political
functions. His early historical inquiry into the structural
transformation of the public sphere since the eighteenth century has
been central to nearly all subsequent debates ([1962] 1989). For
Habermas, the basic political question that the public sphere raises
is how to promote widespread and more or less egalitarian
participation in rational-critical discourse about the proper ends of
society. The public sphere, he argues, was created largely for the
purposes of addressing the state and the sorts of public issues on
which state policy might bear. It is based on (1) a notion of the
public good as distinct from private interest; (2) social
institutions, like private property, that empower individuals to
participate independently in the public sphere; and (3) forms of
private life, notably the family, that prepare individuals to act as
autonomous, rational-critical subjects in the public sphere. A
central paradox and weakness—not just in Habermas's theory but in
the liberal conception that it analyzes and partially
incorporates—arises from the implication that the public sphere
depends on an organization of private, prepolitical life that enables
and encourages citizens to rise above private identities and
concerns. Habermas and other critical celebrants of the
eighteenth-century public sphere have been especially criticized on
this ground by feminist scholars, who draw attention to the
historically strong gender division between public and private realms
on which male political freedom rested.
Another influential modern theorist of
the public sphere was Hannah Arendt,
who focused on the capacity of action in public to create the world
that citizens share in common (The Human Condition, 1958).
Arendt drew on both ancient Greek and Revolutionary-era American
sources in developing a vision of public life as central to a
republic's moral community. Similar notions of a vibrant republican
public sphere have had a major influence in American historical
studies—particularly in the work J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn,
and Gordon Wood. Like Arendt, these “republican synthesis”
scholars emphasize the ephemeral nature of republicanism and the
rapid emergence in the nineteenth century of a variously liberal,
national, and representative (rather than participatory) model of the
public sphere. They join a broad current of thought on both the Left
and Right that deplores the modern decline of the public sphere—a
phenomenon generally associated with the rise of particular interests
at the expense of concern for the general good, as well as the
deterioration of rational public discourse about public affairs. New
scholarship has gone some way, however, in challenging this treatment
of the republican era as a golden age.
Contemporary research on the public
sphere turns on a number of important issues: the breadth of
political participation, the existence of multiple or overlapping
public spheres, the impact of new communications media, and the
quality of rational-critical discourse and its relationship to
culture-forming activities. These issues also inform discussions
about the international public sphere, which emphasize such themes as
human rights, democratization, and capital and financial flows. The
basic question of the public sphere—to what extent can collective
discourse determine the conditions of social life—is crucial to
emerging research in this area.
- Klancher, Jon. "Prose." An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. : Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
The Romantic era has long been
associated with revolutionary new kinds of poetry
[29]—those like Thomas
Love *Peacock who instead saw prose in
the ascendant around 1800 have been minority voices at most. Yet the
new prose media—from the proliferating rhetorics of journalism,
reviews, and political pamphlets to the emergent disciplinary
languages of modern knowledge—were becoming powerful stimulants of
social visions and cultural classifications as well as apologies for
poetry in the age of Romanticism
and revolution.
By the early nineteenth century,
British writers began describing a historic transformation in the
language and media of their public culture, a change they often dated
to the French
Revolution controversy that had made the
British ‘an inquisitive, prying, doubting, and reading people’.
What might be called a prose revolution, however, had been in the
making for a century before 1789, following the early modern
transformation in print technology and the gradual formation of
‘print capitalism’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
When they began writing in vernacular English, French, or German
instead of Latin around 1700, the educated classes of Europe
effectively made prose the essential medium of what has been called
‘discursive literacy’, the mastery of argument and conversation
that became, by the mid-eighteenth century, the major focus of modern
education
[17] and publishing
[21]. Written prose flourished within a
remarkable network of periodical and book presses created during the
hundred years following 1690 and it formed the ‘polite’ language
that graduated from the aristocratic court to the urban readers and
conversants of Addison's Spectator (1711), Cave's
Gentleman's Magazine (1731), and Johnson's
Rambler (1759). The intellectual society of the coffeehouse
patrons who read Addison and other journalists in the first half of
the eighteenth century formed a discussion-centred ‘public sphere’,
in Jürgen Habermas's phrase. More explicit ideological conflicts
appeared in the rough, vigorous ‘pamphlet wars’ of the early
eighteenth century, as Jonathan Swift and other combatants deployed
prose weapons to stake out variously traditionalist or modernizing
intellectual and political territories. By the 1750s, Samuel
Johnson's Dictionary and other contemporary authorities
claimed that the English had come to speak and write a standardized
prose language
[40], fictional as well as non-fictional.
