Public, Private and the Idea of the ‘Public Sphere’ in Early–modern England

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Notes

¹ This paper arises from some perfunctory remarks in my book Argument and Authority in Early‐modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge: University Press, 2006) 71–9, in which additional evidence is to be found; and from ongoing work on metaphor and model building in which a fuller argument will be developed. Earlier versions were given at the AMZAMEMS Conference, Adelaide University, February 2007 and at The Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland, 3 May 2007. I am grateful to Michael Bennet, Paul Sutton and Mark Amsler, Peter Cryle, Ian Hunter and to CHED for its hospitality. My thanks also to Dr Richard Devetak as respondent in Brisbane, Professor Chris Laursen for comment from California and to the constructive criticism of the anonymous readers for Intellectual History Review, and especially to Professor Hugh Sockett, for debts longstanding.

² On the ‘Habermas effect’ and the status of the book, see M. B. Matustík, Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical Political Profile (New York: Lanham, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 237; A. McKee, The Public Sphere: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 13; on its apparent indispensability, M. McKeon, ‘Parsing Habermas’s “Bourgeois Public Sphere”’, Criticism, 46:2 (2004), 273–7 (273).

³ Examples of the concern with the sphere are given below where a substantive point is being made; but it will be clear that there is no pretence to a complete survey of Habermasian evocation. A wealth of evidence is cited in G. Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, in Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, edited by J. McElligott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 67–90.

⁴ For valuable general studies see M. Black, Models and Metaphors: Structure in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962); J. A. Barnes Models and Interpretations: Selected Essays (Cambridge: University Press, 1990), esp. 215–26.

⁵ Barnes, Models, 220–2.

⁶ J. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1962), translated by T. Burger with F. Lawrence, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (London: Polity Press, 1989), xvii.

⁷ Habermas, Structural Transformation, 18–45.

⁸ McKeon, ‘Parsing Habermas’s “Bourgeois Public Sphere”’, 275.

⁹ A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘Public Sphere/Contact Zone: Habermas, Early Print, and Verse Translation’, Criticism, 46:2 (2004), 207–22 (207–10).

¹⁰ The desiderata of properly rational discourse are more fully worked out in The Theory of Communicative Action (vol. 2); Life World and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, translated by T. McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989); for a recent discussion of the debates concerning this ideal, see P. Johnson, ‘Romantic and Enlightenment Legacies: Habermas and the Post‐modern Critics’, in Contemporary Political Theory, 5:1 (2006), 68–90 (esp. 80–1).

¹¹ C. Calhoun, ‘Introduction’ in Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by C. Calhoun, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 4–6. In the same volume see also B. Lee, ‘Textuality, Mediation and Public Discourse’, 402–19. In ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’ (also published in the Calhoun volume, 421–61), Habermas stated that the whole process can be ‘grasped’ within a Marxist framework (428), which would seem to confirm that he did not see it entirely in these terms.

¹² R. Holub, Jürgen Habermas, Critic of the Public Sphere (London: Routledge, 1991), 5–7.

¹³ Habermas, Structural Transformation, xvii, 2–3, 57–67, 141–250.

¹⁴ Habermas, Structural Transformation, 57–66.

¹⁵ Habermas, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere’, esp. 421–40.

¹⁶ Calhoun, ‘Introduction’ in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 1–9. See also D. Zaret, ‘Religion, Science and Printing in the Public Spheres of Seventeenth‐century England’ in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 212–35.

¹⁷ M. R. Somers, ‘The “Misteries” of Property: Relationality, Rural‐industrialization and Community in Chartist Narratives of Political Rights’, in Early‐Modern Conceptions of Property: Consumption and Culture in the Seventeeth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by J. Brewer and S. Staves (London: Routledge, 1995), 62–93 (62). Judging by her supporting references to Locke scholarship, she is hardly isolated in this carelessness. For similar attitudes concerning the facts Habermas has established, though with reference principally to France, see D. Goodman, ‘Epistolary Property: Michel de Servan and the Plight of Letters on the Eve of the French Revolution’, Early‐modern Conceptions of Property, 339–64 (339–40).

¹⁸ G. Baldwin, ‘Individual and Self in the Late Renaissance’, The Historical Journal, 44:2 (2001), 341–64 (363); N. Mears, ‘Counsel, Public Debate and Queenship: John Stubbs’s The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf, 1579’, The Historical Journal, 44:3 (2001), 629–50; for ‘Shakespeare’s concern’ with the ‘public sphere’, see, for example, M. Spivack, ‘Introduction’ in William Shakespeare. Julius Caesar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 14. For the confusions in the categories apparently arising from Shakespeare’s practice, see Spivack, ‘Introduction’, 17–19. On Shakespeare’s actual use of the terms ‘private’ and ‘public’, see below.

