La Vopa, Sobre Habermas y Koselleck

Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern
Society by Reinhart Koselleck; The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society by Jurgen Habermas; Thomas Burger; Frederick Lawrence; Jack R. Censer; Gail W. O'Brien Review by: Anthony J. La Vopa The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Mar., 1992), pp. 79-116 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2124716 . Accessed: 01/04/2013 10:50
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Review Article Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe*

Anthony J. La Vopa
North Carolina State University
To students of eighteenth-century Europethereis somethingoddly familiarabout recent events in the Soviet Union and its formersatellites. We recognize the appealsto the "public"as a collectiveconscienceandto "publicopinion"as the recordof its judgments; the faithin openness,or "publicity,"as the high roadto reform; the politicallychargedcensureof government in the languagesof fiction andphilosophy. Wereit not for the obviousdifferences betweenthe EastBloc and the ancien regime, we mightbe temptedto regard glasnost as a telescopedreplay of an eighteenth-century script. It was in eighteenth-century Europe,and particularly in England,France,and the Germanstates, thatthe "public" firstassumeda recognizably modernshape andbecamea powerfulideologicalconstruct.Thatconstruct was a characteristic product of the Enlightenment,and it marked one of the critical zones of intersectionbetween Enlightenment discourse and a broad range of socioeconomic and institutional changes.To appreciate the semanticshift, one need only considerhow the meaningof "opinion"changedas it was pairedwith "public." As late as the mid-eighteenth century,"opinion"usuallyconnotedthe fickleness and the narrow particularismof prejudice, in contrast to the unchanging of truth.By the end of the century,however,opinionin its "public" universality that guise was endowedwith a rational objectivityopposedto the blindadherence traditional commanded.Publicopinionwas the authoritative authority judgment of a collective conscience, the rulingof a tribunalto which even the state was subject.1
* The works reviewed in this essay areReinhartKoselleck, Critiqueand Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesisof Modern Society (1959; English trans., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), pp. x + 204; and JurgenHabermas,The StructuralTransformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (1962; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), pp. xix + 301. A special word of thanks is due Jack R. Censer and Gail W. O'Brien, who provided needed criticism and encouragementin the initial draftingof the essay. The research and writing were made possible by a fellowship at the WoodrowWilson International Center for Scholars and by a grant from the American Philosophical Society. 1 See, esp., Lucian Holscher, Offentlichkeit und Geheimnis: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Entstehung der Offentlichkeit in der fruhen Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1979), pp. 81-117, and "Offentlichkeit," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur
[Journal of Modern History 64 (March 1992): 79-116] ? 1992 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/92/6401-0004$01.00 All rights reserved.
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observers were quick to remarkthat the public was a Eighteenth-century mysterious, not to say miraculous,phenomenon.Somehow myriad personal within the innersanctumof conscience, judgments,each formedautonomously coheredinto a collective will with a credibleclaim to rationalobjectivity.The public will confrontedthe state as a social entity, a civil society assertingits restedon a metasocial independence from state tutelage;but its moralauthority the particularity of any and all social divisions and interests. claim to transcend universal; and yet the promiseof madethe publicinherently This transcendence universalitycoexisted with the assumptionthat an entire society could be by one or anotherof its parts. crediblyand indeedauthoritatively, represented, of a public,the paradoxes As printbecamethe primary mediumfor the creation promisedto makean entiresocietytransparent multiplied.Publiccommunication to itself, but its typicalformswere the solitaryacts of readingand writing.Like the oratorsof the ancientpolis, modem authorswere expectedto forge a public consensus;but they faced a mass of readers"who [were] never assembledas a Preciselybecause whole, and whose expressionas a whole [was] neverheard."2 the public consensus was "invisible," it was easily abused. "Friends of the of the Terror, aftermath Garveobservedin the immediate Revolution,"Christian "takerefugeinpublicopinionas a Qualitasoccultathatcanexplaineverything-or as a higherpowerthatcan excuse everything."3 books on the emergenceof The two most imaginativeand thought-provoking the modem public-Reinhart Koselleck's Kritik und Krise and JurgenHaberder Offentlichkeit-haverecentlyreceivedEnglishtranslamas's Strukturwandel in the construct itself as it emergedin the course tions.4They exploreparadoxes
politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart,1978), 4:413-67; WolfgangKroger,Das Publikumals Richter:Lessing und die "kleinerenRespondenten"im Fragmentenstreit(Nendeln/Liechtenstein,1979); Eric Walter, "L'affaire La Banfe et le concept d'opinion publique," in Le journalisme d'Ancien Re'gime: Questionset propositions, ed. PierreRetat (Lyon, 1982), pp. 361-92; Mona Ozouf, "L'opinion publique," in The Political Culture of the Old Regime,.ed. Keith Michael Baker, The French Revolution and the Creationof a Modem Political Culture, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 419-34; Keith Michael Baker, "Politics and Public Opinion under the Old Regime: Some Reflections," in Press and Politics in Pre-RevolutionaryFrance, ed. Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), pp. 204-46; Daniel Gordon, " 'Public Opinion' and the Studies 22, no. 3 Civilizing Process in France:The Example of Morellet," Eighteenth-Century (Spring 1989): 303-28; EdoardoTortarolo, " 'Opinion Publique' tra antico regime et rivoluzione francese: Contributoa un vocabolario storico della politica settecentesca," Rivista Storica Italiana 102, no. 1 (1990): 5-23. 2 This observation was made by Johann Christoph Adelung in the third volume of his as quoted in H6lscher, Offentlichkeitund Geheimnis, p. 88. Worterbuch, 3 Quoted in ibid., p. 113. 4 Scholars are indebted to the MIT Press for publishing translationsof these and many other GermanSocial Thought, edited by seminal Germanworks in its series Studies in Contemporary Thomas McCarthy.The introductionsby Victor Gourevitch (Critique and Crisis) and Thomas identify theoreticalissues concisely, though they may be McCarthy(StructuralTransformation) disappointingto scholars interestedin the contexts in which these books were written and their of Critiqueand Crisis significancefor historicalresearch.Both Thomas Burgerand the translator (who ought to have been named) had to contend with the reified abstractionsand convoluted syntax of academic German. It would probably be unreasonableto expect the results to be
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of the eighteenth centuryandin the social andinstitutional processesthatexplain its emergence.Both books have become standard citationsin eighteenth-century studies,butuntilrecentlyneitherhadreceivedthe criticalscrutinyit deserved.A Frenchtranslation of Strukturwandel did not appearuntil 1978, and Kritikund Krise was not availablein Frenchuntil a year later. Aside from the language barrier,the books had also attractedlittle attentionin France because their philosophicalpreoccupations and their approaches to ideology cut against the grainof the reigningAnnalesSchool paradigm. Only in recentyears, in the wake of the debate provoked by FranqoisFuret's reinterpretation of the French Revolution,have FrenchscholarsdiscoveredCritiqueand Crisis. As for Habermas, the bulgingliterature on his contributions to CriticalTheory hardly acknowledgeshis initial exercise in historical sociology in Structural Transformation, thoughit was arguably the criticalfirststep in his development as a theorist.5 Historians have foundhis conceptof "representative publicness" especiallyuseful;but therehas been little attentionto how this element, or any other,fits into the largerstructure of his argument. The new English translations will surely help remedy this neglect. Even in English,however,theseproducts of German Wissenschaft maystrikereaders more as philosophical meditations,or as ideologicallyinspiredpolemics, than as historicalmonographs. Bothreflectthe politicalpreoccupations of the 1950s, though fromoppositeendsof theideologicalspectrum. Andbothremind us that,untilquite recently,Kantian philosophyand its nineteenth-century offshootswere centralto Germanmodes of historicaland sociological explanation.ThoughCritiqueand Crisis became a broad-ranging intellectualhistory,beginningwith Hobbes and Locke and ending with Raynaland Paine, Koselleckhad originallyintendedto investigatethe "politicalfunction"of Kant'sCritiques.It was in the prefaceto theCritique ofPureReason(1781)thatKoselleckfoundtheculminating expression of the Enlightenment's ideal of public criticism(pp. 1, 121).6 In Structural Transformation Englandis the "model case" and Germany lags well behindit; but Habermas's conceptual hinge was the philosophical discourse extendingfrom Kant (who gave "the idea of the bourgeoispublic sphere" its
readableas well as clear by English standards.But one wishes that the translation of Critiqueand Crisis had been less faithful to Koselleck's syntax; German constructionsdesigned to convey paradoxessometimes become contortedEnglish. And it is regrettablethat Koselleck's Burger (as well as Staatsburgerand BurgerlicherMensch) becomes simply "citizen," while Burgertumis renderedas "bourgeoisie" and burgerlichas "bourgeois." On the complexities of this semantic field, see the translator'snote in StructuralTransformation,p. xv. S The importance of Strukturwandel for Habermas's subsequent thinking is acknowledged, albeit very briefly, in David Ingram,Habermasand the Dialectic of Reason (New Haven, Conn., 1987), pp. 4-5; Thomas A. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), pp. 11-12, 381-83; Rick Roderick, Habermas and the Foundationsof Critical Theory (New York, 1986), pp. 42-43. 6 This aspect of Kant's thought has received renewed attention in John Christian Laursen, "The Subversive Kant: The Vocabulary of 'Public' and 'Publicity,' " Political Theory 14 (November 1986): 584-603, and "Scepticism and Intellectual Freedom: The Philosophical Foundationsof Kant's Politics of Publicity," History of Political Thought 10, no. 3 (Autumn 1989): 439-55; Onora O'Neill, "The Public Use of Reason," in her Constructionsof Reason: Explorationsof Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 28-50.
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"theoreticallyfully developed form") to Hegel and Marx (who exposed its ideologicaldistortions)(pp. 102-29).7 Thisreviewwill explainthe theoretical agendasthatinformCritique and Crisis andStructural Transformation, thoughwithdue solicitudefor readers not at home in the German philosophical tradition andin any case moreinterested in historical implications thanin philosophical premises.The review will also approach both books as historicaldocumentsin their own right. With a distanceof thirty-odd years,we arein a positionto appreciate how the ideologicalclimateof the postwar era at once enrichedand limitedtheirscholarship. My focus, however, will be on the continuingrelevanceof these books to eighteenth-century studies.Koselleckand Habermas used the eighteenth-century construction of a "public" as a prism to direct light onto an entire range of subjects-and these still command our attention. Should we think of the Enlightenment as an integralpart of the Old Regime or as a movementpitted squarely againstOldRegimecorporate valuesand"absolutist"lines of authority? Canthe Enlightenment in Franceandthe German statesbe said to havemounted
a "political" opposition to absolutism? Critique and Crisis and Structural
Transformation were pathbreaking because, in the very ways they posed such questions, they conceived of the Enlightenmentas a social as well as an intellectualmovement. Each charted new territoryin our explorationof the relationship betweennew ideas and social change.8 Kosellecktakesus into the milieusof Enlightenment "sociability,"particularly by pryingopen the closed doors of freemasonry. Habermas tracesthe growthof a printmarketand a readingpublic, and he findsboth groundedin the family's new role as a nest of intimacyand a unit of consumption.In both cases we confrontthe task of identifyingan emerging"bourgeois"society, thoughfrom radicallydifferentangles. And thattask in turnrequiresa close look at the kind of society and polity impliedin eighteenth-century conceptionsof a public. Did such conceptionspoint to a democratic one? future,or at least to an egalitarian Did they justify new forms of exclusive authority and power for a modernizing elite? Behindthe promiseof consensuswe findtensionsbetweenuniversality and exclusiveness,opennessand closure. The tensionspointto a historicalreconfigurationof class relationsand, no less revealingly,to a historicalredefinition of
gender roles.9
7 See also Habermas's"Publizitatals Prinzipder Vermittlung von Politik und Moral (Kant)," in Materialien zu Kants Rechtsphilosophie, ed. Zwi Batscha (Frankfurt am Main, 1976), pp. 175-90. 8 The implications of Haberinas's argumentfor the historiography of the French Revolution will receive relativelylittle attentionin this essay. The subjecthas been ably exploredin Benjamin Nathans, "Habermas's 'Public Sphere' in the Era of the FrenchRevolution," French Historical Studies 16, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 620-44. 9 Even if limited to the above themes, a complete bibliographywould be enormous. My rule of thumbhas been to limit citations to the most relevantbooks and articles publishedin the last two decades.