Novelistic prose did yet not count as ‘literature’, and the
difference between non-fiction and fictive prose tended in the new
‘republic of letters’ to replicate the older division between a
prestigious classical language and a common, modern, vernacular
language. ‘Men of letters’ were skilled non-fiction prose writers
who demonstrated broad expertise across several genres of prose,
speaking ‘generally’ in a world of increasingly specialized
knowledges. Polite or bellicose, the face-to-face contacts of early
eighteenth-century print culture were gradually replaced by a more
heterogeneous, dispersed array of writers and readers who were welded
together as a public by the practices of criticism and the literary
reviewing
journals at mid-century.
In this larger process, Ralph
Griffiths's (1720–1803) Monthly Review; or Literary Journal
(1749) and Tobias Smollett's (1721–71) Critical Review; or
Annals of Literature (1758) carved out an audience of avid
mid-century book readers and buyers. The new reviews promoted a
fourfold increase in British book production and consumption between
1750 and 1800. Their impact was much greater than their paid
circulations (3,000–4,000 copies per month) would
indicate—universities, reading societies, private academies, and
libraries subscribed while readerships multiplied. Such reviews were
not simply devices for promoting the sales of British booksellers.
Working within the Enlightenment
[32] category of ‘literature’ as generally
educated discourse—a spacious universe of written genres ranging
from natural
philosophy [34], historiography,
moral philosophy, political philosophy, and political
economy [33] to poetry, drama, and
criticism—the Monthly and Critical reviews attempted
to be encyclopedic in their display of recent or emerging knowledges.
Hence they employed scholars in linguistics, mathematics, chemistry,
classics, moral philosophy, and other disciplines to inspect ‘all’
books in both established and emerging intellectual fields. Such
reviewers typically quoted long patches of the books under review,
offering their readers a generous sampling of the new knowledges,
alongside work in already established prose fields such as biography,
autobiography,
and novels
[31]. Yet their summary judgements on these
books encouraged the accusation that, instead of allowing readers to
‘think for themselves’, the new reviewing establishment was
imperiously imposing its own opinions (whether *Whig
or Tory)
on an unsuspecting public.
A turning-point in the history of
British reviewing culture developed in the early 1780s. Writers for
the Whiggish Monthly and Tory Critical reviews had
expressed their respective political outlooks with increasing
indifference to any larger intellectual function of the world of
‘polite letters’. The new English Review (1783),
however, mingled writers from both conservative and progressive
political camps to introduce a new category—‘Public Affairs’.
The English and the Analytical Review (1788) were the
first to circulate the notion of ‘public opinion’ as a newly
autonomous force in British public culture, and before long the
Monthly and the Critical likewise took up the mantle of
‘public opinion’ as the political articulation of what had
formerly been a mainly ‘literary’ public sphere. Renewing the
promise to enable readers to ‘think for themselves’, political
and religious dissenters gathered to edit and write for the leading
‘literary’ reviews so that, by 1791, England's four most
influential reviews were supporting the French Revolution while
demanding political change at home.
This critical mass of reformist
ambition helped produce the remarkable intellectual counter-culture
of the 1790s, including Joseph
*Priestley, Richard
*Price, Mary
*Wollstonecraft, William
*Godwin, Erasmus
*Darwin, John
Horne *Tooke, a young S.
T. *Coleridge, Thomas
*Paine, and Thomas
*Beddoes. What Godwin's Political Justice
in 1793 called ‘freedom of social communication’ became the credo
of these progressive intellectuals who socialized together in clubs
and at suppers, wrote for the same periodical media, and exchanged
critical viewpoints with an intensity which could produce rapid
changes in even the most unqualified intellectual positions.
