According to Jürgen Habermas, during the eighteenth century the “bourgeois public sphere” emerges in contrast to what he calls a “representational public sphere” (repräsentative Öffentlichkeit). Whereas in the latter those in power would communicate to a passive audience of subjects, in the new bourgeois public sphere communication takes place outside the reach of state and governmental institutions, for instance, in coffee houses, taverns, and theaters. The new public sphere was propagated by the effects of a flourishing print market and the exponential growth in the availability of moral weeklies and sentimental fiction. In its forms of communication it takes its cues from the new sentimental genres of the epistolary novel and bourgeois tragedy; interlocutors are imagined as friends and members of a nuclear family rather than as representatives of a particular estate within a social hierarchy. In that sense the bourgeois public sphere values intimacy and equality; it is open and inclusive. Like Habermas, I am interested in the emergence of a new concept of the public as well as in the actual practices and institutions that promoted it. However, I do not assume that explicit reflection on the public sphere is necessarily part of the same domain as the practices promoting this new, more inclusive, more egalitarian and potentially critical public. In fact, as I shall show, at least initially it is in the context of a conscious involvement with the reaches and claims of government and the state that we can find the first programmatic reflections on the nature of the public. I shall do so by focusing on the reflection on the emergence of the public sphere in Germany between 1750 and 1800.
In his entry “Öffentlichkeit” (the public, public sphere) from the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (History of Fundamental Political Concepts), Lucian Hölscher treats the emergence of a public that is no longer the mere passive audience of a top-down communication, but one that sees itself as actively involved in shaping matters of taste and exchanging views and opinions by tracing the meaning of the term Publikum, which in German still today—like the English term public—also carries the plain, neutral meaning of “audience.” Hölscher makes the point that even once this term has acquired its newly added dimension, referring primarily to “an educated readership,” its older uses continue to be valid throughout the eighteenth century, namely referring to the potential readership of a specific municipality or otherwise circumscribed administrative or juridical territory for which particular decrees, laws, and regulation are made available in print.1 This medial aspect will concern my analysis throughout this chapter.
Whereas Habermas consciously excludes from his considerations those instances where the state and polity are involved, Hölscher notes the importance of the Latin term publicum, the substantive of publicus (pertaining to the state and to the people). It is in that traditional sense that the term public (Publicum) refers to the commonwealth or polity of a city or land. The res publica that concerns all citizens, moreover, brings into play an entirely different meaning of the German Bürger and bürgerlich, namely “citizen” and “civic” rather than “bourgeois.” The public of citizens rather than a bourgeois public sphere is not primarily an economic or class issue, but it is constituted through the common interest in the well-being of the commonwealth. Here we are dealing with a concept of the public that has been attributed to antiquity, be it the Greek polis or the Roman republic, where free citizens debate and decide together how to govern the commonwealth in a common public space under the open sky. This phantasm of a glorious open debate among equals in support of the common good had its anachronistic elements for the mid-eighteenth-century observer, as most writers who invoked it were aware of. However, it is exactly this rather glorified, idealizing version that addresses the questions of inclusiveness and the overcoming of social hierarchies, both decisive elements leading toward a new concept of the public. Moreover, as we shall see, invoking this republican ideal of a public calls attention to the role of media and media technologies in its insistence on the oral culture of the ancients in contrast to the public of print culture.
In part 3 I will trace the emergence of the concept of an active, emancipated public by looking at the transition from the traditional model of a top-down communication to one that conceives of the public as capable of critical judgments, actively involved in the shaping of public opinion. I shall ask when, how, and with regard to what kind of specific settings and examples this new model of an open, more egalitarian public was made into a normative ideal by examining the explicit analysis or programmatic articulation of what a public is or should be, i.e., by calling attention to what could be considered “metatexts” in the eighteenth-century constructions of a new public sphere. Apart from these meta-texts, I shall also consider actual practices within the domain of communication and pay attention to interventions in the form and format of public debate as they demand new kinds of participation, attention, and self-understanding of the public. In brief, I shall study the question: When and how does “the public” become a normative ideal in the Enlightenment? When and how is the concept addressed? Which practices contributed to the development of new models of the public sphere?
In what follows I shall show that beginning with the transformation of the older concept of the public we can observe two very distinct trajectories. First there is the trajectory in which the public is conceived as a distinct unit, an imagined community that is united in view of a common interest, the concern for the commonwealth that transcends factions and individual interests, and through that concern creates equality even within a hierarchical, nondemocratic setting in the context of absolutist rule. In the second trajectory, the public is imagined as open to one and all, although this ideal openness will always be limited in terms of the specifics of language, accessibility, and the concrete modalities of circulation of the texts in question. Whereas the former model sets up the public as a normative ideal, it is primarily in the latter model that we can find an ongoing reflection on the textual and medial aspects of the public. Apart from Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?” most of the texts I shall be considering have received relatively little attention. I have chosen these texts because they draw attention to how the conceptualization of the public emerges in contexts that have been overlooked. Most scholarly discussions of the emergence of the “bourgeois public sphere” tend to ignore issues of governmental authority and the reaches of censorship as they portray the “rise of the modern public” primarily as a creature of the print markets and the self-reflexive circulation of news, fashion, and entertainment discourses. By contrast, the texts I shall draw attention to involve the domains of patriotism, religion, and the republic of letters.