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at Heidelberg,acceptedin 1954. As Critique and Crisis beganas a dissertation the conflictsbetweenthe new superpowers hardened intothe ColdWar,Koselleck was struck by the binary opposition between their "utopian" scenarios for progress, each refusing to recognize the other as a legitimate opponent but "liv[ing] by thatother'simaginedreaction"(pp. 5-6).10 This was the perspecof his nationin the tive of a young Germanscholarwitnessingthe bifurcation capitalistdemocracyand Sovietideological stand-offbetween American-style style communism. Ironically,the other agenda Koselleck recalls in his preface to the English edition-the need to explain historically the "Utopian self-exaltation" in nazism-had a less distinctly German point of departure(p. 1). Koselleck fromthe assumption, scholarship, proceeded by no meanslimitedto WestGerman coin, that fascism and communismwere the two sides of the same totalitarian dismissalof mere"politics" to justify mirroring each otherin theircontemptuous one-partydictatorship. Accountingfor the Nazi horrorwas obviouslyan urgent hadprobably taskin the early 1950s, but Koselleck'sdiagnosisof totalitarianism been shapedas powerfullyby his image of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. "ideology" in all its varieties To Koselleckthe essence of modemtotalitarian was an exclusivelymoralvision, self-deluding in its blindnessto its own political will to power and self-righteousin its refusal to grant moral legitimacy to of ideology in this sense explainedthe "political" alternatives. The ascendancy state of "crisis" or "civil war" that characterized modernity.Like permanent J. L. Talmon,Kosellecksoughtthe genesisof this pathologyin the Enlightenment to andfoundits firstfull-blownmanifestation-the one thatpointedunmistakably horrorsof this century-in the Jacobinideology of the French the totalitarian momentum to the underRevolution.11 WhereasTalmonattributed a totalitarian lying logic of Enlightenmentthought, however, Koselleck found the same momentum betweenthe state and society in old emergingfrom the relationship regimeEurope. This contextual took the formof an ironicnarrative, with its point explanation in the religiousstrifethatplaguedEuropein the sixteenthand early of departure centuries.To end the religious "civil war" the seventeenth-century seventeenth and "rationalistic" where stateclaimedfor itself a "supra-religious" jurisdiction, Hobbes spelled out "politics could unfold regardlessof moralconsiderations." the the mostfatefulconsequence of this "absolutist"conceptof statesovereignty: obedienceof the subjectand splittingof the self into the "public" (or outward) the "private"exerciseof conscience.It was fromthe "privateinnerspace" that the publiccriticismof the Enlightenment emanated(pp. 23-40). In the course of the eighteenth century the private enclaves constituted themselvesas the tribunal of publicopinion-the collective conscienceto which the statewas morallyaccountable. In Englandthe emergenceof a criticalpublic
10 See alsothepreface Kritik undKrise:EineStudie to Reinhart zurPathogenesis Koselleck, relateshis der burgerlichen Welt(Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1973), pp. ix-xi, whereKoselleck in globalconflict. of the Enlightenment to morerecentdevelopments interpretation TheOrigins Democracy (New York,1960). 1 J. L. Talmon, of Totalitarian
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was entirely compatible with the politics of the post-1688 regime. On the Continent,criticismcollided head-onwith absolutismand had to containitself within the private enclaves of the Enlightenment's bourgeois and aristocratic elites. The resultwas the pathological"moraldualism"thatwould characterize modem ideology. Convincedof his own moral innocence, the rationalist critic condemnedan amoral,calculating,power-hungry state and made the abuse of power identicalwith its very exercise. Kosellecktracesthe development of this dualism,with its hypocritical "politicsby indirection," fromits late seventeenthcenturyemergencein the thoughtof PierreBayle to its culminationin Kant's Critiques.He findsthe symptomswrit large in continental with its freemasonry, cult of secrecy,andin the secretorderof Illuminati foundedby AdamWeishaupt, a young Bavarian professor,in 1776 and suppressed nine years later. If masonic secrecy was a shield against the absolutiststate, it was also an of self-deception.Secrecywas emblematic instrument of the fact thatEnlightenment criticism,in its condemnation of politics from a positionof pristinemoral innocence,blindeditself to its own politicalmotives and ambitions-and hence the ultimate secret was its own lack of "self-insight" (pp. 118-19). The corollaryof secrecy was the Enlightenment's philosophyof history,which was centralto the thoughtof, amongothers, Turgotand Raynaland foundvisionary expression in Weishaupt'splans for the Illuminati. A "utopian" vision of progress,this philosophyjustifiedbehind-the-scenes planningby the select few who understood the courseof historybut at the same time absolvedthem of the need to accept responsibilityfor political decisions. Its posture of moral innocence, combinedwith its assumptionof historicalinevitability,veiled the of the crisis engulfingthe Old Regime-and, in its very failureto politicalnature confrontthe politicalreality,it made the crisis all the more intense. In 1789 the crisis explodedinto revolution."All parties,"Koselleckobserves in a note on France in the early 1790s, "became the victim of a mutually intensifying and compulsoryresort to ideology which has characterized the modemage ever since" (p. 151).12 The absolutist dichotomybetweenthe public and the private,the politicaland the moral,had endedone kind of civil war but haddrivencontinental A historical Europeinexorably towardanother. processthat of "the privateinnerspace" frompoliticsendedwiththe beganwiththe extrusion totalpoliticaloccupation of thatspace. Deprivedof a politicaloutlet, the critical conscienceof the Enlightenment in the nameof morality. It politicizedeverything did so-and here is the finalirony-because, in its dialecticalconfrontation with absolutistpolitics, it could not confrontits own politicalwill to power. His protestations to the contrary, Koselleckhaddrawnup an indictment. Aside fromthe obviouspresenceof Hobbes,therewerealso strongechos of Machiavelli and Burkein his thesis. But the most obvious inspiration was the "decisionist"
12 Koselleck's footnotes warrantcareful reading. Aside from offering strikingformulationsof his argument(some of which ought to have been in the text), they record his hermeneutical encounterswith a wide range of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century texts. They exhibit the same concern with continuitiesand changes in contextualmeaning that would inform his later agenda for a "history of concepts" (Begriffsgeschichte).
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who had provideda theoryof Carl Schmitt,the jurist and politicalphilosopher Republicto Nazi dictaseductivejustification for the transition fromthe Weimar 13 It was notsimplythat theconceptof "civil war" torship. Koselleckhadborrowed of fromSchmitt.In his Der Leviathan,Schmitthadarguedthatthe "reservation" hadcontained "inner"freedomof consciencein Hobbes'sconceptof sovereignty the "seeds of death" (Todeskeim) for absolutism,the first "greatbreachfor the betweenpublic relationship modemliberalism"thatwould reversethe absolutist thatKoselleck andprivate.It was this basic plot line, with its ironicdenouement, Schmittsaw "the secret"as one elaborated. He also sharpened the focus. Whereas of severaldimensionsof the "innerreservation," Koselleckmadeit the paradigmatic symptomof the Enlightenment's pathology.Schmitt's "carriersfor the Protof [the] innerreservation" development included,along with freemasonry, estantsects and, in a languageresonating with racistconspiracy theory,the "restless" (and "liberal") spiritand "unerringinstinct" of the Jew.14 To Koselleck an entirelynew social phenomenon, essentiallydifferent freemasonry represented from sectarianism; and he had no sympathywith Schmitt'sdilutedbut still poisonous anti-Semitism. and Habermas pouncedon Koselleck'sdebtto Schmittin his reviewof Critique Crisis. The implicationof Schmitt's thought, he observed, was that civil war state."15 Habermas's couldnow be overcomeonly "in the formof the totalitarian over point may do justice to Schmitt'sintellectualcareer,but it rides roughshod Koselleck'sview of totalitarianism as a pathologyof the Rightas well as the Left. On one level Critiqueand Crisis can be readas the modem liberal'sdefense of politics against the metapolitics-or, perhaps better, the antipolitics-of all varietiesof totalitarian ideology. Koselleck'spoint is thatthe only way to avoid civil war is to acceptthe realityof politicalinterestsand conflictsand to remain awarethatall the playersaremakinga bid for power.And yet Critique and Crisis is also an attackon the secularjustificationsfor individualfreedom(including freedomof conscience)to which modem liberalismtracesits origins. Koselleck rootednot in a reactionagainstEnlightenment found totalitarianism rationalism itself. Is the implicationthat the injectionof morality but in the Enlightenment If one acceptsKoselinto politics inevitablyacquiresa totalitarian momentum? criticism, leck's versionof the dialecticbetweenabsolutismand Enlightenment
13 Schmitt no longer held a university position after the war, but he remained a prolific and highly controversial author. In the preface to the first edition of Kritik und Krise (1959), Koselleck thankedSchmitt, who (in Koselleck's words) "posed questions [to him] in conversations and helped seek answers." See also Keith Tribe's informative biographical sketch in Reinhart Koselleck, FuturesPast: On the Semantics of HistoricalTime,trans.-Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. vii-xvii. For a judicious assessment of Schmitt's thought and career, see Joseph W. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, Theoristfor the Reich (Princeton, N.J., 1983). 14
CarlSchmitt, Der Leviathan in derStaatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: SinnundFehlschlag
eines politischen Symbols (Hamburg, 1938), pp. 82-93. On Schmitt's opportunisticadoptionof anti-Semitismin response to attacksfrom within the Nazi regime, see Bendersky,pp. 226-42. 15 JurgenHabermas, "Zur Kritikan der Geschichtsphilosophie (R. Koselleck, H. Kesting)," in his Kultur und Kritik: VerstreuteAufsatze (Frankfurtam Main, 1973), p. 363. Despite its simplistic conflationof Koselleck's "political anthropology" with Schmitt's, this is a trenchant critiqueof Kritik und Krise.
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how is the emergence of a pluralisticconcept of political contestationto be explained? The readerhas to supplyhis own answers. Despite its elusive political agenda, and in part because of it, Critiqueand Crisis offereda strikinglyoriginalalternative to the conventional wisdomof the 1950s. On both sides of the Atlantic, scholars were busy tracingGermany's deviation fromthe EnglishandFrench pathsto a modern liberalsocietyandpolity. One of the culturalmarkersfor this Sonderwegwas the retreatinto apolitical "inwardness"by eighteenth-century Germanintellectuals.In Koselleck's comparativeframework there was nothingexceptionalabout GermanInnerlichkeit; the same apparently apoliticalposturecharacterized the thoughtof the French Enlightenment, and indeedit was typicalof Enlightenment criticismas a whole. Whereasotherscombedthe Enlightenment for anticipations of modernpolitical "isms," he was struckby the pervasiveness of an avowedlyunpolitical idealism. Unlikemanyof his colleaguesin the German historical guild, however,he did not acceptthatidealismon its own terms.His indictment was framed to remind us that a principled rejection of politicsis itself a politicalact andthatit can involvea lack of self-awareness with dire politicalconsequences. Thoughits selectionof authors andtexts now seems quiteconventional, not to say old-fashioned,Critiqueand Crisis rested on the audaciousclaim to have discovered "the unity of the Enlightenment as it happenedin the absolutist state." Other eighteenth-century authors, Koselleck noted, could easily have been substituted for the dozen or so he had singled out (pp. 8-9). He found "unity," one suspects, because he projectedbackwardand outwardfrom his verdict on Kant's CriticalPhilosophy.The entire argumentcan be read as a refutation of Kant's famous essay on "theory" and "practice" (1793), which had as one of its subtitles"AgainstHobbes." In the face of Kant's appealto a priori moral norms, Koselleck was vindicating what he saw as Hobbes's 16 unflinching realism. In the light of more recent research, Koselleck's confidentdiscovery of a unitaryEnlightenment seems naive. The historicalconsciousnessof the Enlightenmentin Franceandthe German statescannotbe reducedto a "utopian"vision of universal progress. Faith in progress had its counterpointin a persistent pessimism about the directionof change and in that fascinationwith cultural 17 The Lutheran specificitythatwouldcharacterize nineteenth-century historicism. of the Germanstates did not emulate the Frenchphilosophes' war Aufkldarer againstl'infame;theircautiousreformism,aimedat rationalizing the established churchesfromwithin, typifiesthe moderation of a distinctlyProtestant varietyof
16 ImmanuelKant, "On the CommonSaying: 'This may be truein theory,but it does not apply in practice,' " in Kant'sPolitical Writings,ed. Hans Reiss and trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 61-92. 17 See, esp., Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenmentand the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley, 1975); Hans Erich B6deker, George G. Iggers, JonathanB. Knudsen, and Peter H. Reill, eds., Aufkldrungund Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaftim 18. Jahrhundert(Gottingen, 1986).
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Enlightenment.18 When we take soundingsinto the undercurrents, we find still
anothervariety of Enlightenments or, perhapsbetter in this case, of counterEnlightenments, with social and political colorationsthat make the standard galaxy of philosophesseem very tame indeed.19 And yet Critique and Crisis seems prescient from this distance, since it identifiedissues that still demandour attention.Subsequent researchhas vindicated Koselleck's focus on the masonicmovement.Whetherone considersthe of local lodges, or the impressivegrowth in membership,or the proliferation social profile of the members,it is clear that by mid-century had freemasonry becomethe most widespread and inclusiveformof the new sociabilityon which the French and German Enlightenmentswere grounded. As eclectic as its ideologybecame,freemasonry usuallyremained committed to the moralidealsof Enlightenment rationalism. How thendo we explainits relianceon secrecy,both as a protectivewall against the "profane" outside world and as an ordering principle for the lodges' internal ritualsandhierarchies? Does thecult of the secret not standin blatant contradiction to the principle of openness,of "publicity," that the Enlightenment posed againstabsolutistandcorporate concealment? Is not the lodge, as a crypto-public, a case of the Enlightenment violatingits own ideals? Koselleck'sindictment this issue but gave it a one-sided effectivelydramatized To Koselleckthe tragicironyof the secretwas that,in posinga barrier resolution. againstabsolutist intrusions,it also allowedthe "private"subjectto exercisehis conscience critically without acceptingpolitical responsibility. The Enlightenment's "cloak of moral innocence and political absence" became its veil of self-deception(pp. 70-97). This charge of "hypocrisy" substitutesa moral categoryfor contextualanalysis. It fails to take into accountthat the resort to in Enlightenment secrecybecamean objectof controversy discourse. The controversy has a long history,and in Germany it clearlyintensified in the wake of the Bavariangovernment'sexposureof the Illuminati'sconspiratorial plans in the mid-1780s. Even at that late date some observersstill foundvirtue, or at least practicaladvantage,in masonicsecrecy;but to othersthe principleof
18 Roy Porter and Mikulaas Teich, eds., The-Enlightenmentin National Contexts (London, of the GermanProtestantEnlightenment,see also Reill; 1981). On the distinctive characteristics Franklin Kopitsch, ed., Aufkldrung, Absolutismus und Burgertum in Deutschland (Munich, 1976); JonathanB. Knudsen, Justus Moser and the GermanEnlightenment(Cambridge, 1986); Anthony J. La Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany(Cambridge, 1988). 19 MargaretC. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London, 1981), focuses on the religious dissidents and publishers who formed the "radical underside" of Dutch freemasonry.On the French lawyers who used highly publicized trials to flail the Establishment,see Darlene Gay Levy, The Ideas and Career of Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet (Urbana,Ill., 1980); Sara Maza, "Le tribunalde la nation:Les memoiresjudiciaires et l'opinion publique a la fin de l'Ancien R6gime," Annales 42 (1987): 73-90; Jean Starobinski, "La Chaire, la Tribune,le Barreau,"in Les Lieux de Memoire, ed. PierreNora, vol. 2: La Nation (Paris, 1986). Robert Darnton, "The High Enlightenmentand the Low-Life of Literature,"in his TheLiteraryUndergroundof the Old Regime (Cambridge,Mass., 1982), pp. 1-40, reconstructs the mentalityof the denizens of Paris's "Grub Street" on the eve of the Revolution.
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publicitymade such secrecyboth indefensibleand obsolete. Therewere parallel debatesaboutanonymousand pseudonymous publication: while some regarded these expedientsas perfectlylegitimateformsof self-defense,otherscondemned themas hypocritical violationsof principle,likely to erodeauthors'credibility.20 The point is that there was a perceivedtension between critical openness and secrecyin Enlightenment discourse,andthatit pointsto a level of self-awareness, perhapseven of self-insight,thatKoselleckignored.A thoroughexploration of thattensionwouldtell us a greatdeal aboutthe ambitions andthe inhibitions that were shapingemergingconceptsof a public. In anothersense, though, Critiqueand Crisis anticipatedour more recent of the publicandpublicopinionas Enlightenment understanding ideals. We now know that, thanksto religious and constitutional controversies from the 1750s onward,the FrenchHigh Enlightenment developedin a context of increasingly open opposition to the Crown. Against this backdropKoselleck's view of "criticism" as a pretensionto moral innocence in the face of politics seems simplistic;it was the politicalthrustof criticism,afterall, thatforcedthe Crown itself to enterthe arenaof politicalcontestation,even thoughit denied the very existenceof that arenain principle.And yet the appealsto the tribunal of "the public" reveal a profound ambivalence, a simultaneousplunging into and from the modernpoliticalarenathatwas beginningto take shape. The shrinking sacredcenter-the monarchy-was being stripped of its auraand was losing its powerto controlpublicmeanings,but the publicloomedas the consensual center of a secularorderin the making.Even as criticsof the Crownassumedan openly confrontational posture,they soughtto dispel the specterof open dissensionand conflictwith theirnew ideal of a unitaryand transcendent public conscience. Whatneeds furtherhistoricalexplanation is not a hypocritical stance, vulnerable to exposureon its own terms, but a tension-ridden posturereflectingthe complexitiesof its context. Koselleck's insight-that Enlightenment criticism couldnot confrontits own politicalmotivesandimplications-identifiedone side of the tension. The French concept of "public opinion," Keith Baker has concluded, projected "a politics without politics"; in correctingKoselleck's one-sidedindictment,Bakerconfirmed his insight.21
20 See, e.g., Eberhard Weis, "Der Illuminatenorden (1776-1786): Unter besondererBerucksichtigung der Fragen seiner sozialen Zusammensetzung, seiner politischer Ziele und seiner Fortexistenznach 1786," in Aufklarungund Geheimgesellschaften: Zurpolitischen Funktionund Sozialstruktur der Freimaurerlogenim 18. Jahrhundert,ed. Helmut Reinalter(Munich, 1989), pp. 94-96; ManfredAgethen, Geheimbundund Utopie: Illuminaten,Freimaurer und deutsche Spataufklarung(Munich, 1984), pp. 127-33; Rudolf Vierhaus, "Aufklarungund Freimaurerei in Deutschland," in Das Vergangeneund die Geschichte, ed. Rudolf von Thadden, Gert von Pistohlkors, and Hellmuth Weiss (G6ttingen, 1973), pp. 32-33. Vierhaus reminds us that the relationshipbetween the Enlightenmentand freemasonrywas one of "affinity," not identity. 21 Baker, "Politics and Public Opinion underthe Old Regime" (n. 1 above), p. 246. See also Ozouf (n. 1 above); and Jeffrey W. Merrick,The Desacralizationof the French Monarchyin the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1990), which emphasizes the role of the government itself, the parlements, and intrareligiousconflict in desacralizingthe monarchy.