¹⁹ On the reduction of the search to precursion, see J. Loewenstein and P. Stevens, ‘Introduction’, Criticism, 46:2 (2004), 201–5.

²⁰ See, for example, numerous contributions to Calhoun’s Habermas and the Public Sphere.

²¹ This may go beyond Barnes’s process of oscillation, ultimately, pointing to circularity in the whole practice of model use. It raises the question of what evidence we have for the validity of any model other than our own capacity to describe the world through its constituent vocabulary.

²² D. Norbrook, ‘Women, the Republic of Letters and the Public Sphere in the Mid‐seventeenth Century’, Criticism, 46:2 (2004), 223–40 (223).

²³ S. Pincus, ‘“Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffee‐houses and Restoration Political Culture’, The Journal of Modern History, 67:4 (1995), 807–34.

²⁴ D. Zaret, ‘Religion, Science and Printing’, cf. 212–13 and 224; D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), for example, 13, 100–2, 282–3; cf Nancy Struever, ‘Review Essay’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 61:2 (2000), 295.

²⁵ Habermas, Structural Transformation, 102–18, 116–20; ‘Further Reflections’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 430–1, 444.

²⁶ The contributions of David Zaret, Geoff Eley and Nicholoas Garnham to Calhoun’s Habermas and the Public Sphere, all move in this pluralizing direction.

²⁷ M. Schudson, ‘Was There Ever a Public Sphere? If So, When? Reflections on the American Case’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 143–63.

²⁸ T. Claydon, ‘The Sermon, the “Public Sphere” and the Political Culture of Late Seventeenth‐century England’, in The English Sermon Revised: Literature and Literary History, edited by L. A. Ferrell and P. McCullogh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 208–34; see also Zaret, 224–6; for due scepticism, see Norbrook, ‘Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere’, 233. For a recent attempt to replace rational/logical criteria with rhetorical ones, see D. Randall, ‘Epistolary Rhetoric, the Newspaper and the Public Sphere’, Past and Present, 198 (2008), 3–32.

²⁹ See, for example, S. Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early‐modern England, 1550–1640 (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 234–7 and P. Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England, Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories, 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press, 2005), 125–7. For the public sphere in Tudor courts, see M. Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 120, 165, 238.

³⁰ Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, 68–70.

³¹ For linguistic shamans and the linguist’s ambivalent attitude to them, see D. L. Bolinger, Language – The Loaded Weapon: The Use and Abuse of Language Today (New York: Longman, 1980), 1–9.

³² J. Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (London, 1726 and 1735, reprinted London: Collins, 1953), cf III.5, 203 with IV.10, 296–7.

³³ On what he called ‘conversational implicature’, see H. P. Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, in Speech Acts, vol 3. Syntax and Semantics, edited by P. Cole and J. Morgan (New York: Academic Press, 1975), 41–58.

³⁴ L. Bloomfield, Language (New York: Holt, Reinhardt & Winston, 1933), 139.

³⁵ I. Hunter, ‘The History of Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 33:1 (2006), 78–111 (109–110); Habermas, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 441–3, 446–8.

³⁶ Hunter, ‘The History of Theory’, 108–10; Norbrook, ‘Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere’, 223.

³⁷ For brief but helpful comments on censorship, see G. Burgess, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 2–8. For a survey of literacy and what might be inferred from evidence of it, see Laslett, The World We Have Lost: Further Explored (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, reprinted 2000), 229–36; B. Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee‐house (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005), admittedly a work hostile to the Habermas hypothesis.

³⁸ N. Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 30–91.

³⁹ The debate was started by P. Collinson, De republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); P. Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1994); The Monarchical Republic of Early‐modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson, edited by J. McDiarmid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). For critical comment on some of the ambiguities in the notion, see J. Sommerville, ‘English and Roman Liberty in the Monarchical Republic of Early Stuart England’, in The Monarchical Republic, 201–16 and Condren, Argument and Authority, 59–62, 158–62.

⁴⁰ See, especially, M. Braddick, State Formation in Early‐modern England, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); S. Hindle, The State and Social Change; M. Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Office‐holding in Early‐modern England’, in The Politics of the Excluded, c.1550–1800, edited by T. Harris (London: Palgrave, 2001), 153–94; and Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth.

