Il Craftsman. Giornalismo e cultura politica nell’Inghilterra del Settecento (The Craftsman: Journalism and Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century England) (review)

Mr. Sanna retraces the eighteenth-century background of the formation of the media as an autonomous and impartial power in the state, or “the fourth power.” He correctly underlines that the Craftsman’s self-presentation as champion of freedom of press did not imply the existence of an already fully developed public opinion. The journal’s contributors, in fact, had only a vague idea of public opinion as consensus gentium; actually, they maintained that one’s opinion could be detrimental to the correct formation of reasonable political thought. Mr. Sanna thus criticizes Habermas’s influential interpretation of the Craftsman as the first organ of public engagement in political debate. Although he thinks that journals and gazettes contributed to the crisis of the ancien régime, he does not believe that they had already become “the fourth estate” in the eighteenth century.

Contextualizing the Craftsman in the political aftermath of the Licensing Act of 1695 and in the British “paper wars” of the 1720s and 1730s, Mr. Sanna stresses the role of the aristocraticélites in the creation and production of the journal and in the preservation of ancien régime constitutionalism. His discussion of the English ancien régime does not add to accounts by historians, such as J. C. D. Clark, J. G. A. Pocock, Jeremy Black, and Frank O’Gorman. The book’s central chapters (four and five), devoted to the political background and monarchical versus republican models, recapitulate well-known ideas and studies. Mr. Sanna, however, has original things to say about the aristocrats who contributed and subscribed to the Craftsman; he provides a useful and meticulous account of the journal’s complex reception, its distribution in the country, and subscribers. One might have expected a deeper discussion of the journal’s reception abroad, which contributed to the spreading of the myth of English political freedom.

For Mr. Sanna, the Craftsman became an elaborate, hard-to-untangle skein. Thus, in his view, Caleb d’Anvers’s periodical was much more than simply Bolingbroke’s organ of propaganda, as in Isaac Kramnick’s interpretation; instead, it was a laboratory of political ideas and the composite result of general participation, offering a cross section of contemporary English society. Mr. Sanna’s approach in untangling the “skein” (“matassa”) of the Craftsman is well-read and diligent. Despite inconsistent hyphenations (“Cra-/ ftsman,” “Craf -/ tsman,” “Licensi-/ ng,” “Jo-/ hn,” “Lo-/ rds”), this book commends itself to Italian readers.