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If Koselleckhad simplygeneralized froma small and aboutthe Enlightenment arbitrary sampleof thinkers,his book wouldnot continueto sendripplesthrough eighteenth-century studies.Critique and Crisis was seminalabove all in pointing the way to a new understanding of the Enlightenment as a social movement.As archaicas it may at firstseem, Koselleck'sview of Enlightenment criticismas a modeof "bourgeois"self-assertion did not implya crudelyreductionist approach to ideas as rationalizations for class interests.Insteadhe saw criticismgrounded in a new kind of social communicationor, in currentparlance, in a new "sociability,"extendingto the aristocracy but given its ethos by an educatedand propertied bourgeoisie.Here again freemasonry, for all its fondness for occult ritualsand feverish mysticism, typifieda largertrend;it belonged in the same milieuas the academies,the literarysocieties, the clubs, and the coffeehouses.22 Whatis strikingfrom this distance, though, is that the promiseexceeded the execution.As innovativeas Koselleck's methodologywas, it had to conformto the terms of his indictment.Intenton reconstructing the frameworkin which "moraldualism" had emerged,Koselleck assumeda strictdichotomybetween the publicsphereof the absolutiststateand the privatespace formedby the new social milieus. The groups who constitutedthe "new elite," he argued, had varyinginterestsbut shared"the fate of being unableto find an adequate place withinthe AbsolutistState'sexisting institutions"(pp. 62-66). In fact, though, Koselleckhadnot definedabsolutism by reference to its institutional structure, or even by referenceto its official ideology. He had simply equatedthe absolutist statewith Hobbes'stheoretical for its claims to sovereignty. justification Koselleck'sdichotomy tendsto dissolveundercloserscrutiny. The bureaucratic of the new statedevelopedin partialfusionwiththe elites at the summit apparatus of the corporatehierarchy.Absolutistauthorityand power flowed downward throughthe court and its networksof aristocratic families; througha corps of and judicial officials (many of its families recently bourgeois administrative ennobled);throughthe universitiesthat trainedthem; throughthe established churchandits clericalhierarchy; local office-holders. It was preciselythis through multitieredservice elite, more or less directly implicatedin the workings of "absolutism,"that formed the center of gravityfor the Enlightenment's new sociability.By andlargethe new social spaces, masoniclodges prominent among them, were occupiedby the groupswho constituted the state. If they wereprivate retreats from absolutism,they were also its informalextensions.
22 On the new "sociability," see esp. Richardvan Dulmen, "Die Aufklarungsgesellschaften in Deutschlandals Forschungsproblem," Francia 5 (1977): 251-75, and Die Gesellschaft der Aufkldrer:Zur burgerlichenEmanzipationund aufkldrischenKultur in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1986); Ulrich Im Hof, Das gesellige Jahrhundert:Gesellschaft und Gesellschaftenim Zeitalterder Aufklarung(Munich, 1982); Etienne Francois, ed., Sociabilite et socie6te bourgeoise en France, en Allemagne et en Swisse, 1750-1850: Geselligkeit, Vereinswesenund burgerliche Gesellschaft in Frankreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz, 1750-1850 (Paris, 1986).
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It is hardlysurprising, then, thatin the face of absolutismthe Enlightenment assumedan inherentlyambivalentposition, combiningcriticaldetachment and symbioticidentification. The ambivalence is conveyedwith rarenuancein Daniel Roche'ssynthesesof his research on the French provincial academies.Mostof the provincial academies were virtually exclusive domains of the service elite, including its clerical and aristocraticbranches(ca. 20 percent of the entire membership, includinghonorary members,were clergymen,and ca. 37 percent were noblemen).These institutionsenteredthe eighteenthcenturyas embodiments of absolutism's"modernizedideologicaljustification" -exemplifying a "politics of the public welfare and of monarchicalservice" in their very insistenceon excludingpolitical (as well as religious)dissension. Beneaththis conformistsurface, the academies incubatedan alternativemode of political discourse,basedon "egalitarian" procedures. On the eve of the Revolutionthey were pulled betweentheir newly assumedrole as guides of popular"opinion" andtheirassignedmissionas a "directingclass," the "ideologicalmanifestation of enlightenedabsolutism."23 Unlikethe Frenchacademies,which were publicinstitutions sponsored by the Crown and responsive to its expectations, masonic lodges were intent on constructing and sealing off a privatespace. The lodges also had a broader and deepersocial reach,usuallyincludingat leasta minority of commercial patricians and, less often, artisansand shopkeepers from the lower bourgeoisranks. But with the exception of some lodges in commercialmetropolises,French and Germanfreemasonrywas dominatedby the same service elite that virtually monopolizedthe Frenchacademies.24 This mixed elite clearly needed a refuge fromthe intricate peckingorders,the rigidformalism,andthe incessantintrigues
23 Daniel Roche, "Die 'Soci6t6s de pensee' und die aufgeklartenEliten des 18. Jahrhunderts in Frankreich," in Sozialgeschichte der Aufklarung in Frankreich, vol. 1, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht,Rolf Reichardt,and Thomas Schleich, (Munich, 1981), pp. 77-115, and "Acad6mies et politique au siecle des lumieres: Les enjeux pratiquesde l'immortalite," in Baker, ed. (n. 1 above), pp. 331-44. See also the portrait of Jean-Sylvan Bailly in George Armstrong Kelly, Victims,Authority,and the Terror:TheParallel Deaths of d'Orle'ans,Custine, Bailly, and Malesherbes(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), pp. 149-210, 288-90. 24 Im Hof, pp. 163-225, is a succinct introduction to eighteenth-century freemasonry.Roche, "Die 'Soci6t6s de pens6e' und die aufgeklartenEliten des 18. Jahrhunderts in Frankreich,"uses a sampling of French lodges to provide a thorough analysis of their social composition, with attention to local variations in the structureof the educated and propertiedelite. In the court towns of the territorialstates and ecclesiastical principalities of western and southwestern Germany,it was often the court nobility (or indeed the princehimself!) who organizedthe lodge, though bourgeois officials were included (see Winfried Dotzauer, "Freimaurergesellschaften im Rheingebiet:Die Anfange der Freimaurerei im Westen des Alten Reiches," in Freimaurer und Geheimbundeim 18. Jahrhundertin Mitteleuropa, ed. Helmut Reinalter [Frankfurtam Main, 1983], pp. 140-76). On the social composition of Central European lodges, see Winfried Dotzauer, "Zur Sozialstruktur der Freimaurer in Deutschlandim 18. Jahrhundert," pp. 109-49; and Eva Huber, "Zur Sozialstruktur der Wiener Freimaurerlogen im JosephinischenJahrzehnt," pp. 173-87, both in Reinalter,ed., Aufklarungund Geheimgesellschaften.For general observations on the social structure of English freemasonry,see Jacob, TheRadical Enlightenment (n. 19 above). MargaretC. Jacob's Living the Enlightenment:Freemasonry in 18th-CenturyEurope (New York, 1992) appearedtoo late to be considered in this essay.
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of theirpublicworlds.It is all the morestriking,then, thatin the way it filledthat Implicit to identifywith absolutism. the elite continued needthrough freemasonry in the principled exclusion of all political (as well as confessional)controversy andits cabals.And yet, of courtfactionalism fromthe lodge was a condemnation reality of absolutist politics, in its very rejection of the behind-the-scenes freemasonryconfirmedabsolutist ideology. The lodges, like the academies, idealizedthemselvesas microcosmsof the consensual,conflict-freeworld over which absolutismaspiredto reign. In its dense contextualism,and in the subtlety of its conclusions, Norbert offers strikingparallelsto Roche's Schindler'sanalysisof Germanfreemasonry work. Schindlerremindsus thatour fascinationwith masonicsecrecy shouldbe complementedwith attentionto the public posture that the lodges, like the academies,assumedin ceremoniesand festivities. Focusingon the Johannisfest the dialecticof "integrastagedby the Bayreuthlodge in 1753, he reconstructs tion" and "exclusion" (Ausgrenzung)in freemasonry'srelationshipto the "profaneworld," includingabsolutism.Preciselybecausemasonicfestivals, on impulseto assimilateinto, theirmost obvious symboliclevel, revealeda natural and to borrowprestigefrom, the "representative publicness"of the court, their to courtly an alternative subtext couldbe "a subtlemorallecture."Theyprojected formswere appropriated, hierarchy implicitly,in the distinctiveways ceremonial ratherthanin explicit moralcensure. of a In this approach as the instrument secrecybecamecriticalto freemasonry subtle dialectic, and not as the expressionof Koselleck's dichotomybetween the efficacy of an "exercise and moralityand politics. Only when we appreciate why freemasonry practice"do we comprehend routinization throughbehavioral cultureand, from within it, to set in was able "to integrateinto the traditional motion that relatively unbroken,long-term learning process from which the 25 Schindler'sunderlying methodemergingbourgeoisculturefinally profited.' in cannotbe understood ological point is thatthe ritualsof masonicbrotherhood and the "cognitive learningprocess" that terns of the rationalargumentation preoccupy conventional intellectual history. Ironically, the point applies to criticism. with the social milieusof Enlightenment Koselleck,despitehis concemn Koselleckinferred better,imposedmeaningon-the meaningfrom-or, perhaps sheerfact of masonicsecrecy,findingin it a heightenedexpressionof the same
25 im 18. Jahrhundert:Zur sozialen Funktion des Norbert Schindler, "Freimaurerkultur Geheimnisses in der entstehendenburgerlichenGesellschaft," in Klassen und Kultur:SozialanthropologischePerspektivenin der Geschichtsschreibung,ed. Robert M. Berdahlet al. (Frankund Geheimnis im furt am Main, 1982), pp. 206-11. See also NorbertSchindler, "Aufkldarung Studien in Geheime Gesellschaften,ed. PeterChristianLudz, Wolfenbutteler Illuminatenorden," zur Aufklarung,vol. 5/1 (Heidelberg, 1979), pp. 203-29, and "Der Geheimbundder Illuminaten:Aufklarung,Geheimnis und Politik," in Reinalter,ed., Freimaurerund Geheimbundeim 18. Jahrhundertin Mitteleuropa, pp. 284-318. Schindler's approachhas been eclectic, but he has been particularlyconcerned with advancing a Germantraditionof historical sociology. See und offenlicheMeinung:Studienzur Soziologie der Offentlichesp. ErnestManheim,Aufkldarung keit im 18. Jahrhundert,ed. NorbertSchindler(1933; reprint, Stuttgart, 1979), which contains a wealth of ideas about eighteenth-centurysociability and public communication.
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programthe Enlightenment's thatseemedto pervade puristcensureof absolutism maticrhetoric.Shiftingour focus to the ethos embodiedin masonic sociability, Schindler reinsertssecrecyinto a field of symbolicpractices.The cult of secrecy on the awe attachedto the was, fromone angle, a kind of emulation,borrowing with a and on the glitterof courtentertainments arcanumof absolutiststatecraft and concealment.For that very reason, secrecy penchantfor self-mystification could also be a "frictionless" way of walling off an alternativesocial space, andthe mixedelite could couldbe "unbounded" wherethe "social imagination" modernbourgeoisethos of moralself-discipline be socializedinto a recognizably and self-cultivation.26 with the orderof freemasonry planto supercede This is why AdamWeishaupt's curious Illuminati,as puerile as it was, has a largersignificance.Weishaupt's form, the tension brainchildrepresents,in a heightenedand often caricatured between critical detachmentand symbiotic identificationthat characterized orderwas Weishaupt's sociabilityas a whole. Unlikefreemasonry, Enlightenment to be a genuinelysecret society, keeping its very existence concealed. Carrying also planned the hermeticaspectsof masonicinitiationto an extreme,Weishaupt to make his recruitsthe object of an invisible tutelage on the path to selfenlightenment.Internal secrecy would create a pedagogical utopia, and its products would in turnbe the leavenfor universalmoralenlightenment.27 could not be spreadsimply by had concludedthat enlightenment Weishaupt still assumed.But the significanceof his shift individual example,as freemasons to a collective strategyshouldnot be exaggerated.The 600-oddIlluminatiwere of the service branches fromthe aristocratic andbourgeois drawn overwhelmingly elite. Their mission as products of Weishaupt'sinvisible pedagogy was, in of the State"-a process Koselleck'sapt phrase,"the indirect,silentoccupation fromtheinside"by its ownpersonin whichtheabsolutist statewouldbe "absorbed a conviction even as it expressed addsthatthisstrategy, nel (pp. 91-95). Schindler "an administrative-elite utopia of moralsuperiority to absolutist politics,projected in the vestibulesof power."28 The objectivewas not of the officialdomgathered give it a new legitimacy. butto purifyit morallyandthereby to replaceabsolutism, There remains the issue of the relationshipbetween freemasonryitself (as ideology. Did not the fictionalor opposed to the Illuminati)and revolutionary the way for the Jacobin withinthe lodge walls prepare artificial equalityfabricated Was not the "democratic"impulsein freemaideology of politicaldemocracy?
im 18. Jahrhundert," pp. 211-16. Schindler, "Freimaurerkultur There was an official investigation in Bavaria, and it provokedboth apologias by some of the order's faithful and exposes by disillusioned members. As a result, the order is far better documented than freemasonry. A sample of the documentation is included in Richard van Duilmen,Der Geheimbundder Illuminaten:Darstellung, Analyse, Dokumentation(Stuttgartand Bad-Cannstatt, 1975). See also Agethen (n. 20 above); Schindler, "Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten";Weis (n. 20 above); Michael W. Fischer, Die Aufklarungund ihr Gegenteil:Die Rolle der Geheimbundein Wissenschaftund Politik (Berlin, 1982). 28 Schindler, derIlluminaten," "Der Geheimbund pp. 300-302. See also Agethen,pp. 295-303.