Alone among the reformers, Paine's
‘democratical’ rhetoric reached beyond the intellectual journals
to galvanize an audience of hundreds of thousands of literate
artisans and labourers unaccustomed to philosophical prose, crossing
well-established lines between the public sphere of the
intelligentsia and what Arthur
*Young anxiously described as plebeian
‘assemblies in ale-house kitchens, clubbing their pence to have
Rights of Man [1791] read to them’. Yet Paine's popularity
can obscure the fact that he shared with Godwin, Wollstonecraft,
Priestley, and others the ambition of modelling a political republic
upon the literary republic. A meritocratic literary canon which
‘brings forward the best literary productions, by giving to genius
a fair and universal chance’ offered Paine the ideal model for
anti-aristocratic government. His idealization of the literary public
sphere as a model for political representation would also be one of
the last such visions to be entertained seriously by Britain's
progressive intellectuals. One of the most successful of what Edmund
*Burke called these ‘political Men of
Letters’, Godwin would argue, in his 1797 Enquirer, that
the medium of British prose had now historically developed to its
full maturity: ‘the spirit of philosophy has infused itself into
the structure of our sentences.’
But at no time since the formation of
the Enlightenment category of ‘literature’ had this modern
vernacular canon of discourse and knowledge come under such pressure
as in the intense culture wars of the 1790s. In the 1793 edition of
Political Justice Godwin had triumphantly opposed
‘literature’ to pre-modern romance
and superstition. However, by the second and third editions of
Political Justice in 1796 and 1798 he was omitting such
confident claims for its progressive powers and investing new hopes
in the minor and maligned genre of prose fiction. Meanwhile,
anti-Jacobin writers like T.
J. *Mathias had begun to put pressure upon the
hitherto unproblematic category of ‘literature’ by issuing widely
read and reprinted demands that it expose its political and national
allegiances. His polemic in the voluminous footnotes to the satiric
poem The Pursuits of Literature (1794–8) campaigned to
discredit the progressive political and intellectual culture
sustained by the later Enlightenment reviewers and the circles of
Godwin and Joseph
*Johnson. Though these anti-Jacobin
intellectuals could often sound like old-fashioned reactionaries in
the mould of a Swift, they were in fact a new breed of conservative
writers who embraced the economic forces of modernity and forged
strategies to reassert control over the ‘engine’ of Enlightenment
by every possible means. The collapse of the Analytical and
English reviews in 1796–8 signalled the success of this
inventive counter-revolution, which was part of a portentous
restructuring of cultural and economic capital that opened onto the
new century.
The conservative reshaping of British
public culture around 1800 took two especially far-reaching and
innovative material forms. One was the emergence of the new
scientific, philosophical, and literary lecturing
institutions, established when a group of ‘improving’ aristocrats
founded the Royal Institution to carry out a programme of wedding
science to commerce, philosophy to technology, and literary
traditions to the newest conditions of modernity. For fashionable
audiences, the Royal Institution and its successors converted the
eighteenth century's discourse of ‘natural philosophy’ into a
spectacular urban display of scientific know-how. Its leading light,
Humphry
*Davy, translated dry technicalities into star
performances while instructing his audience that the inequality of
property, rank, and taste was a founding precondition for scientific
‘advance’. Davy's rapturous lectures on chemistry and geology
tended to infuse scientific discourse with British aesthetic
vocabularies of sublimity
and sensibility
[11]. While his brilliant rhetorical flights
dazzled the audiences of the Royal Institution and similar bodies,
they also helped conceal the fact that original scientific enquiry
was beginning to disappear from public view. Laboratories were being
separated from lecturing platforms, and sure-fire displays replaced
the uncertain outcomes of true experiments. Unlike the older
scientific lectures conducted by Priestley and his contemporaries,
viewers of these new lecturing exhibitions were not meant to learn
how to replicate experiments themselves. Instead, by pioneering
methods of modern scientific popularization, Davy built a
techno-scientific constituency for whom he could synthesize the
various arcana of the new sciences as a visible testimony to one
evolving culture rooted in property and national feeling. By the
1820s, fully professionalized scientists like Michael
*Faraday would replace the half-publicist,
half-scientist figure of Davy. Faraday and his successors would
henceforth speak publicly only on matters of secured scientific
expertise and institutional qualifications. But it was thanks to
Davy's tenure at the Royal Institution that a ‘popularized’
science inscribed in popular prose effectively displaced the older
dialogue of natural philosophy by wider moral, historical, and
political languages.