In the recent literature on the history and emergence of an Enlightenment public sphere, one study pays particular attention to the authors who are also of primary interest in my approach to the subject matter. Benjamin Redekop presents his Enlightenment and Community as a way of doing justice to the particular circumstances of a “German” public, to the fact that there is no unified nation but rather a great number of individual principalities, which leads him to seek in the conscious construction of imagined communities a decisive element in the German approach to the public sphere.2
While my own argument is informed by Redekop’s study, it also crucially departs from it in two ways. First, I disagree with some of the individual readings of specific texts by these authors. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, I differ in my overall approach to the construction of an Enlightenment public within a German context. Although I agree that it is necessary to consider the fragmentation of Germany and pay close attention to the context of the Seven Years’ War in order to understand the first emergence of an emphatic notion of the public, I contend that the concept of a critical Enlightenment public will be utterly compromised if it ends up being reduced to some kind of “imagined community,” i.e., a unit with a definite membership like this or that audience, the nation, a distinct people, etc. In order to prevent this distortion, I have not restricted my choice of texts to the same that Redekop privileges in order to study what is specific to the German concept of the public. I shall also pay attention to Kant’s programmatic “What Is Enlightenment?” and the important context of the much wider transformation of the republic of letters. Moreover, I shall show that a critique of a unified, homogenized public as a decisive element in the emergence of an emphatic Enlightenment concept of the public can already be found in some of the publicist practices during the Seven Years’ War. Most importantly, I hope to trace the different takes on the role of religion with regard to the construction of a new concept of the public.
My argument is divided into three sections. In the first (chapter 10), “Patriotic Invocations of the Public,” I shall show that, already in the context of the Seven Years’ War, we can situate an awareness of the public as a discursive construct calling for innovation and modernization. In this context the creation of a modern public is part of a patriotic agenda, an imagined community of people united in support of a common cause and in their ability to transcend self-interest. I shall argue that the ultimately moralist underpinnings of this concept of the public, the claim that its invocation can mobilize nonselfish behavior, provide this concept of a modern public of patriots with its normative charge. The main focus of this chapter, however, will be on tracing some of the arguments and debates between two advocates for the construction of an imagined community of patriots, the legally trained high-level administrator Friedrich Carl von Moser and the very young, ambitious scholar and publicist Thomas Abbt. What renders their dispute most interesting for my larger argument is their very different understanding of the role of religion in the construction of a united public, on the one hand, and their very different understanding of civic virtue, on the other hand. In the very same context of the Seven Years’ War, however, we also already find a critique of the same concept of a modern patriotic public and the practices it calls for. This critique of a unified patriotic public, moreover, proceeds by way of an intervention in a mode of communication by way of disturbing and interrupting exactly the appeal to this kind of construction of an imagined community. With these strategies it offers another model of a public, a heterogeneous one that is open in terms of membership as well as toward the future, and above all a critical public.
In the second section (chapter 11), “Real and Virtual Audiences in Herder’s Concept of the Modern Public,” I will examine the two versions of Herder’s essay answering the question “Do we still have the Public and the Fatherland of the Ancients?” Its first version from 1765 can be read as a direct response to the attempts to conceive of a modern patriotic public during the Seven Years’ War, shifting the moralist focus of this model from its martial implications to that of an imagined community based on the participation in the public sector committed to support all segments of the population, including the weak, sick, young, and elderly. Its revised and much expanded second version from 1795/96, published as the fifty-seventh letter of his Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (Letters for the Promotion of Humanity), provides an extensive reflection on the function of real time and space in the construction of different kinds of publics with regard to the different domains of politics, religion, and the arts. Whereas at first glance this essay seems primarily to be promoting print culture and the isolated, silent reader as the model scenario of the competent, critical audience member of humanity at large, a closer examination of the essay reveals a fascinating, sustained analysis of the interrelationship of oral/aural forms of communication with written forms and of the real with the virtual sphere when it comes to constructions of different kinds of publics. Herder’s advocacy of the public of literature as the ideal public for a humanist agenda does not only expose the explicit program behind the scenario of the individual reader as the prototype of the member of the public, it also shows us how this agenda is directly and consciously intertwined with a distinct model of secularization, a displacement of religion by art when it comes to the construction of a critical audience. Indeed, according to Herder, as I shall show, it is first art in the form of live theatrical performances, then literature as any kind of fiction that promotes the kind of self-awareness that is constitutive of the critical public.
The third section (chapter 12), “Mobilizing a Critical Public,” focuses on some of the writing and publication strategies that invoked and expanded existing conventions of the traditional republic of letters, making deliberate use of the vernacular, and consciously provoked and called attention to questions of authority and censorship. First I shall analyze Kant’s programmatic essay “What Is Enlightenment?” in the context of the academy competitions as a reflection on the expansion of the conventions of the republic of letters. Then I shall turn to Lessing’s so-called theological writings. Already in chapter 10, in the discussion of the role of the patriotic debates during the Seven Years’ War for the construction of a modern public, I shall turn to Lessing’s intervention in an effort to show that through his particular writing and publication strategies he postulates a radically different public from the corporate model he is criticizing. In this last chapter Lessing’s writings on religion will be analyzed as active interventions in the position of authority claimed by theologians in matters of belief. Lessing’s treatment of religion in general can be characterized as a radical provocation of the established academic hierarchies, as a way of taking the academic battles among the learned to a much broader, general population.