27 26
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inversionof absolutism,at once negatingandmirroring sonrya proto-totalitarian absolutistsovereignty?It was above all in this sense that Koselleck saw the of one era and the plungeinto another. Conceived Revolutionas the culmination had found its most dramatic with Kant, Koselleck's indictment in an argument proofin Rousseau'sconceptof the generalwill. Rousseau'ssearchfor "the unity of moralityandpolitics" had endedwith the "total state," a formof democracy "under constantpressureto create ideology." The Revolutionhad sucked all party, buthis primeexhibitwas theJacobin partiesintothe ideologicalmaelstrom; and unmediated popularsoverwith its Rousseauian ideology of unconditional eignty (pp. 162-67).29 This lineage will be recognizableto anyone familiarwith Fran9oisFuret's publishednearlytwo decadesafterCritiqueand Penserla Revolution FranVaise, to prerevCrisis. FuretadaptedAugustinCochin's politicallychargedapproach olutionary"societies of thought,"and he does not seem to have realized that Koselleck(who also drewon Cochin'swork)hadalreadypointedthe way. Buthe sharedwith Koselleck a teleologicalperspectivethat made the Enlightenment's in its masonic form, the progenitorof "democraticsociability,"particularly The new sociability generateda new and modem totalitariandemocracy.30 "confused" concept of "opinion." In the vortex of the Revolution, opinion absolutepower" of "puredemocracy"- the fictionwith becamethe "imaginary justifiedthe Terror.31 which the Jacobindictatorship becomes the focal point for a verdicton the ideological Again freemasonry term sociability. Leaving aside the treacherous significanceof Enlightenment "democracy"for a moment,we can at least ask whethertherewas an egalitarian dimensionto the new sociabilityand the conceptof a publicit generated.Since the seventeenth century,scholarsandgens de lettreshad imagineda "republicof would be free of scholars"(or a "republicof letters")in which communication
Jeremy Popkin kindly allowed me to read his unpublishedpaper, "The Concept of Public of the FrenchRevolution:A Critique," which argues persuasively Opinionin the Historiography public, for the centralityof a Rousseauianmodel in Koselleck's analysis of the eighteenth-century as in Furet's. 30 On the eve of the Revolution, Koselleck argued, French freemasons saw themselves as 'citizens of Masonic democracy' " (Critiqueand Crisis, p. 80). Still anothervariationon the ideology lineage, with particular attention to the Illuminati, is freemasonry-revolutionary James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the RevolutionaryFaith (New York, 1980), esp. pp. 92-99. 31 FrangoisFuret,Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. ElborgForster(1978; translation, dans la France Cambridge, 1981), esp. pp. 37-52. See also Ran Halevi, Les loges ma,conniques d'Ancien Re'gime:Aux origines de la sociabilite' de'mocratique (Paris, 1984), p. 1, and "Les origines intellectuelles de la Revolution Frangaise: de la magonnerie au Jacobinisme," in Frangois, ed. (n. 22 above), p. 195. Citing Koselleck as well as Furet, Halevi finds in French freemasonrythe "embryonic forms" of "a social praxis that Jacobin France will push to its extremepoint"-though he also concedes that we have yet to define the relationshipbetween the masonic "system of disponible values" and "the social groupingit was intendedto model." For sobering contrasts to this approach, see Pierre Chevallier, Histoire de la franco-ma,onnerie fran,caise, vol. 1: La ma,connerie:tcole de l'egalite6,1725-1799 (Paris, 1974), esp. pp. 293305; LenardR. Berlanstein, The Barristers of Toulousein the EighteenthCentury(1740-1 793) (Baltimoreand London, 1975), pp. 123-26.
29
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the termsof authority anddeference,poweranddependence, thatpervaded social relationsin the corporate hierarchy of the Old Regime. In this socially neutral zone intellectual property, like landedproperty in classicalrepublicanism, assured equalityof citizenship.The sheercogency of ideas-regardless of the social rank andpowerof theiradvocates-would yield a consensus.In the eighteenth century this ideal extended its appeal to a wider social field-a proto-public binding scholarlyinstitutions (the academies,the universities,etc.) and literary circles to the educatedstratawho formed a new audiencefor "useful" scholarshipand belles lettres.One of its social loci in Francewas the salon, wherenew normsfor polite conversation formedin reactionto the politesseof the court. As formalas it mightappear to us, salonrepartee was seen as a relatively egalitarian altemative to the courtlyobsessionwith rank.32 Freemasonry was distinguished by the self-consciousness with which it made the new principleof communication centralto its ethos of "brotherhood" and "friendship." The "republic"of the ideallodge was analogous to the idealpublic (or republic)constitutedby print communication. Authorand readercould be equalcitizensbecauseprint,as an impersonal medium,abstracted theirrelationship from the hierarchical termsof any specific social setting. The paradoxical appealof masonicbrotherhood was that, in the obviouslycontrivedsettingof the lodge, the samedomination-free exchangecouldassumesocial andeven personal forms. To recalla leitmotivof the era, lodge memberswere bondedhorizontally by theirpure "humanity." This elementof masonicideology can fairly be called egalitarian, thoughnot withoutconsiderable qualification. The popular classes were effectivelyexcluded by explicit social restrictionsor, more often, by an implicit expectationof respectability combined with the need for connectionsand the means to pay admission fees. If the ritualization of masonicbrotherhood was designedto bridge social chasms, it also insuredagainstthe kinds of informalcontactacrosssocial boundaries thatmightbe all too intimate.In any case, masonicsociabilitywas, afterall, a fictionor a gameconfinedto an artificially zone. The fiction segregated was viable precisely because the participantsput it behind them when they reentered social reality.Whenthese obviousinconsistencies and limitations have been acknowledged, however,the fact remainsthatfreemasonry was committed to bringing together noblemen and educated and propertiedcommonerson entirelynew termsof interaction. It was not simply that in principlethe lodges ignoredthe legal privilegesattachedto rank. Their memberswere expectedto transcendthe corporateidentities-the self-definitionsin terms of distinctive linguisticstyles, tastes, and moralcodes-that legal inequalitydemarcated. In the 1770s and 1780s freemasonsoccasionallydescribedthis "republican" ethos as "democratic."33 When contemporary historianscharacterize the inner
32 See, e.g., H6lscher, Offentlichkeitund Geheimnis (n. I above), pp. 92-95; van Duilmen, "Die Aufkldrungsgesellschaften in Deutschland als Forschungsproblem" (n. 22 above), pp. 256-57; Im Hof (n. 22 above), pp. 216-17. The new ideal of salon conversation and its political implications are explored insightfully in Gordon (n. 1 above). 33 See, e.g., Helmut Reinalter, "Freimaurerei und Demokratie im 18. Jahrhundert,"in Reinalter,ed., Aufkldrungund Geheimgesellschaften (n. 20 above), pp. 43-46.
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workingsof freemasonry as democratic,however,the word unavoidably carries the freightof politicalmeaningsthathave attachedto it since the Revolution.It did not commititself to any may be besidethe point, of course, thatfreemasonry was not an incipientpolitical political alternative to absolutism.Freemasonry butits vision of a new moralorderdid havepolitical partywith its own program, implications. If the issue is ever to be resolved,we will Werethoseimplications democratic? haveto bringto centerstage a questionthatis usuallyrelegatedto the historyof education.How was knowledgeto be distributed socially?To put it another way, In Enlightenment how was accessto knowledgeto be structured? discourse,virtue (i.e., moralexcellence)was pairedwith knowledgerather thanwith pedigreeor inheritedproperty.The implicationwas that education,in the broadestsense, legitimatedthe exercise of power. In the meritocratic version of this pairing, everyoneis, in principle,equallyentitledto highly valuedknowledge,thoughde facto disadvantages-lack of the requisite wealth or of the requisitecultural patrimony-severely restrictthe access of the great majority.The meritocratic ideal may be said to justify modernsocial inequality, but it does so in a way that has provedentirelycompatiblewith Western democratic politics. But therewas another way of drawingthe triangleof virtue, knowledge,and power-one that marked a profoundly paternalisticand blatantly antidemocraticimpulse in Enlightenment discourse. An enlightenedelite not only claimed the right to educate the masses on its own terms; it also reserved for itself a "higher" knowledgethatwas too dangerous to disseminate broadly,andit soughtto insure of thatknowledgethroughformalcontrols. againstbroaddissemination The meritocratic ideal was a powerfulbondingagentfor the aristocrats andthe educatedand propertied commoners sociabilbroughttogetherin Enlightenment ity. As the new ethos helped fuse these elites, its ideal of enlightenedselfcultivationand self-disciplinealso markedtheir new sense of distancefrom the of plebeianculture.34 crudityandviolence, the superstition and "enthusiasm," It is fromthis perspective that"popularenlightenment" becamea high priorityon the reformagendasof the Frenchand GermanEnlightenments. What kind of education wouldtameplebeianculture,andindeedharnessit to the requirements of a progressiveorder, without weakening traditionalconstraintson popular behavior? The standard solutionwas to administer a safe dose of enlightenmentone thatwouldpurifybutnot eradicate traditional religiousbeliefs andthatwould avoida dangerous inflation of popular expectations by limitingthe lowerordersto "useful" knowledgeof directrelevancein theirinherited occupational spheres.35
34 See esp. HarryC. Payne, "Elite versus PopularMentality in the EighteenthCentury,"in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Roseann Runte (Madison, Wis., 1979), 8:3-32. 35 See, e.g., GerhardSauder, " 'Verhiiltnismassige Aufkldarung'-ZurburgerlichenIdeologie am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts," Jahrbuchder Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 9 (1974): 102-26; Eckhart Hellmuth, "Aufklarung und Pressefreiheit: Zur Debatte der Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft wahrend der Jahre 1783 und 1784," Zeitschriftfur historische Forschung 9 (1982): 315-35; Werner Schneider, Die wahre Aufklarung: Zum Selbstverstdndnisder deutschen Aufkldrung (Freiburgand Munich, 1974). ForFrenchvariationson the same theme, see HarveyChisick, The Limits of Reform in the Enlightenment: Attitudestoward the Education of the Lower Classes in
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This strategyand its axiomaticassumption-that knowledgemustbe distributed proportionally and at a safe pace, underthe tutelarycontrolof an enlightened distinctionbetweenan educatedpublic and the elite-underlay the conventional uneducated mass. The mission of an academy,d'Alembertobserved,was to be by estate." It would not provoke "[an] organof reasonby duty and of prudence into (its) midst."36 "the multitude"by "throwingthe truthbrusquely the exclusiveness lodge members andoutsidecriticsattacked Whendisgruntled of masonic secrecy, their grievance was that an invidious distinction, a line dividingthe deservingand the unworthy,was being drawnthroughthe educated of the largersociety, masonicsecrecywas an public. Seen withinthe framework impulse. tutelary,quasi-hermetic of the Enlightenment's unintended caricature formin the effort to insurethat, in assumedan attenuated The hermetictradition a revelationcarefully staggeredover generations,masonic knowledge would enlightenthe profaneworld without blinding it. Weishaupt'sstrategyfor the Illuminatiwas a characteristically extremevarianton this vision of enlightened progress.The new orderwas to be, among other things, a kind of multidisciandgradually disseminating plinaryacademydevotedto discovering,preserving, psychology new truths.Forthe core insights, Weishaupt drew on the materialist of Helvetiusand otherFrenchphilosophes.In his naively provincialvision, this idiomof the FrenchEnlightenment formedthe kernelof the secret, commonplace oracularwisdom to which initiates would ascend. Its corrosive attack on the authority of traditionalreligion-the feature that made it so suitable for idealof a morally autonomous vanguard-madeit seemtoo dangerous Weishaupt's in the foreseeablefuture.37 for mass consumption since it in domination-free communication, was a safe experiment Freemasonry in quasi-hermetic withdrawal andconducted was confinedto a select brotherhood from the profanemass. At least until the 1780s we find a paralleldualityin the anobvioustensionandprovoked thoughit generated lodges' internal organization, to the In the FrenchandGerman"systems," in contrast chargesof inconsistency. Englishvariety,the progressin knowledgeand virtue was an intricatelygraded ascent to masonic secrets. The "grades" (levels of initiation)stood in curious of electedofficers),andtherewere to the "dignities"(thehierarchy juxtaposition constitutional In the effortsto harmonize themwithelaborate structures. recurrent to its body, accountable dignities, leadershiptook the form of a representative in the grades,leadership meanta guidingauthority, meritingunqueselectorate; enlightenment.38 tioningobedienceby virtueof its superior
C. Payne, The Philosophes and the France (Princeton, N.J., 1981); HarTy Eighteenth-Century People (New Haven, Conn., 1976). 36 Roche, "Academies et politique au siecle des lumieres" (n. 23 above), p. 340. 37 See esp. Agethen(n. 20 above), pp. 133-87; van Dulmen, "Die Aufldarungsgesellschaften in Deutschland als Forschungsproblem," pp. 264-65; Fischer(n. 27 above), pp. 215-38. 38 Especially lucid on the mix of egalitarianand elitist impulses in freemasonryis Wolfgang in und Geheimnis in den Geheimgesellschaftendes 18. Jahrhunderts," Hardtwig, "Eliteanspruch Reinalter, ed., Aufklarung und Geheimgesellschaften, pp. 63-86. The conflicts among the Der Wilhelmsbader FreimaurerGermanlodges are exploredin detail in Ludwig Hammermayer, Konventvon 1782: Ein Hohe- und Wendepunkt in der Geschichteder deutschenund europaischen
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Once again Weishauptand his acolytes, in their aspirationto supercede the road tensions.Forthe Illuminatus one of its inherent heightened freemasonry, was mappedby superiorswhom he did not know, and whose to self-education Theexposureof thisinvisibleempireby the Bavarian was invisible.39 intervention freemasons. of conscienceamongGerman provokedan examination government hierarchies betweentheirown tutelary contradiction Wastherenot a laughable with their implicationthat truth was a carefully guarded privilege and an of manipulation-and the ideal of personalautonomyand interperinstrument was supposedto embody? sonal equalitythatmasonicbrotherhood be saidto havegrownout of the masoniccrypto-public?-and, CanJacobinism lie?40The issue is still farfromresolution, if so, whereexactlydoes the continuity andthatis in partbecauseit hingeson a priorquestion-one Furetposedapropos ideology,why democratic Cochin.If the masonicethosdid give rise to a radically filiationremainsto be did it do so in Franceand not elsewhere?This particular a unitaryconsensusthe concernwith reconstituting Admittedly demonstrated. betweenconflictinginterestswith dispellingthe specterof open contestation as in other can also be foundin freemasonry, thatbecameobsessivein Jacobinism sociability.But are we justifiedin puttinga democratic formsof Enlightenment label on the masonicversionof this unitaryideal?We cannotsimplypoint to the
Geheimgesellschaften(Heidelberg, 1980). For an explicit corrective to Furet's argument, see francaise, 1750-1850," in GerardGayot, "Les relationsde pouvoir dans la franco-maconnerie fran!aise: Frangois, ed. (n. 22 above), pp. 203-13; GerardGayot, ed., La franc-maConnerie siecles) (Paris, 1980). In Gayot's view, freemasonry'sinternal Texteset pratiques(XVJIIe-XIXe hierarchiesreproducedthe hierarchicalprinciples of the old regime; this oversimplifiesmasonic elitism and overlooks its modern features. 39 It is striking that Adolph von Knigge protested against Weishaupt's despotic system of subordinationwithin the order; but, like Weishaupt, he assumed that "only so much [of the order's wisdom] would have been communicatedto the world as would have seemed useful in each era, with regard to the need for and the degree of enlightenment" (quoted in Agethen, p. 184). 40 Ironically, recent monographic research has told us much more about freemasonry in England, the Netherlands, and the German states than about the French variety. Jacob (The Radical Enlightenment [n. 19 above]) focuses on a group of refugees and publishers in the Netherlandsand emphasizes their heady mix of pantheism and republicanism. But Jacob also drawsa sharpcontrastbetween her small cohort of radicalsand "official" masonry,and she links the radicals to the militantly anti-Christian(but not republican)thought of d'Holbach's coterie ratherthan to the "gutter Rousseauism" that contributedto Jacobin ideology. See also Alan C. in Paris (Princeton,N.J., 1977), which emphasizes Kors, D'Holbach's Circle:An Enlightenment that d'Holbach and his "circle" were comfortably integrated into le monde and that their philosophical assault on Christianityshould not be mistaken for social or political radicalism. Also relevant is research on the relationshipbetween freemasonryand Jacobinism in Central Europe, as exemplified in Helmut Reinalter,ed., Jakobiner in Mitteleuropa(Innsbruck, 1977). Reinalter (n. 33 above), pp. 50-51, concludes that in Central Europe there was a "tight connection" between Jacobinism and freemasonry,though in the latter the "understandingof democracy" was "moral" rather than "political." The connection becomes problematic, however, when one recalls thatthe greatmajorityof CentralEuropeanfreemasonsdid not become Jacobins. In any case it is doubtfulthat Reinalter'sJacobins were democraticin the same sense as theirnamesakes. On the need to maintaina strictdefinitionof Jacobinism,see Vierhaus(n. 20 above), p. 37.