The lecturing institutions achieved
even greater impact by sponsoring new voices in moral philosophy and
‘literary’ criticism as well as in science. Davy recruited
Coleridge to lecture on poetry at the Royal in 1808, and thereby
crafted a public partnership between the new, conservatively
inflected science and British cultural traditions that reached back
into the very resources of the national language. Over the next
twelve years, Coleridge interpreted and transmitted to contemporary
audiences a Shakespeare
whom he called a ‘philosophical aristocrat’, unexpectedly
compatible with the social ethos of the London lecturing
institutions. But the lecturing scene also diversified after 1808;
the Surrey and Russell institutions sponsored William
*Hazlitt's lectures on the English poets and
novelists for audiences of Quakers
and Dissenters, and by the year 1818 middle-class Londoners could
choose between duelling Shakespeare interpreters, as Coleridge,
Hazlitt, and John
*Thelwall offered competitive readings of a
figure who had come by this time to represent ‘literature’ in a
more psychological and internalized way than Shakespeare could have
done within the wider spectrum of discourses that counted as
literature in the late eighteenth century. Like the new quarterly
reviews of the early nineteenth century, the scenario of
institutional lecturing had the long-term effect of dividing the
externalized showcase of scientific innovation from the increasingly
internalized conceptions of poetry and thereby ‘literature’ which
Coleridge, Hazlitt, and others were interpretively promoting through
lectures on Shakespeare and Milton.
These lectures were, of course, ‘oral’ performances in a
predominantly ‘print’ culture, but their quasi-academic format,
as well as wide publicity among the newspapers
and periodicals, made them a key form of contemporary prose media.
The other great innovation in media
during this period was the new-style literary ‘review’,
inaugurated in 1802 by the lawyer-journalists of the Edinburgh
Review. By professionalizing the practices of periodical print
culture, the Scottish reviewers changed the scope and relation of
knowledges open to discussion in the British public sphere. Behind
Francis Horner (1778–1817), Francis
*Jeffrey, Henry
*Brougham, and other intellectual inheritors of
the Edinburgh-based Scottish
Enlightenment stood a tendentious body of
philosophical and historical arguments [see history,
38]. Most readers would have encountered this,
if at all, only in the writings of David
*Hume, William
*Robertson, or Adam
*Smith; that is, in Scottish philosophical
history, with its ‘inevitable stages’ theory of the development
of British modernity, and in the new ‘science’ of political
economy with its rationalizing of commercial society. The Edinburgh
reviewers' aim was as much to roll back the political and
intellectual influence of the 1790s London reviewing journals as to
counteract the conservative impact of the Anti-Jacobin
and Quarterly reviews. Jeffrey and his colleagues absorbed
the controversy over the French Revolution by interpreting the
Revolution as a calamitous yet historically necessary stage in the
unfettering of the commercial classes of France. They celebrated the
defeat of Napoleon
in 1815 as a removal of the last barrier against commercialized civil
society posed by the old republican
ideal of an armed citizenry.
Thus fitted with a rationale for
commercial modernization, the Edinburgh Review forged a set
of media practices which would persist throughout the nineteenth
century and into the twentieth. Reviewers no longer quoted books at
length. Instead, the new reviewer's own critical performance largely
displaced the language and the summarizing of the book under review,
thereby setting aside the question of whether the readers of the
Edinburgh or Quarterly reviews were truly being
invited to ‘think for themselves’. ‘Selectivity’ became the
new byword: where in three monthly issues the Monthly Review
might assess an average of 150 books, the Edinburgh and
later the Quarterly reviewed an average of fifteen books
each in the same quarter. Shrinking the number of authors and raising
the profile of reviewers, the Edinburgh and Quarterly
reviews thus created a cadre system of public criticism, leaving the
impression that to be ignored by the new quarterly reviews was a
telling sign of exclusion from the higher reaches of the literary
market-place.
The curious division of ideological
labour between these leading quarterlies prompted the later
Westminster Review (1824) to call their professed Whig and
Tory alignments a mask for a joint advocacy of aristocratic
interests. But the class content of the quarterly reviews was
ambiguous. They contested with each other and with the Westminster's
utilitarian
intellectuals for leadership of the emerging professional class who
had one foot in commercial institutions and one foot in the
institutions of state and church. While reviewing Maria
*Edgeworth's Tales of Fashionable Life
(1809), the Quarterly defined its own role as ‘a strict
literary police’, claiming to inspect the ‘weights and measures’
of the commercial cultural economy with its circulating
libraries and (in the common conservative
epithet of the time) its ‘manufactured’ novels
[31]. In this indirect way, the Quarterly
identified itself with the older principle of absolutism or
Polizeiwissenschaft—the philosophy of rule by state—as
if to declare its opposition to the more liberal philosophy of
commercial civil society promoted by Jeffrey in the Edinburgh.
