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21 - Public opinion and the political pamphlet

from PART IV - LITERATURE AND SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
J. A. Downie
Edited by
John Richetti
John Richetti
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

The people of England, it is generally observed, are, of all nations in the world, the most addicted to Politics. The fact is certain, and the reason of it evident.

Jürgen Habermas' influential model of the rise of public opinion as a force in the state argues that ‘[a] public sphere that functioned in the political realm arose first in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century’ when, with the end of censorship, ‘a press devoted to the debate of political issues developed out of the pamphlet’. The principle of universal access is central to Habermas' thesis about the emergence (as opposed to the structural transformation) of the bourgeois public sphere. ‘A public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely incomplete’, he explains, ‘it was not a public sphere at all.’ As it consists of ‘private persons come together as a public’, the public sphere, in its appeal to reason as a governing principle, is in a crucial sense disinterested.

The period from the later seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries has been described, quite rightly, as ‘the first age of party’. This inevitably presents problems for a thesis in which ‘rational-critical’ debate is posited as being somehow free from party-political (or any other) considerations. On the contrary, it is clear that politicians immediately appreciated the possibilities presented by the existence of a free press for influencing parliamentary as well as public opinion. While Edmund Burke was drafting Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), he received a letter from the Marquis of Rockingham:

I wish it may be read by all the members of Parliament – and by all the politicians in town and country prior to the meeting of Parliament. I think it would take universally, and tend to form and to unite a party upon real and well founded principles – which would in the end prevail and re-establish order and Government in this country.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 549 - 571
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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