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fact that masonic and Jacobinideology converge in justifying a monopoly of power (or at least of "imaginary"power)by a small elite. The issue is not the effect but the logic of justification. Jacobinism, afterall, contradicted freemasonry's elitistdirigismenot only with its commitment to popular sovereignty butalso with its tendencyto equaterepublican virtue with the naturalsimplicityof the uneducated.It upturned,in other words, the meritocratic ideal and its social distributionof power. As the Jacobins' internal war on "conspiracy" and "aristocracy"gained momentum,the institutionsof Enlightenment sociability became highly vulnerabletargets.There could be no secrecy, and indeed very little privacy,in the Jacobinvision of a completelytransparent body politic.4' If a straight line connectsthe republicof the lodge to the Republicof Virtue, the transition fromthe one to the otherrequired a dramatic leap. More likely we will have to explaina wrenchinginversionof values. Like Koselleck,Habermas conceivedof historical analysisas an exploration of pathogenesis; but, as a second-generation practitioner of the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory, he judged the Cold War environmentof the 1950s from a radicallydifferentperspective.Drawingon his mentors'eclectic neo-Marxism and neo-Freudianism, Habermas soughtto explainthe hegemonicascendancy of the modern"cultureindustry"withina long-term historyof structural change.42 Hence in his diagnosisthe ideologicalsyndromewas not that rationalcriticism had degeneratedinto utopian fanaticismbut that modern capitalist societies precluded the very possibilityof seriouscriticism.With the rise of commercialized massculture,publiccommunication hadbecomea narcotic,andit seemedto seep intoeverynookandcrannyof privateas well as publiclife. By the late 1950s the UnitedStates,the most advanced consumersociety, seemedto haveentereda completely anaesthetizedstate; and the FederalRepublic, on the crest of its economicmiracle,seemedreadyandeagerto follow. WhenHabermas of thought the totalitarian future,he saw an endlesssea of suburban homes. Theirinhabitants staredout at him vacantlyfrom the "floodlit privacy" of consumerism.They spenta good deal of their"leisure" time being inundated, in bovineisolation,by commercials on the boob tube. Structural has been incorporated Transformation piecemealinto the historical literature; even in eighteenth-century studies, where its impact has been most
41 Furet's reworking of Cochin's argumentis dubious, but his analysis of Jacobin ideology remains illuminating. See also Nathans (n. 1 above), pp. 640-42; Jack R. Censer, Prelude to Power: The Parisian Radical Press, 1789-1791 (Baltimore, 1976); Kelly (n. 23 above), esp. pp. 18-23, 281 -98; LynnHunt, Politics, Culture,and Class in the French Revolution(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984); Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution(Ithaca, N.Y., 1986); Brian C. J. Singer, Society, Theoryand the French Revolution:Studiesin the RevolutionaryImaginary(New York, 1986). Also relevant is Gary Kates, The "Cercle Social," the Girondins, and the French Revolution(Princeton,N.J., 1985), pp. 89-92, which emphasizes the differences between the secrecy and elitism of Old Regime freemasonryand the democraticideology developed during the Revolution. 42 Especially relevant is Max Horkheimerand Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (1944; reprint, New York, 1972), pp. 120-67.
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dramatic,therehas been little appreciation of the sweep and the intricacyof its and Crisis, andit may haveencouraged argument.43 Habermas hadreadCritique him to elaboratehis own ironic varianton the historicaldialectic between the publicandthe private.In his version,as in Koselleck's,the publicemergedfrom the private;but it was the expanding capitalist sphere of "commodity and information exchange,"and not the fractured landscapeof religiousbelief, that acquired a new public status under the aegis of the absolutist state. The mercantilist policies of the earlymodemerademarcated this sphereas the private "addressee"of publicauthority and, in so doing, gave it a new publicrelevance. The result was a momentousshift in the meaning of "publicness" and "publicity."In the publicsphereformedby the absolutiststateandthe corporate hierarchy on which it rested,the functionof publicitywas to exhibitthe political authority thatadhered to corporate status.The social worldof the princelycourt, displayingitself before a mass of excluded spectators,epitomizedthis "representativepublicness."By aimingto stimulatecapitalistinitiative,andby relying on detailedregulation to do so, the mercantilist statecreateda publicthatwould marketand Withthe rise of a literary becomecriticalof its own interventionism. a bourgeoisreadingpublicfromthe late seventeenth centuryonward,the private of publiccommunication, societyof market exchangeformeditself into a network generatedits own "universal" moral standardsthrough the communicative process, and eventually applied those standardscritically to the state and its policies. The "addressee"of state authoritybecame its "adversary"(Kontrato which it was morallyaccountable. henten),the tribunal to an underlying social change directsour attention Structural Transformation in TheHuman thatKoselleckhadignored.Adapting Hannah Arendt'sperspective Condition,Habermas groundedthe emergenceof a criticalpublic in a startling revaluation of the "private" household.44 The ideal citizen of the Greekpolis exercisedhis freedomin publiclife by virtueof his statusas householdpatriarch, butthe householditself-the worldof the women, children,andslaves-was the of biological privatesphereof necessity,governedby the unbending imperatives and social reproduction. As an expandingmarketexchange "burstout of the confinesof the householdeconomy,"a new family type-the bourgeois"conju-differentiated itself from both material productionand social gal family" reproductionby virtue of its relative independence. Commodity exchange and detached of the corporate structure domesticlife fromthe verticalhierarchies at the sametime gave it a new measure of autonomy vis-A-visthe state. Whathad beenthe netherworldof coercionbecamean "intimate"retreat of "saturated and free interiority"(p. 28). As illusoryas the bourgeoiscult of domesticitymay have been, its "publicoriented subjectivity" yielded a moral ideal-an ideal of purely "human" freedom and self-realization-with claims to universal and hence to public
43 A lucid synopsis and critique of StructuralTransformation is Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1982), pp. 247-49. For a trenchant reformulation of Habermas's argument about the literary public, see Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism:From "The Spectator" to Post-Structuralism(London, 1984). 4Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), esp. pp. 22-78.
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applicability.The ideal originally entered and shaped public communication andits new fictionalgenre,the novel. As the worldof market through the literary bourgeoisdomesticityreflectedon itself, its values informedfiction and in turn as rational normsin the publicdiscussionof fiction.In England authority acquired the "public century; by the earlyeighteenth the next stage was alreadyunderway of literaryreasoning" was developing into a "politically reasoningpublic," body and officially recognizedas its arounda nationalrepresentative structured "discussionpartner." In its failureto unmaskitself, Koselleckhad charged,the eighteenth-century was Whatstruck Habermas conceptof a criticalpublichadbeenself-contradictory. of the sameconcept.The demandthat the consistency,andindeedthe credibility, by, in, andlegitimated to publicopinionwas grounded be accountable government andhenceauthoritative couldbe rational two eminently Kantian axioms.Judgment only when it was formedin and throughpublicdiscussion;and such discussion, open hadto be in principle applicability, if it was to yield conclusionsof universal to all.45 How had this classic "liberal" model of the bourgeoispublicspheredegenerated into the "sham public" of the twentiethcentury?By the mid-nineteenth andeducation effectively it was apparent thatthe prerequisites of property century disqualifiedthe great mass of the population.As the masses were drawninto inclusivenessandde facto closurebecamea politics, the tensionbetweenabstract blatantcontradiction; liberalslike Mill and Tocqueville,fearingthata democraof "compulsion toward conformity," tizedpublicopinionwouldbe the instrument in moreor less esotericpublics. Fromthe 1870s authority soughtto concentrate context capitalism,the structural onward,with the rise of large-scalecorporate Therewere now obvious conflictsof interestamong social changeddrastically. by the "social-welfarestate" as well as by groups,and they had to be mediated bureaucracies, by public and quasi-public enterprises.Penetrated new corporate the familyexchangedits genuineprivacy-the kind on which the autonomyof a critical public had rested-for an illusory privacy as a passive consumerof newspapers services.The rise of the cultureindustry-first with mass-circulation and periodicals,then with the electronicmedia-completed this transformation and "hollowed out" the substanceof the classic public. The originallycritical function,and the public sphere, functionof publicitybecamea "manipulative" in this travestyof itself, became a vast platformfor advertisingand public relations.While the "scope" of the public sphere"is expandingimpressively," Habermasobserved, "its function has become progressively insignificant" (p. 4). still readsas Transformation Structural Nearlythirtyyearsafterits appearance, The a trenchant cultureand its publicityindustry. critiqueof our commercialized has been critiquehas becomeall the morerelevant,in fact, as politicalpackaging
45 Ironically,the concept of a "public sphere" that Habermasfound in the eighteenthcentury was more Kantian than Koselleck's, despite the latter's starting point in Kant's Critiques. To appreciatethe difference, cf. Habermas's discussion of Rousseau (StructuralTransformation, pp. 96-99) with Koselleck's (Critiqueand Crisis, pp. 162-67).
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The issue here, however,is the reducedto soundbites and photo opportunities. In Structural Transformation, historicalargument. of Habermas's persuasiveness as in Critiqueand Crisis, the historicalcenter of gravityis eighteenth-century Europe. To Habermasthe classic public that emerged in England and, less in France and the Germanstates markeda unique moment in dramatically, how steep the collective self-awareness.From its summitwe could appreciate narcoticstatehad been. slide into our current It was this perspectivethat drew the fire of Germancritics in the 1960s and 1970s. While liberalsfaultedHabermas'sleftist utopianism,Marxistsfrom the New Left regrettedhis failure to expose the classic bourgeois public as an for class hegemony.Both sides foundhim guiltyof elitist ideologicalcamouflage Like Adornoandother nostalgia,andthatverdictwas not entirelyoff the mark.46 combinedtwo personae.One Frankfurt School luminaries,the young Habermas was the leftist critic, unmaskingbourgeoishegemonywith an eclectic but unwho, for all The otherwas the academicmandarin neo-Marxism. compromising to the attached of "high" culture,remained his skepticismaboutthe pretensions literaryand philosophicaltraditionin which he had been reared. From both massculture of his own eraseemedcontemptible; thecommercialized standpoints, but the artifactsof the classic bourgeoispublic were anothermatter. Habermasacknowledgedthat the internalstructureof the property-owning to coercive marketforces. Nonethebourgeoisfamily reflectedits subordination "were and self-cultivation less, he insisted,the new idealsof personalautonomy surely more thanjust ideology." Bourgeoisdomestic intimacyhad produceda credibleand hence efficaciousillusion of individualfreedom-one which, in its "transcendence"of the constraintsimmanentin social reality, revealed "the elementof truththatraisedbourgeoisideology above ideology itself" (pp. 46of thistranscendent value-this capacityto evoke a purely 48).47The expressions humanideal, with potentiallyuniversalapplication-includedRousseau'sPour Heloise, Kant's CriticalPhilosophy,and the literaryclassicism of Goethe and canonicaltexts with an eye for their Schiller. If the leftist critic approached still reveredthem as monu"bourgeois"self-delusions,the academicmandarin value of high culture.48 mentsto the authoritative the reason for surrounding had a methodological Nostalgiaaside, Habermas classic publicwith an auraof sanctity.If he had simplytakenhis cue fromKant, discussionandwouldhave an a priorimodelof rational he wouldhaveconstructed Butto this student the "sham"modempublicin the lightof its standards. pilloried wouldhavebeenas self-deluding critique of Adomosucha purely"transcendent" as a merely "immanent"one. The dialecticalchallengewas to fuse immanence Habermas sought to achieve this fusion with the genuinely and transcendence.