The common result was jointly to represent the uniquely British and
uniquely productive tension between state and civil society, polizei
and commerce, inscribing it in Britain's intellectual public culture
as perhaps nowhere else in Europe.
The Edinburgh Review claimed
to draw its readers from the 200,000 lower clergy, shop-keepers,
teachers, and lesser professionals who composed the middling classes
often regarded as the moral backbone of Britain—as though to
suggest that the new quarterlies would speak to a wider social base
than their eighteenth-century precursors. Still, Jeffrey's aggressive
critical style soon made clear that it was his or the Review's
opinion which counted more than the ‘public opinion’ to which it
often appealed. One way to speak on behalf of a presumed consensus of
public belief was to partition the literary public sphere into
‘sects’ and ‘schools’, which the Edinburgh and
Quarterly reviews often identified with a named writer.
Reviewing Hazlitt's Table Talk (1821–2) became a means of
classifying and excoriating ‘the Radical School’; Robert
*Southey's Thalaba (1801) became the
sign of a ‘sect of poets’, the Lake School; while Keats
and Byron
became prime exhibits of a ‘Cockney school’ or a ‘Satanic
school’. Ironically, the reviews' practice of calling out the
representative writer of this or that ‘sect’ also produced a
long-run, unintended canonizing effect. Elevated from the wider group
of mere verse-producers, such poets as Keats, Wordsworth,
Byron, Shelley,
and Coleridge entered a sphere of publicity that would help to
accredit them as distinctively representative poets of an age. By
imposing such divisions upon the early-nineteenth-century literary
world, the quarterlies expanded the ‘judging’ power far beyond
the scope known to eighteenth-century critics. Not content merely to
prosecute this or that individual author, the new reviewers became
masters of cultural classification, dominating the literary sphere as
institutions having the power to institute other categories and
groups.
The most unexpected prose genre that
emerged in the early nineteenth century was the essay
in ‘Romantic prose’—the phrase that literary history has
conferred upon the writings of Hazlitt, Thomas
*De Quincey, Charles
*Lamb, John
*Wilson, and Leigh
*Hunt. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
(1817) probably published more of this reflexive, self-consciously
literary genre of the period than any other journal; it also
translated the German Romantic and idealist philosophers and poets
into English for wide circulation and influence in the 1820s, doing
much to make the taste for what was only later to be called
‘Romanticism’. John Wilson's essays and reviews for Blackwood's
established that magazine's early predisposition to shape an audience
of middle-class culture consumers. Indeed, the new figure of the
intellectual consumer was made plausible by the impressive leap in
circulation figures for the major reviews and magazines by 1820:
while early issues of the Edinburgh and Quarterly
reviews still had circulations of 3,000–4,000, like their
precursors, the numbers jumped by 1817 to an average of 12,000–14,000
for the quarterlies and Blackwood's.
If the Edinburgh Review
systematically translated commerce into ‘political economy’,
Blackwood's, the New Monthly Magazine (1814), and
the London Magazine (1820) cast their lot with a more
concretely arriviste cultural economy to which they were
giving tangible form. Writers for the New Monthly were
especially fascinated by the ‘mercantile phraseology’ of
advertisements
and other historic signposts of a fashion-driven consumerism
[19] which they alternately criticized and
publicized. No journal of the period better carried out the
magazines' promise to make their readers skilful interpreters of the
social semiotics and pretensions of public fashion, helping such
readers to escape being categorized themselves as belonging to the
much-noticed and maligned ‘fashionables’ or the strenuously
climbing and socially anxious middle class.
A baroque public prose emerged from
many of the quarterlies, magazines, and lecture halls formed after
1800. Perhaps its most trenchant critic was William Hazlitt, whose
intellectual roots lay in the Dissenting culture of the 1780s and
1790s, and whom the Quarterly Review defamed as a
‘Slang-Whanger’, gabbling vulgarisms to the multitude. In his
reply to the Quarterly, Hazlitt sketched out the identifying
marks of the newly normative prose language of the reviews and
magazines—its ‘rich and rare phraseology’, its ‘substitution
of foreign circumlocutions for the mother-tongue’, its ‘technical
or professional allusions’, a language ‘besotted with words’
written by ‘hieroglyphical writers’ in which ‘objects are not
linked to feelings, words to things, but images revolve in splendid
mockery, words represent themselves in their strange rhapsodies’.
