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Facts and Norms in the Marketplace of Print: John Dunton's Athenian Mercury
- Eighteenth-Century Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 36, Number 3, Spring 2003
- pp. 345-365
- 10.1353/ecs.2003.0023
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay discusses the division of knowledge within the context of a popular periodical, the Athenian Mercury (1691-1697). The separation of fields of knowledge in the Enlightenment was merely the prelude to the attempt to establish disciplines on a common basis. I trace a similar process in the Mercury, which treated questions about natural science and moral dilemmas as if they shared an analogous structure--of particular instantiations of universal laws. I argue that this identification of facts and norms constituted the public subject simultaneously as subject to the law and the authority before which the law must legitimate itself.