46 Hohendahl,pp. 250-68, conveniently summarizesliberalas well as Marxistcriticisms. On the Germanpolitical background,see ibid., pp. 30-39. 47 As Habermasacknowledged, Max Horkheimerhad attributed this duality to the bourgeois family (ibid., p. 48, n. 48). the readingsocieties of the 48 Habermas'sreverencebecame quite explicit when he contrasted and modem book clubs (StructuralTransformation,pp. 165-67). late eighteenthcentuiry
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historical sociologythatis rarely foundin theworkof his Frankfurt Schoolmentors. If therewas any escape fromthe soporificembraceof the cultureindustry, it lay in recovering theemancipatory potential of an actualhistorical moment,albeitone withuniqueclarity.Bourgeoisculture thatKant'sCritical Philosophy hadrecorded with its own vision of transcendence, was to be confronted which lay in its own norms.49 Hence the eighteenth-century self-generated public had to retain its normative authority, even thoughinherent contradictions had madeits disintegration inevitable. Historians shouldbe glad Habermas chose this route. In the last threedecades interdisciplinary researchhas become a matterof course, but few scholarshave from a wide range of matchedHabermas'sskill in integratingcontributions disciplinesinto a coherentargument. Indeed,his eclecticismled him into several new areasof researchthat have since become growthindustries.The historical sociology of literature; the historyof the family;the historyof the book and of reading; the historyof the press;the historyof popular cultureandconsumerismin all these fields, andperhaps in a few more, will findsomething to practitioners ponderin Structural Transformation. this ambitious exercisehas come to serveas an Unfortunately, interdisciplinary and all too convenientbackdrop, all-purpose especiallyfor literaryscholarswho wish to set theircontributions withina sociohistorical contextbut preferto avoid moundsof recentlyproduced monographs. CanHabermas's be adjusted backdrop to suit the new foreground detail, or has it outlivedits usefulness? Manyissues are packedinto this question,but, on the criticalones, we can at leastexplainwhy Habermas's elaborate scaffoldis tottering.To Habinterpretive ermasliterary transmuted the valuesof domesticintimacyinto public subjectivity norms.This view of the privateand the publicmay proveto be present-minded, or at least one-sided. Ourcurrentbinaryoppositionbetweenthe public and the intimatedoes indeed have its origin in the eighteenthcentury, but in much discoursethe more relevantdichotomystill lay betweenthe eighteenth-century of publiccommunication of private andthe particularity universality (orpartiality) communities and institutions (includingmany we would considerpublic).50 A closely related issue is whether Habermasdid justice to the symbiotic relationship betweenthe "literary"andthe "political"in the eighteenth century. On the Continentas well as in England,he argued, the political public grew
49 Especially relevant is Theodor Adorno, Prisms: Cultural Criticism and Society (London, 1967), pp. 19-34. See also Hohendahl, pp. 32-34, 242-46; and Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 111-60. 50 See esp. Ozouf (n. 1 above). The "intimate"and the "particular," it shouldbe noted, are not mutually exclusive; and if there is a present-minded emphasis to Habermas's argument, it is nonetheless a valuablecorrective to ourtendencyto equatethe publicwiththe politicalandthe private with the unpolitical.See esp. the application of Habermas's distinctionin SaraMaza, public/private "DomesticMelodrama as PoliticalIdeology:The Caseof the Comtede Sanois,"American Historical Review 94, no. 5 (December 1989): 1249-64. I was fortunateto read Dena Goodman's "Public Sphereand PrivateLife: Towarda Synthesis of CurrentHistoriographical Approachesto the Old view Regime" (LouisianaStateUniversity,1991, typescript),which furtherelucidatesHabermas's of the eighteenth-century interactions between the public and the private.
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naturally out of a literaryVorform-thoughthe timingof this two-stagesequence varied. "Literaryreasoning" had lacked explicit political content, but it had generated universalmoralnormsfrom which government could not be exempt. Habermas did notintenda rigiddichotomy; one of the advantages of his approach, in fact, is thatit alertsus to the implicitpoliticalsignificance of fictionaltextsthat focus on privateexperienceand avoid public issues. But is his basic distinction betweenthe literaryand the politicalviable?The distinctionseems commonsensical enoughwhen the referents are, on one side, intimateepistolarynovels and, on the other,an openlypartisan press;butit tendsto blurwhenwe enterthe lower reachesof the literarymarket.We encounterhybridforms, and they make us wonderwhetherHabermas underestimated the immediatepolitical volatilityof eighteenth-century literarysubjectivity. One such hybridis the judicialme'moire, as it evolved in the Frenchscandal trialsof the 1770s and 1780s. SaraMazafindsthatin the 1780s politicalthemes becamemoreexplicit in the me'moires andthatat the sametime a theatrical style gave way to the narrativestrategyof the autobiography-confession. Now the lawyer's politically chargedjudgmentswere legitimatednot only by his legal expertisebutalso by the intimacies of his stylizedintrospection. This is a case, we might conclude, in which public discoursewas politicized in and throughan intensifiedliterary subjectivity.51 And how are we to classify the "political pornography" churnedout by France'sGrub Street scribblersfrom the 1770s onward? This quasi-fictional pamphletliterature exposed sexual exploits as well as politicalintrigues.Like Habermas's novels, it transmuted intimatedetailinto publicdiscourse.WhereHabermas creditedliterature with articulating the moral normsby which government would in due coursebe judged, however,the detail of the expose was politicallychargedin a moredirectandmoresubversive sense. Now the functionof publicitywas to unmaskthe corruption of an entireestablishment,and therebyto call into questionits very rightto exist.52 The largerissue concernsthe definingcharacteristics of a "political" public and the timingof its emergence.In Habermas's comparative timetable,England completedthe transition to a politicalpublic as early as the firstdecadesof the
Maza, "Le tribunalde la nation" (n. 19 above). See esp. Darnton, "The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature" (n. 19 above). Also relevantare Robert Darnton, "Trade in the Taboo:The Life of a ClandestineBook Dealer in PrerevolutionaryFrance," in The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literaturein Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Paul J. Korshin(Philadelphia, 1976), pp. 11-83, and "Philosophy underthe Cloak," in Revolutionin Print: The Press in France 1775-1800, ed. Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), pp. 27-49. By emphasizing the pornographicvenom of prerevolutionarylibelles, and by tracing them to the frustrations of an alienated "Grub Street" intelligentsia, Darntonmay distort the largerpicture. His view has been challenged forcefully in Jeremy Popkin, "PamphletJournalismat the End of the Old Regime," Eighteenth-Century Studies 22, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 351-67, which argues that the libelles of the 1770s and 1780s were vehicles of "substantive political polemic," representing"the diversity of elements within France's elites willing to appeal to the growing force of public opinion to settle their disputes" (pp. 360, 363). See also Darnton's view of the literaryintelligentsiain his "The Facts of LiteraryLife in Eighteenth-Century France," in Baker, ed. (n. 1 above), pp. 261-91; and Nathans(n. 8 above), pp. 629-31.
5'
52
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publichad begun eighteenth century.In France,on the otherhand, an equivalent by to emerge at mid-century but had not been "effectively institutionalized" 1789; and in Germanyits emergencewas still more belated. As valid as this was, it was all too easy; it seemedto obviate comparative generalization probably for politicization. The German criteria the needto developdenselycontextualized deservesits reputation for politicaltimidity,but some of Enlightenment probably its more successfulpublicistshad clear (thoughmoderate)agendasfor constituGerman tionalreform.53 Moreimportant, the entireprocessin whichthe educated as a "political elite constituteditself as a public is now being characterized by 1789.54 mobilization"that was well underway narrative it was not untilthe The morearresting case is France.In Habermas's a debateaboutthebudgetcrisis,that"a breach early1780s,whenNeckerprovoked in the absolutist systemfor a publicspherein thepoliticalrealm"(p. 69). [opened] We now know that the parlements,mixing Jansenistmilitancywith natural-law constitutional oppositionto absolutism jurisprudence, had mounteda formidable since the 1750s and that an increasinglyintense "politics of contestation"had French press Students of the prerevolutionary developedaround thatopposition.55 the observation thatcensorshiphad prevented would not agree with Habermas's development of "a politicaljournalism"(p. 57). In JeremyPopkin'spersuasive newspapers officiallytolerated analyses,as in JackR. Censer'sinitialexploration, despitethemlike the Gazettede Leydebecamepoliticalandindeedoppositional selves in the final decades of the ancien re'gime.Committedto an image of "authorities functioningwithoutproblem,"they nonethelessreportedand even favoredthe dissentspearheaded by theparlements.Popkinhas also demonstrated that in two other widely disseminated publications-Mairobert'sJournalhistorique (begun in 1771) and Observateur anglois and Linguet's Annales politiques
(1777-88)-journalism becameovertly ideologicaland indeed "genuinelysub53 See, e.g., Ursula A. Becher, Politische Gesellschaft: Studien zur Genese burgerlichen Offenlichkeitin Deutschland (Gottingen, 1978); James van Horn Melton, "From Enlightenment to Revolution: Herzberg, Schlozer, and the Problem of Despotism in the Late Aufkldarung," CentralEuropeanHistory 12, no. 2 (1979): 103-23; Diethelm Klippel, "The True Concept of Liberty: Political Theory in Germany in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century," in The Transformation of Political Culture:England and Germanyin the Late EighteenthCentury,ed. EckhartHellmuth (Oxford, 1990), pp. 447-66. 54 See esp. Hans Erich B6deker, "Prozesse und Strukturen politischer Bewusstseinsbildung der deutschen Aufklarung," in Aufkldrungals Politisierung-Politisierungals Aufkldrung,ed. Hans Erich Bodeker and Ulrich Hermann (Hamburg, 1987), pp. 10-31, and "Journals and Public Opinion: The Politicization of the German Enlightenment in the Second Half of the EighteenthCentury,"in Hellmuth, ed., pp. 423-45. On the variety of political (and unpolitical) postures among the German intelligentsia, see also Rudolf Vierhaus, ed., Burger und Burgerlichkeit im Zeitalter der AuJflarung(Heidelberg, 1979). ss Carroll Joynes, "The Gazette de Leyde: The Opposition Press and French Politics, 1750-1757," in Censer and Popkin, eds. (n. 1 above), pp. 133-69; PierreRetat, L'attentatde Damiens: Discours sur l'evenement au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1979); Dale K. Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Regime, 1750-1770 (Princeton, N.J., 1984), and "The JansenistConstitutionalLegacy in the French Revolution," in Baker, ed., pp. 169202; William Doyle, "The Parlements,"in Baker, ed., pp. 157-68.
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versive."56And such examples, it should be stressed, keep us at the level of officiallytolerated publications. Habermas was awarethatthe Frenchpublicalso hada largeappetite for clandestine literature, suppliedfromthe "fertilecrescent" of extraterritorial printing houses;but, in theabsenceof detailedresearch, he could not have realizedthe scale and importance of a clandestineliterarymarketthat included radically anti-Christian philosophical tractsas well as scabrous attacks on the royal family and the court.57 Thepointis not thatHabermas's comparative scheduleis in needof adjustment, but that the fundamental terms of his comparativeanalysis are misleading. reminds us that until recently Marxist historians StructuralTransformation appliedthe sameinstitutional criteriato gaugepoliticization (or politicalmodernization)as did theirliberalantagonists,albeit from a radicallydifferentvantage point.Taking England as the "modelcase" (Habermas's term)andthepacesetter, they assumedthat a public became political as it developedinto a "discussion such a public partner"for a nationalrepresentative body. In its politicalmaturity reflectedthe structural evolution of a parliamentary and constitutional government, with its organizedpartiesandincreasingly democratic electoralpolitics. If of a publicin eighteenth-century the formation France(or indeedin we approach eighteenth-century Germany)in searchof this institutional pattern,we will be blind to what was politicalaboutit. On the Continent,as in England,political meaningswere contested;but the social and institutional configurations varied, and hence the termsof contestations were, quite simply,different. It is not surprising thatHabermas glossed over salientdifferencesin national context. His comparative framework rested on the assumptionthat the critical of a capitalist factor-the axis for a comparative analysis-was the development of this single-axis market economyin clearlydiscernible stages.The inadequacies are nowheremore apparent than in his social typology. Fromthe late approach
56
Jack R. Censer, "Die Presse des Ancien Regime im Ubergang-eine Skizze," in Die
Franzosische als Bruch,des Revolution ed. Reinhart Koselleck gesellschaftlichen Bewusstseins,

and Rolf Reichardt (Munich, 1988), pp. 127-52, and Censer's further remarks in ibid., pp. 179-81; Jeremy D. Popkin, "The PrerevolutionaryOrigins of Political Journalism," in Baker, ed., pp. 203-23, "The Gazette de Leyde and French Politics under Louis XVI," in Censer and Popkin, eds., pp. 75- 132. Also relevantare Popkin's remarkson the partisanshipof the Gazette in his News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac's Gazette de Leyde (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989). On the eighteenth-centuryperiodical press, see also Stephen Botein, Jack R. Censer, and HarrietRitvo, "The Periodical Press in Eighteenth-Century English and French Society: A Cross-CulturalApproach," ComparativeStudies in Society and History 23 (1981): 464-90; Jean Sgard, "Journale und Journalistenim Zeitalter der Aufklarung," in Gumbrecht, Reichardt, and Schleich, eds. (n. 23 above), 2:3-33; Pierre Retat, ed., Le journalisme d'ancien riegime (Lyon, 1982); Claude Labrosseand PierreRetat, eds., L'instrument p&riodique:La fonction de la presse au XVIIIe si&le (Lyon, 1985); Nina Rattner Gelbart, Feminineand OppositionJournalismin Old RegimeFrance: "Le Journal des Dames" (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987); Daniel Moran, Towardthe Centuryof Words:Johann Cotta and the Politics of the Public Realm in Germany, 1795-1832 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990). 57 See esp. Damton, The Literary Undergroundof the Old Regime (n. 19 above); and, for needed correctives to Damton's approach, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Print Culture and Enlightenment Thought(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986).