Yet his shrewd assessment of inflated
verbal currencies in the public journals was itself couched in a kind
of linguistic economics. Hazlitt's essay idealized the writer who
used plain words and popular modes of construction. Against the new
journalistic sophistication, this was an appeal to an old tradesman's
ideal, the one Daniel Defoe had commemorated in 1720 as the capacity
to speak to 500 people of different occupations and ranks and have
them understand one's meaning all in the same way. Re-employed in
1821, the effect of this trade-language principle was to desituate
and unsocialize the language of social and cultural criticism.
Hazlitt opposed the natural syntax of the King's English to
provincial or local usages appearing in the coteries of cultural
conservatives like William
*Gifford or John Wilson. Today, any
knowledgeable reader of Hazlitt's prose must be struck by how attuned
it was to the local idioms of his own publishing venues—journals
like the London Magazine, New Monthly Magazine, the
Examiner, or the Edinburgh Review—the very idioms
of the professionalizing liberal middle class to which he owed his
audience and ethos. This group and its language escaped scrutiny in
Hazlitt's opposition between the prose that is misshapen by social
and material circumstance, on the one hand, and the prose he wished
to hear speaking from the inner logic of language and the
transhistorical place of critical thought.
It was not casually that Hazlitt voiced
his deep reservations about the positive tendencies of ‘public
opinion’ in the literary magazine begun by John Scott (1783–1821)
in 1820. The liberal London Magazine contributed as much as
the conservative Blackwood's to sketching in the Romantic
world picture by erasing the journalistic world from which it arose.
The London's anthology of current discourses was anchored by
the ‘Living Authors’ section, a cultural category which seemed to
replace the older magazines’ rhetorical claims upon living readers.
A new intimacy between writer and reader was claimed for liberal
political ends, either as Hazlitt's ‘familiar’ style, or as what
Charles Lamb redefined as the authentically ‘genteel’ style,
modelled on the relaxed language of the late-seventeenth-century
model Sir William Temple as opposed to the strained, ornate, and
status-conscious prose gentility of Temple's contemporary, the third
Earl of Shaftesbury. Hence, a third level of public prose could be
identified in addition to the older division that opposed the ‘lofty’
or ‘refined’ writers of the conservative reviews to the ‘vulgar’
or ‘lowly’ rhetorics of the plebeian radical journalists: the
‘common’, ‘familiar’, or, in Lamb's sense, the ‘plain
natural chit-chat’ of the unostentatiously learned man.
Equally decisive was the London's
fourfold classification system, representing ‘all that is going
forward in Literature, Art, Science & Politics’—a division of
intellectual labour well advanced beyond the older, less
differentiated category of ‘literature’ operating in the Monthly,
the Analytical, or the early Edinburgh reviews. The
new space between ‘politics’ and ‘literature’ was evident
even among the middle-class radical writers who, like Leigh Hunt in
the Examiner (1809), had once strenuously referred cultural
matters to political contexts. Writing in 1822 to open his new
review, the Liberal, Hunt now modulated the relationship. In
what was effectively a new definition of liberalism, he claimed that
the review was not political, but was rather an arena for
contributing ‘liberalities in the shape of Poetry, Essays, Tales,
Translations’. To separate literature from science and politics was
also protectively to distinguish critical writing from the intensely
personalized culture battles being waged in reviews and magazines
since 1798. Even authorship itself was no longer to be pictured in a
war of manœuvre between cultural positions. From 1820 to 1825, in
works ranging from Lamb's ‘essays of Elia’ and Hazlitt's ‘table
talks’ to De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater
(1822), the London Magazine writers tried to distance
authorship from its social location by practising Hazlitt's ‘familiar
style’ or De Quincey's confessional prose as the discourse of a
newly defined literary subject. This subject was an ‘author’,
held to be irreducible to the position of the ‘writer’, who was
both politically marked and striving to be marketed.
In 1780 the terms ‘public’ and
‘literary’ still enjoyed a close association: by the 1820s, these
terms displayed an open contradiction. Thomas
*Carlyle's remark in the Edinburgh Review
that ‘all Literature has become one boundless self-devouring
Review’ rendered in shorthand what others, including Coleridge,
John
Stuart *Mill, and Arnold, would elaborate as an
inevitable antagonism between ‘society’ and ‘culture’, those
greater abstract totalities drawn from the intense local, civil, and
cultural wars of the turn of the nineteenth century.
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