⁴¹ See, for example, Norbrook, ‘Women, the Republic of Letters and the Public Sphere’; Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’; N. Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the European Republic of Letters’ in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 457–545.

⁴² See Calhoun’s introduction to Habermas and the Public Sphere.

⁴³ See K. Baker, ‘Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth‐century France’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 198–211; G. Eley, ‘Nations, Publics and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 307–19; S. Magedanz, ‘Public Justice and Private Mercy in Measure for Measure’, Studies in English Literature, 44:2 (2004), 317–32. For critical comment, see Norbrook, ‘Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere’, 224–5.

⁴⁴ See, for example, V. B. Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 101–5.

⁴⁵ Norbrook, ‘Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere’, 223.

⁴⁶ Habermas made a few ground‐clearing forays in looking at the terms, but revealingly pressed patterns of use into the shapes demanded by conformity to a Marxist trajectory of epochs, and seemed to assume that usage reflected, or, as in The Middle Ages, simply failed to keep clear the prior concepts his theory needed, Structural Transformation, 6–9; for some helpful discussion of debates around the ‘public’ see J. C. Laursen, ‘The Politics of Skepticism’ in The Ancients, Montaigne, Hume and Kant (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1992), ch. 9; Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, 84–6.

⁴⁷ C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, reprinted 1976), 12–16.

⁴⁸ Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, 75–83.

⁴⁹ Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named The Governor (1531), I.1, summarizing standard views.

⁵⁰ Condren, Argument and Authority, 80–104.

⁵¹ Pace Zaret, ‘Religion, Science and Printing’ in Habermas and the Public Sphere, where use of ‘public’ in the seventeenth century seems to be taken as a sign of a quasi‐Habermasian sensibility.

⁵² Condren, Argument and Authority, 71–9; K. Sharpe, Remapping Early‐modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth‐century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 51, 150–1.

⁵³ Sir Thomas Smith, De republica Anglorum: A Discourse of the Commonwealth of England, edited by L. Alston (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972), 31–46.

⁵⁴ Johann Gerhard, cited in R. von Friedeburg and M. Seidler, ‘The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, in European Political Thought: 1450–1700, edited by H. A. Lloyd, G. Burgess and S. Hodson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 131.

⁵⁵ W. Willymat, A Loyal Subjects Looking‐glasse (London, 1604), 47–9; P. Heylyn, The Rebells Catechism (Oxford, 1643), 16. On German usage, see R. von Friedeburg, Self‐defence and Religious Strife in Early‐modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 56–70.

⁵⁶ M. Dalton, Country Justice (1635), ch.7, 33; S. Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity (London, 1670, 1671), 308.

⁵⁷ H. Howard, A Publication of his Majesties Edict, and Severe Sensure Against Private Combats and Combatants (London, 1613), quoted in M. Peltonen, The Duel in Early‐modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 110.

⁵⁸ Sir Ralph Sadler, letter 43 (August 1543), in The State Papers and Letters of Sir Ralph Sadler, edited by A. Clifford, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1809), vol. 1, 251.

⁵⁹ T. Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 27, 211.

⁶⁰ Castiglione’s work was a sustained attempt to define the aristocratic courtier as a responsible office‐holder, hence its reliance on the authority of Ciceronian formulations of office; but in likening the courtier to the physician, it also canvassed a more precise model of official rectitude. See R. Aubrey, ‘Medicine and Statecraft in The Book of the Courtier’, Intellectual History Review, 18:1 (2008), 75–89.

⁶¹ For a most valuable study of the arguments and history of duelling in early‐modern England, see Peltonen, The Duel.

⁶² W. Ames, Cases of Conscience and the Resolution Thereof (London, 1639), 179; P. M. Vermigli, ‘Commentary of 2 Kings, 11: 5–12’ in the Political Thought of Peter Martyr Vermigli, edited by R. Kingdon (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 100–2; W. Allen [E. Sexby], Killing Noe Murder. Briefly Discourst in Three Quæstions (London, 1657, reprinted London, 1689), 11, 13; A. Salmerón, Commentarii in omnes Epistolas B. Pauli, et Canonicas (Cologne, 1604), 680–1 discussed in H. Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c.1540–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 191.

⁶³ J. Lipsius, Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex, translated by W. Jones, Sixe Bookes of Politickes (London, 1594), 64.

⁶⁴ G. Gascoigne, ‘The Adventures of Master F. J.’ (London, 1573), in An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, edited by P. Salzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 13. See also R. Greene, Pandosto (1588) in the same volume, 157.