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argued,the public spherebecamea sham centuryonward,Habermas nineteenth as it expandedto encompassnew strataof middle-classfamilies, dependenton What was bureaucracies. and in corporate salariedemploymentin government lost was preciselywhat had given the classic bourgeoispublicits independence: the powerto disposeof propertyin marketexchange. England, This meaningof "bourgeois"is apt enough for eighteenth-century where periodicalsand newspapersappealedto a readingpublic crowdedwith andcraftsmen.58 shopkeepers, merchants, free professionals, gentlemen-farmers, had a quitedifferent realized,the bourgeoisied'ancienre'gime But, as Habermas lists we turnto the subscription states.Whether profilein Franceandthe German rolls for the for the quartoedition of the Encyclopedieor to the membership readingsocieties that sproutedacross the Germanlandscapein the 1780s and presenceof the serviceelite.5 The greatbulk the dominant 1790s, we encounter of readers were governmentofficials, judicial officials and lawyers, local office-holders,clergymen, professors, and teachers. These groups occupied a incomes, where the disposal of and multifaceted world of intricatehierarchies privilegeandthe publicsecurity fromcorporate wealthwas inseparable capitalist as was usuallythe property, whenthe office was a heritable of office (particularly norearlyspeciesof bourgeoisie on a commercial case in France).Neithervariants typology. the salariedmiddleclass, they simply defy a one-dimensional For Habermas, as for Koselleck, there was something egalitarianabout publicity.WhereasKoselleck tracedthe egalitarianspirit to eighteenth-century focused on the communityformedby the sociability,Habermas Enlightenment new print market. And where Koselleck identified an incipient pathology, found an unfulfilledpromise. As "bourgeois" as it was, Habermas Habermas throughprinteffected of literarysubjectivity insisted,the publiccommunication power a new kind of purely human intimacy,insulatedfrom the hierarchical that pervadedsocial reality.Likewise the issues discussedbecame relationships "general"not merelyin theirsignificancebut also in theiraccessibility;no one Within for participation. legally from fulfillingthe prerequisites could be barred madethe competition of legal equality,market a Kantian (andliberal)framework of propertyand educationpossible in principlefor all. Hence it was acquisition
58 Botein, Censer,and Ritvo. This thoroughlyresearchedcomparativeanalysis concludes that, in contrast to the "aristocratic" orientation of the French press, the English press of the century"articulatedthe normsand aspirationsof the middlingclasses.thatformed mid-eighteenth the bulk of their audiences" (ibid., p. 490). See also John Brewer, "Commercializationand Politics," in The Birth of a ConsumerSociety, ed. Neil McKendrick(Bloomington, Ind., 1982), pp. 197-262. 59 For a social profile of the readership see Robert Darnton,The Business of the Encyclope6die,
Mass., 1775-1800 (Cambridge, A Publishing of the "Encyclopedie," History of Enlightenment: (Munich,1981);andOttoDann, Vergleich Eine europaischer Emanzipation: undburgerliche
Ein Forschungsbericht,"InternationalesArchiv fur "Lesegesellschaften im 18. Jahrhundert: 1979), pp. 524-31. On Germanreading societies, see esp. Otto Dann, ed., Lesegesellschaften
Literatur 14, no. 2 (1989):45-53. der deutschen Sozialgeschichte
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crediblein context(thoughultimately illusory)to equateproperty ownership with "humanity"(pp. 102-17).6? was well awarethathe was walkingan ideologicaltightrope.In an Habermas effort to planthis argument on firmground,he madethe distinction betweenthe eighteenth-century bourgeoisieand the modem salariedmiddleclass turnon the mode of consumption.Literaryfiction became a commodityin the eighteenth century only in the sensethatthe formof its distribution was commercialized, with the resultthatit becamean accessibleobjectof publicdiscussion.Thanksto the economicindependence of property-owning families,the substance of literaturethe meaningauthors putintoit, andthe meaningreaders derivedfromit-was not commodified. Hence, in contrastto the conflationof shampublicityand illusory privacy in themodern culture industry, eighteenth-century fictioneffectively"conjoined"genuineprivacy andtrulypubliccommunication. Thepurelyhuman values of intimacywere transmuted into normsof publicdiscoursewithoutlosing their authenticity (pp. 159-75). If the logic was neo-Marxist, the perspectivewas unmistakably nostalgicand eminently mandarin.There was a qualitativedifference, Habermasassumed, betweenparticipation in high cultureand mass consumption. The formerwas an active, demandingprocess of self-educationand self-determination. In mass consumption access to culturalgoods is facilitated"psychologically"as well as "economically."The consumerstagnateswithin an endless roundof effortless entertainments and is oblivious to their manipulativeeffect. New historical to consumerism approaches suggest that this contrastis simplisticat both ends. Theremay be modes of active appropriation in modernconsumerism-ways in which the consumercreates intersticesof personalautonomywithin the larger framework of mass conformity. Moreto the point, Habermas's roseateimage of the eighteenth-century literarymarketskews our vision in two closely related ways. It is too narrowlyfocused on a subsequently establishedcanonof fiction; and it drawsinferencesfrom abstractmodels of marketexchange, ratherthan explaininghow specific social and culturalcontexts shapedeighteenth-century readers'receptionof texts. Even in the Germany of Goetheand Schillereducatedmen probablydevoted little of theirreadingtime to fictionand still less to literary criticism.The typical publications available in theircoffeehouses,theirclubs, andtheirreadingsocieties were newspapers and periodicals,and theirmainfare was politicalandcommercial reportage,social commentary, advertising,and obituaries.If Habermas's distinctionbetween form and substancedissolves in the face of this reading its application material, to fictionmaybe hardlyless problematic. In England,and to a lesser extent on the Continent, the eighteenth-century literary market as an integral expanded partof an emergingleisureindustry.6' As reading became
60 Habermas'stortuousvia media-his view of the "bourgois" concept of a public as illusory (and indeed self-contradictory)but credible in context-is slighted in the otherwise insightful critique in Nathans(n. 8 above). 61 See, e.g., J. H. Plumb, "The Public, Literature,and the Arts in the EighteenthCentury," in The Emergenceof Leisure, ed. Michael R. Marrus(New York, 1974), pp. 11-37.
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(albeiton a muchsmallerscale thanin our culture a formof mass entertainment industry), the texts thatwouldbecome "classics" had to competewith a flood of "vulgar" fictionthatcateredto marketdemand.At the same time the reception was surelyconditioned by of futureclassics like La NouvelleHeloise andWerther in ways thatbluntedthe emancipatory implicommercial distribution-probably as well as continuities cationsthatHabermas foundin them. Therewere ruptures in the transmutation of literarysubjectivityfrom its privatesourcesin domestic to its public status as an "anonymous" object of intimacy and letter-writing consumption and discussion.62 Intenton reproaching modempublicitywith the purityof its origins,Habermas As a resulthe also oversimoverlookedthese dimensionsof commercialization. market. authors towardthe new literary plifiedthe posturesof eighteenth-century of intimacy-made-public evoked,andwithgreatinsight,was Whathis descriptions communication, to the author'saspirationto bond with readersin transparent achievethemetasocial thatprint,in its positiveguise, seemedto promise. intimacy literaryreactionto print But this was only one side of an intenselyambivalent as his technologyandthe marketit created.In 1784 Schillerhailedthe Publikum or Vertrauter), but "sovereign"andhis "tribunal"(as well as his "confidante," fifteenyearslaterhe wrotethat"waris the only relationship to the publicthatone cannotregret."63 The new printmarketofferedeighteenth-century authorsan objectifiedpublic witha mass prospects fordirectcommunication identity andopenedunprecedented audience.On both counts the marketpromisedliberationfrom the aristocratic, self-enclosedworldof courtlyletters.Oftenenough, though, authors'reverence for the idealPublikum theiralienation fromthe actualreadingpublic.The marked of the market to reducethe momentum had its darkside; it threatened egalitarian andto trivializehis writerto a hirelingof fickle consumers andgreedypublishers work as one more ephemeralcommodity. In the face of this specter many eighteenth-century literarymen became all the more self-consciousaboutmainin some cases even as they were being tainingthe pose of a gentleman-amateur, reducedto GrubStreethacks.64
62 Zum Syndrom burgerlicher See, e.g., Klaus R. Scherpe, Wertherund Wertherwirkung: Gesellschaftsordnungim 18. Jahrhundert (Bad Homberg, 1970); Claude Labrosse, Lire au XVIIIesiicle: La Nouvelle Heloise et ses lecteurs (Lyons and Paris, 1985). 63 Quotedin HelmuthKiesel and Paul Munch, Gesellschaftund Literaturim 18. Jahrhundert: Voraussetzungenund Entstehung der literarischen Markt in Deutschland (Munich, 1977), pp. 98-99. On Schiller's attitude toward the reading public, see also Klaus L. Berghahn, "Volkstiimlichkeitohne Volk? Kritische Uberlegungen zu einem KulturkonzeptSchillers," in am Main, 1974), Popularitdtund Trivialitat,ed. Reinhold Grimmand Jost Hermand(Frankfurt pp. 51-75; John A. McCarthy, "Die republikanischeFreiheit des Lesers. Zum Lesepublikum von Schillers Der Verbrecher aus verlorenerEhre," Wirkendes Wort1/79 (1979): 28-43. There is a wealth of well-documented information on the French literary market and the changing circumstancesof French authorsin the eighteenth century in John Lough, Writerand Public in France: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Oxford, 1978), pp. 164-274. 64 Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester and New York, 1982), provides valuable detail on eighteenth-centurywriters' relationships with their publishersas well as their reading publics. On the commercializationof literatureand authors' reactions to it, see Hans J. Haferkom, "Zur Entstehungder burgerlich-literarischen Intelligenz
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The intimacybetween authorand readerwas anonymous,impersonal,artificial. Thismadefor an alluring paradox; printseemedto effect a kindof egalitarian transparency that face-to-facecommunication in everydaysocial relations,with its pervasivelyhierarchical terms, did not admit. But there was also a sense in whichthe purified intimacyof print-and the rhetoric of shared"humanity"that conveyedthat intimacy-opened the readerto instruction on the author'sterms. That was the other reason why Samuel Johnson'sfaith in "common readers," whosejudgmentswere "uninstructed by precept"and "unprejudiced by authority," was precociouslymodem. The image of the common readerannounced Johnson'sreadinessto exploit the egalitarian potentialof the printmarket,and of literaryquality.But it also indeedto acceptmass approvalas the final arbiter markedhis strategyfor dispellingthe egalitarian threat.The public of common readerswould "pass the last sentenceon literaryclaims"; but it would play the role of incorruptible tribunalprecisely because "criticism" would "establish principles"and "improveopinion into knowledge."65 It is this fine balancebetween an egalitarian aesthetic rejectionof traditiqnal thatAlvin Kemanhas conveyed standards and a new "criticalauthoritarianism" in his recentstudy of Johnson'sliterarycareer.One of the lessons of Johnson's careerwas thatprintwas not simply a leveling agent;it also had the capacityto endow a new breedof authorsandcritics, includingthose of obscureoriginsand This was in part because marginalstatus, with a new kind of literaryauthority. print projectedthe "authorialdignity" of the competentprofessionaland the "intriguingpersonality,"independent of any social milieu. There was also the standardized fixity of mass production,which deprivedthe ancienttexts of their sacredaurabut also workedto "remystify" or "privilege" the purely literary text. Thanksto this capacityof printtechnology,a new literarycanon, produced in authoritative scholarlyeditions, could be elevated above the flood of typocould legitimatetheir graphical ephemera-and the criticswho were its guardians claim to independent authority.66 We finda similarimplication in plansfor a constitutional reformof absolutism in andin effortsto modernizeacademiclearningand its professional applications It was not simplythat,for the greatmass the secondhalf of the eighteenth century.
und des Schriftstellersin Deutschlandzwischen 1750 und 1800," in Deutsches Burgertumund literarische Intelligenz, 1750-1800, ed. BermdLutz, Literaturwissenschaft und Sozialwissenschaften, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1974), pp. 113-275; Wolfgang von Ungarn-Stemberg, "Schriftsteller und literarischerMarkt," in Hansers Sozialgeschichteder deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundertbis zur Gegenwart, ed. Rolf Grimminger(Munich and Vienna), 3:133-85; Kiesel and Munch, esp. pp. 84-104, 155-70; Alvin Keman, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princeton, N.J., 1987), esp. pp. 7-17, 62-90. 65 Quoted in Kernan, pp. 19, 226-27. On the issue of literary authority and the role of criticism, see also Klaus L. Berghahn, "Von der klassistischen zur klassischen Literaturkritik," in Geschichteder deutschen Literaturkritik (1730-1980), ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 10-75. " Keman, esp. pp. 16-23, 107-72, 219-40. Keman's book is refreshinglyinterdisciplinary, especially in its use of key concepts from Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979). On Johnson's literarystrategy, see also ClarenceTracy, "Johnson and the Common Reader," Dalhousie Review 57, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 405-23.
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to participation of the population,propertyand educationwere de facto barriers (like Koselleck)ignoredthe normapublic. Habermas in the eighteenth-century and educatedelites soughtto embodythe tive discourseswith which propertied for the entiresociety, even as they publicconscienceandto speakauthoritatively open public. positionedthemselveswithin a theoretically Coulda partspeakcrediblyfor the whole?This issue hadalwayslurkedbehind modem the apotheosisof the public, andit was beginningto takeon recognizably soughtto recover),the conceptof contours.In its pureversion(theone Habermas public opinion can be said to have denied a legitimaterole to any part. Public becauseit formedout of an aggregate moralauthority opinionhadunimpeachable of morallyautonomousindividuals,each arrivingat his (or her?)judgmentin splendid isolation. Somehow in public discussion individualjudgments were directlyinto the consensusof a totality-which is to say that social transformed solidarities were short-circuitedand social interests were transcended.This prospect was not simply an appealing alternativeto the fragmented,tunnelvisioned corporatismof the Old Regime; it was also posed against new of the selfish, often fanaticalspiritof "party" and "faction." It manifestations was no accidentthatpublicopinionwas idealizedas a courtof appealas the spirit whereit hadoriginally of partyseemedto expandfromthe religiousbattleground, rearedits head, to the emergingarenaof modem politics. In the final decades of the eighteenthcentury,however, the image of a pure better,of a metasocialconsensus-also assumedsocially consensus-or, perhaps Keith concentrated forms. A case in pointis the "social theoryof representation" Baker has traced through the French Enlightenment,from the Physiocrats' originalversion to the Abbe Sieyes's more flexible variation.A representative a new kindof collectivedecisionmaking,free of the assemblywouldconcentrate but at the stigma of "privilege" attachedto old-style corporaterepresentation thatelectedrepresentatives principle the Rousseauian around sametime detouring such an assemblywas conceived shouldbe boundby popular mandates.Whether or as an arena for men of wealth and as the preserve of landed proprietors education,its memberswere assumedto embodythe only social "interests"that andachievea rationalvision of of self-interest could rise above the particularism (like the ideal the publicwelfare.Properly organized,theirinternaldeliberations would lay form of Enlightenment sociability,or the ideal printcommunication) the barethe inherent cogency of ideas. Hencethey couldbe reliedon to constitute publicconsciencesimply by voting theirconsciences.67 of the professionshavefounda similarlogic takingshapeamongthe Historians lawyers, scholars, physicians, teachers, and even clergymen who aspired to modem "professional" status in the last third of the eighteenthcentury.The into a specialized sharedaxiomof theirprofessional ideologieswas thatinduction academicdiscipline,like property ownership,insureda kindof privilegedinsight into the naturalorder of things, a disinterestedpublic vision to which mere of thatvision was reinforced by interests couldnot ascend.The inherent authority
67
Keith Michael Baker, "Representation,"in Baker, ed. (n. 1 above), pp. 469-92.
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the fact that modem professionalexperts-unlike the caste-likeparlementsand the exclusiveacademiesthathadclaimedto speakfor "the nation"in eighteenthcenturyFrance-formed a meritocratic elite, membersof a set of careersopen to
talent.68
between MissingfromHabermas's classic publicarethe complexrelationships the publicand the marketthatthese discoursesimplied. "Social" representation andprofessionalism weremodern formsof closurewithinthepromiseof openness, and as such they were centralto the eighteenth-century self-representations of an "enlightened"or "educated" public. They offered alternativesnot only to a popularsovereignty but also to Rousseauian ideal of directand all-encompassing of free-market exchange.Theirefficacylay the egalitarian momentum commodity objectivityto attributes in attachingthe capacity for rational(or disinterested) (propertyownership,academiceducation,professionalexpertise) that could be considered invulnerable to thecoercivepressures of themarket, oratleast relatively uniquelydeservingof such invulnerability. Andyet therewas also a sense in whichthesediscoursesworkedto domesticate the principle of market competitionby concentratingit within micropublics from the electorate,the perchedabove the masses. Thanksto its independence new representative of ideas; assembly would form a self-enclosedmarketplace thatwas why it could be countedon to producethe rationalconsensusthe word of a modern "public" promised.Similarly,the ethos and the internalstructure professionmade for a market-like competitionof ideas on issues of vital public importance.Popularwhims might prevail in an increasinglycommercialized culture, but knowledge that survived the filteringprocess of the profession's internalmarketwas, in the ideal, authoritative. Since professionalswere trained to judge ideas purely on their merits, the lay public-the consumers of professional services-should defer to their collective judgment as the best availableopinion.69 Well before Mill and Tocquevillesounded their alarms about the threatof the privilegingof moreor less partialandesotericpublicshadbegun. democracy, as This dimensionof the eighteenth-century public is perhapsbest characterized a neocorporate rationalefor paternalism.It was reminiscentof Old Regime corporatism,despite its principled rejection of old-style exclusiveness and of freemasonry-though secrecy.It also had affinitieswith the quasi-hermeticism the enlightened agent elite, in its professional profiles,wouldserveas the filtering How was for a purified thanas a self-enclosedvanguard. publicconsensusrather
' See, e.g., Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley, 1977); La Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit (n. 18 above), pp. 287-350, and "The Politics of Enlightenment:Friedrich Gedike and German Professional Ideology," Journal of Modern History 62, no. 1 (March 1990): 34-56. 69 On the domesticationof the marketmodel in modernprofessionalism, see esp. Thomas L. Haskell, "Professionalismversus Capitalism:R. H. Tawney,Emile Durkheim, and C. S. Peirce on the Disinterestednessof Professional Communities," in The Authorityof Experts: Studies in History and Theory,ed. Thomas L. Haskell (Bloomington, Ind., 1984), pp. 180-225. Haskell focuses on the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, but his insights are also relevant to the emergence of professional ideologies in the late eighteenth century.
