Much of the recent commentary on the Spectator has emphasized one or more of three overlapping approaches. The Spectator is seen as the prime example of Jürgen Habermas's concept of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, with particular attention to the effect of print and to the institution of the coffeehouse. A second tendency of some criticism has been to read the Spectator against the grain, finding it advancing ideas that it renounces and illustrating practices that it rejects. A third tendency, far more prevalent, has been to mine the Spectator for material on a particular topic, or set of topics, of interest to modern readers. None of these approaches can be dismissed out of hand, and all have produced interesting results, but none, alas, is of particular use to the political biographer, whose approach is skewed by concern for a person and for the specific nature of his politics.

The connection of the Spectator to the bourgeois public sphere was first made in English by Terry Eagleton in 1984. ‘The bourgeois public sphere’, Habermas wrote,

The ‘bourgeois public sphere’ is an intellectual construct that postulates connections among the development of capitalism, the emergence of new methods of transmitting information and of social institutions that allowed access to it, and shifts in the configuration of class structure. In England, during the reign of Queen Anne, the bourgeois public sphere was effected by the democratic access to discourse practised in coffeehouses and recorded in literary periodicals, pre-eminently the Spectator, which ‘worked toward the spread of tolerance, the emancipation of civic morality from moral theology, and of practical wisdom from the philosophy of scholars. The public that read and debated this sort of thing read and debated about itself’.