⁶⁵ F. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (London, 1606) in Works, edited by Basil Montague 16 vols (London, 1825), vol. 2, 233–4.

⁶⁶ C. Malcolmson, Heart Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 267–8. For a more general account of the soul in its official relationship to God, see Condren, Argument and Authority, 125–46. For a conventionally fallacious equation of autonomy with a private sphere, see Somers, ‘The “Misteries” of Property’.

⁶⁷ See also Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, summarizing a standard position, 291.

⁶⁸ Greene, ‘Pandosto’, in Elizabethan Prose Fiction, 158.

⁶⁹ Hobbes’s Leviathan offers, in this limited respect, a theorization of what had been previously asserted by Willymat and Heylyn.

⁷⁰ T. Wyatt, Collected Poems, edited by K. Muir (London: Routledge, 1976), 149.

⁷¹ J. Hitchcock, A Sanctuary for Honest Men. Or An Abstract of Humane Wisedome (London, 1617); see Peltonen, Classical Humanism, 149, 158; Gascoigne, The Adventures of Master F. J. in Elizabethan Prose Fiction, 3.

⁷² R. Mulcaster, Positions Wherein those Primitive Circumstances be Examined which are Necessarie for the Training up of Children (London, 1581), ch. 39, 267–8.

⁷³ J. Swift, Letter, 3 July 1714, in Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, edited by H. Williams, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), vol. 2, 44–5. See also Harley to Swift, 27 July 1714, Correspondence, 85. Having lost office, he will become a private man when he has tidied up his domestic affairs.

⁷⁴ A. Munday, A Second Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theatres (London, 1580).

⁷⁵ H. Parker, The Case of Shipmony (London, 1640), 26–32; M. Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public’s ‘Privado’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 44–6; Charles I (?) Eikon Basilike (London, 1649), 55–8; 83–8.

⁷⁶ J. Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (London, 1650) in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, edited by D. M. Wolfe, F. Fogle, M. Y. Hughes, M. Kelly, E. Sirluck and A. Woolrych. 7 vols to date (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–), vol. 3, 190–258; or see Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (London, 1681–3, 1690), edited by T. G. West (Indianapolis, in Liberty Fund, 1996). Lipsius’s Sixe Bookes warns princes against following private rather than public interest. These were widespread sententiae backed by ancient authority.

⁷⁷ J. Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium or the Rule of Conscience in All Her Generall Measures; Serving as a Great Instrument for the Determination of Cases of Conscience, 2 vols (London, 1660), III.2, 111.

⁷⁸ Mendle, Henry Parker, 40.

⁷⁹ A. Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (Amsterdam, 1677); ‘An Horatian ode upon Cromwell’s return from Ireland’ (1650), lines 83–90 in Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, edited by E. S. Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972, reprinted 1978), 55–8.

⁸⁰ See, for example, J. Arbuthnot, ‘Sermon Delivered at Mercat Cross’ (1706), in The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot, edited by G. Aitken (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 408.

⁸¹ W. Scott, An Essay on Drapery (London, 1635); T. Mun, England’s Treasure By Forraign Trade (London, 1664, reprinted Oxford: Blackwell, 1949). See C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early‐modern England (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).

⁸² J. Lipsius, On Constancie, Two Books, translated by J. Stradling (London, 1594), bk 2.

⁸³ P. Alpers, ‘What is Pastoral?’, Critical Inquiry, 8:3 (1982), 437–60.

⁸⁴ See, for example, C. Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton: The Laughing Philosopher in the Early‐modern Period’, in The Philosopher in Early‐modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, edited by C. Condren, S. Gaukroger and I. Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 90–112.

⁸⁵ See G. Claeys, ‘The Divine Creature and the Female Citizen: Manners, Religion and the Two Rights Strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication’, in English Radicalism, 1550–1850, edited by G. Burgess and M. Festenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 115–34 (esp. 116, 122–3, 126–7).

⁸⁶ See also, All’s Well That Ends Well, 2.5; Coriolanus, 2.3; 1 Henry IV, 3.2; Henry VIII 1.4; King John 4.3; Richard III, 1.1; Love’s Labours Lost, 5.2; Pericles, 2.4.

⁸⁷ Cymbeline, 5.3; Othello 4.1; Romeo and Juliet 1.1.

⁸⁸ Pace M. Spevak, ‘Introduction’ to Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 14.

⁸⁹ Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’, 88–9. See Randall, ‘Epistolary Rhetoric’ for some suggestions as to how this might be argued.