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society to reconstitute itself as a stablehierarchy, and one in which authoritative (as opposed to authoritarian) guidance from above would insure progressive change?The professionalanswer was to concentrate public authorityin arenas thatwereat once highlyvisible to andsafely bracketed off fromthe largersociety. Here again, as in our examinationof Enlightenmentsociability, we are remindedthat the constructionof a public cannot be understoodsimply as a the part movementof oppositionto absolutism.In the logic of professionalism, could speak for the whole because it bridged the division between state and society and faced in both directions. As an autonomous"communityof the of civil society from state competent,"a professionembodiedthe independence was inseparable autonomy tutelage; but, at least on the Continent,its professional from its public authority, and it exercisedthe latterby virtue of its partnership state. Often the need to with, and often its incorporation into, the bureaucratic as an agentrather than justify this mediating role, andabove all to win credibility an objectof statetutelage,shapedthe construction of professional knowledge.If the new professionalswere a meritocratic alternative to the Old Regime service elite, they were also its modernbourgeoissuccessor.70 The tensionbetweenuniversality andexclusiveness,opennessandclosure,has still anotheraxis. The new reverencefor purehumanityand natural authenticity encompassedwomen, and that is hardlysurprisingin view of their significant presencein eighteenth-century fiction and in an expandingreadingpublic. Yet in the new publicsphere.Wasthis womenwerebarred frompoliticalparticipation a partialapplication of an entitlement thatwas universalivLnkiJe? (Q %-s thti of a public? exclusion of women inherentin the ideologicalconstruction
70 The phrase "community L. Haskell, of the competent"is borrowedfrom Thomas "Professionalization as Cultural Reform,"Humanities in Society 1, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 103-14. Darnton,The Businessof Enlightenment (n. 59 above), pp. 517-19, 538-39, thattheemergence of professionalism marks the continuity emphasizes (andnotof Jacobinism) between the Enlightenment andtheRevolution. Onthedominating presence of thebureaucratic state in continental see DietrichRuschemeyer, "Professionalisierung: "professionalization," Theoretische furdievergleichende Geschichte undGesellschaft Probleme Geschichtsforschung," and the Learned 6, no. 3 (1980): 311-25; R. Steven Tumer,"The 'Bildungsburgertum' in Prussia, of a Class,"Histoire Professions sociale-Social History13, 1770- 1830:TheOrigins no. 25 (May 1980): 105-35; Ute Frevert,Krankheit als politischesProblem,1770-1880 L. Geison, ed., Professionsand the French State, 1700-1900 (Gottingen,1984); Gerald ConzeandJurgen undProfession(Philadelphia, 1984);Werner Kocka,eds., Bildungssystem in internationalen im 19 Jahrhundert, pt. 1 (Stuttalisierung Vergleichen, Bildungsburgertum how professionalization as an intellectual to understand gart, 1985). We are only beginning of professional knowledge-servedto process-i.e., as the construction and application a privileged "Foucault the withthe state;see, e.g., JanGoldstein, among legitimate partnership andTheory The'Disciplines' andtheHistory of theProfessions," History 23, no. 2 Sociologists: of Medicine A Professional andPsychiatry (1984):170-92, and" 'Moral Contagion': Ideology in EighteenthandNineteenth-Century in Geison,ed., pp. 181-222; LaVopa,Grace, France," Hellenism as ProfesandMerit,pp. 287-350, and"Specialists Talent, againstSpecialization: sionalIdeology in German in German Classical 1800-1950, ed. Geoffrey Studies," Professions, CocksandKonrad H. Jarausch (New York,1990),pp. 27-45.
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via mediabecame On the issue of gender,as on the issue of class, Habermas's in market owner'sprivateautonomy thatthe property tortuous.He acknowledged authoritywithin the family-hence "any exchange translatedinto patriarchal pretendedfreedom of individuals[was] illusory" for the wife as well as the children.But if the family was "an agent of society" in that sense, it was also emancipation from society." Its memberswere bound to one "the anticipated not only by "patriarchal but also by "humancloseness." This authority" another in the publicsphere; in women'smode of participation dualityhadits counterpart thoughexcluded from "rationalcritical debate in the political realm," female publicsphere."In one sense, readers"oftentook a moreactivepartin the literary this sexual division of the conceptof a single public was a fictioncamouflaging labor. In another sense, though, the same concept pointed ahead: women's potentialinclusionin the politicalpublic was implicitin theirrole as readersof of humanvalues to the directtranslation significantly fiction,alreadycontributing into public discourse(pp. 46-51, 55-56). It is preciselythis dimensionof opennessthatJoanLandesdeniesin herWomen the representative and the PublicSphere.Focusingon France,Landesreexamines to the absolutist stateandits court. She reads attributed publicnessthatHabermas this public self-presentation as a patriarchal iconography,and in its light she Parisas a "potentalterexplainsthe salons thatemergedin seventeenth-century characnative." Her view of the salons is strikinglydifferentfrom Habermas's society" and terization of themas a "bridge"betweenan "aristocratic-humanistic the bourgeoispublic sphere.She emphasizespreciselywhat he ignored:thatthe space salonswereorganized by women,andthattheyformeda uniquequasi-public in which womencould be "purveyors of culture"as well as "powerbrokers."71 It was this feminine power that made the salons the targetsof an aristocratic aristocratic critics opposition.Adaptingthe rhetoricof classical republicanism, pairedthe "feminization"of public life by salonnieres(as well as by politically effect of absolutism. women at court) with the emasculating influential As Landes explains it, this modernizationof a "masculinist classicism" of a bourgeoispublic construction entereda new stagewiththe eighteenth-century in Jacobindemocracy."Universalityandreason,"she andfoundits culmination writes, "were relied on to sustain, not to eradicate, the (sexual) differences activityof To exclude womenfromthe rational erectedby the orderof nature."72 politicswas simply to bow to the dictatesof nature.Their"natural"role was to create the domestic environmentin which the emphaticallymale virtues of citizenshipcould be nurtured. republican to the new binaryoppositionbetweenmale andfemale "natures"was Central of oralandprintcommunication. Rousseau'sprecocitylay in a radicalrevaluation
71
Joan Landes, Womenand the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca,
of the salons in Habennas,Strouctural the explanation N.Y., 1988), pp. 22-24. Compare
Transformation,pp. 29-34.
72 Landes,p. 46. As Landesseems to recognize(pp. 57-61), republican ideology and of Madame werenotnecessarily de Montanclos feminism see esp. thediscussion incompatible; in Gelbart (n. 56 above),pp. 185-91.
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pioneeringan "active textualization of life"-a new channelof communication throughprint, linking two human beings in an entirely naturaland indeed translucent intimacy.By this standard, the highly mannered art of conversational the salonniere-and, with it, the femininityshe represented-was artificialand dissembling.Novel-reading orientedwomenexclusively to the naturalsphereof "love, marriage,and childbirth."Ironically,"active" textualization condemned womento passivityas the subjectsof a new textual"regime."Theywerereduced to objectsof male-dominated texts. Thanksto the intimateinvolvementwith the printedpage that Rousseau pioneered, they became actively complicit in this objectification of theirdesires.73 Focusingon ideologicalconstructsand eschewingcausalexplanation,Landes leaves us wonderingabout the relevance of Habermas'sinterlockedstructural changes-the expansionof marketexchangeand the actualemergenceof a new kind of family-to her story. Her readingof male perceptions of salonnieresis clearlyone-sided;if thephilosopheswho frequented Parisian salonsin the 1760s and 1770s resentedfemale domination,they also acknowledgedthat only the guiding presence of a woman could insure egalitarian exchange in polite conversation.74 Also problematic is the "textualization"Landesfinds in Rousseau'swritings.It pointsaheadto drugstore whatit tells us (or is meant romances; to tell us) aboutother species of eighteenth-century fiction, or indeed aboutthe strategiesof Enlightenment discourseas a whole, is not clear. But one need not wade far into the reformthought of the Enlightenment to find confirmation thatits universalist language-its normative triadof reason,humanity, and nature-was inherently genderedto justify a dichotomybetweena "public" (male)anda "private" (female)sphere.Andit is probably safe to say thatgendered discourse hadits corollary in a new kindof socialsegregation. Withfew exceptions, theEnlightenment's men micropublics wereexclusively malepreserves. As educated founda refugefromtherigors of occupational life in thenew domesticity, theyfound a respitefromdomesticity in theirlodges, theirclubs, andtheircoffeehouses.75 To Habermasit was axiomatic that, as the medium for an oppositional movement against absolutism, the bourgeois public markeda progressive(if limited)historicalepisode. To Landes,in contrast,the same bourgeoisconstruct
73 Landes, pp. 64-65, 78-89. Landes's concept of textualization was inspired in part by Robert Darnton, "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabricationof Romantic Sensitivity," in his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French CulturalHistory (New York, 1984), pp. 215-56. On women and eighteenth-centuryfiction, see also Samia I. Spencer, ed., French Women and the Age of Enlightenment(Bloomington, Ind., 1984); Ruth-EllenBoetcher-Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes, eds., German Womenin the 18th and 19th Century:A Social and Literary History (Bloomington, Ind., 1986). 74 For a subtle reading of this alternativeperception, and of salonnieres' self-estimation, see Dena Goodman, "Governing the Republic of Letters: The Politics of Culture in the French Enlightenment,"History of European Ideas 13, no. 3 (1991): 183-99. 75 Women were admittedto some masonic lodges, or at least to their festivities, and in France the masonic movement did recognize a few lodges for women. See Chevallier (n. 31 above), pp. 200-210; Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment(n. 19 above), pp. 206-8; Gelbart, pp. 204, 287. On coffeehouses, see Hans Erich B6deker, "Das Kaffeehaus als Institutionaufkldarischer Geselligkeit," in Frangois, ed. (n. 22 above), pp. 75-76.
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with "a more pervasivegenderingof the public replaced"the older patriarchy" '76-and, indeed, with a genderingthat became all the more categorical sphere' to the version of republicanism and virulentwith the shift from the aristocratic criticalpublichad its social groundradically"democratic"variety.Habermas's ing and its ethical source in bourgeois domesticity. To Landes the same discourseand, as domesticitywas the ideological productof a male-dominated such, the foil against which an exclusively male public sphere was defined. Literarysubjectivitydid not transmutethe purely human values of domestic intimacyinto public norms;rather,it relegatedwomen to a private(and hence politically powerless) sphere throughthe public process of "textualization." Likewise the exclusion of women from "natural" political rights cannot be of a universalideal, to be explainedby understood simplyas a partialapplication in the ideal itself, since its historical obstacles.Exclusionwas inherent contingent humannaturesexually. differentiated apotheosisof the natural As the story changes, so does its moral. Habermas'shistoricalexercise was had yet to be designed to remindus that a universalpromiseof emancipation confrontsus with the possibilitythat, by the fulfilled. The feminist alternative very natureof its legitimatingpremises,the classic liberalpublic held no such promisefor women. sweepinghistoricalinterpretations In our age of academicmicrospecialization, andpoliticalissues whenthey addressphilosophical aresittingducks,particularly head-on. Exposed on several fronts at once, they invite the sniper fire of research. The groundbeneath them shifts with our increasingly monographic that frequentchanges in academicprioritiesand in the political preoccupations to the effortat synthesisis today'smonument informthem. Yesterday's herculean naivet6 of our elders. Yesterday'strenchanthistoricalcritique of ideology is today's exampleof ideologicalmyopia. of Critique structures thatthe interpretive Muchof this essay has demonstrated have been seriously shaken by new and Crisis and StructuralTransformation researchand changingconcerns.And yet, far from being consignedto the slag on bothsides of the heapof periodpieces, they arenow winningwide recognition is well deserved.Whatstrikesstudents Atlanticas seminaltexts. The recognition of eighteenth-century Europeaboutboth books from this distanceis that-even
76 Landes, p. 2. Again the service elite was probably of central importance; its salaried bureaucraticemployment accelerated the separationof a male public sphere of work from the female private sphere of the household (see Karin Hausen, "Die Polarisierung der 'Geschlechtscharaktere'-Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben," in Sozialgeschichteder Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, ed. WernerConze [Stuttgart, 1976], pp. 363-93). On the genderedlanguageof natureand naturalrights, see also JoanWallachScott, "French Feminists and the Rights of 'Man': Olympe de Gouges's Declarations," History 28 (Autumn 1989): 1-21, and Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988); Workshop DorindaOutram,The Body and the French Revolution:Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New im 19. Haven, Conn., 1989); Ute Frevert, ed., Bdrgerinnenund Burger: Geschlechtsverhaltnisse Jahrhundert(Gottingen, 1988).
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and blindersof the Cold War thoughthey exhibitthe ideologicalpreoccupations prescientin posing salient questions and at its height-they were remarkably developingimaginativeways to answerthem. but the largersignificanceof freemasonry, Koselleckmay have misconstrued the studyof the masonicmovementsurelywill be criticalto understanding further relationshipbetween sociability and ideology, social interactionand symbolic of secrecymay not be a balanced His indictment meaning,in the Enlightenment. commithistoricalverdict;but therewas a tensionbetweenthe Enlightenment's ment to openness and its impulses to closure, and furtherexplorationof that as tensionpromisesto tell us a greatdeal aboutthe movement'ssocial perspective has inspiredus to take a new look at well as its politicalinhibitions.Habermas texts, in an effort to explainhow fictionaland quasi-fictional eighteenth-century in literaryforms and meaningsgave modem political the values communicated became, it pointsus to criticismits moralforce. Howevertortuoushis argument how the emergenceof a modernfamily ethos contributed the need to understand of a modem public-and how the expandingmarketfor print to the construction mediatedthatcontribution. If specialists now find much to fault in Critiqueand Crisis and Structural they cannothelp but admirethe sheersweep of theirvision. The Transformation, vision is, on one level, historical,but this is historyinformedby an imaginative powerthatis very rare.It is a measureof thatpower that, as both books accede them. and new research,they still challengeus to supercede to new perspectives awareness,interdisciMeetingthe challengewill requirethe same philosophical thatKoselleckandHabermas brought breadth andcomparative plinaryversatility, to theirsubjects.

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Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern

Review Article Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe*

CarlSchmitt, Der Leviathan in derStaatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: SinnundFehlschlag

Enlightenment.18 When we take soundingsinto the undercurrents, we find still

Franzosische als Bruch,des Revolution ed. Reinhart Koselleck gesellschaftlichen Bewusstseins,

Literatur 14, no. 2 (1989):45-53. der deutschen Sozialgeschichte

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