Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic

8. Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic

john l. brooke 8 Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic While historians instinctively avoid theory, we necessarily attempt an exploration where imagination, fact, and theory all come to bear, as we attempt to visualize the spaces in which our historical subjects engaged with one another. Over the past decade, a new understanding of public space has begun to provide a more precise structure and coherence to that di≈cult visualization. First proposed in 1962 by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in a book published in English in 1989 as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the concept of ‘‘public sphere’’ has emerged as a formal, even technical, term for historians of the early modern and modern epochs, defining a specific space in civil society for discourse, communication, and association, mediating between the state and the people in their private capacities.∞ Habermas’s great contribution has been to allow us to visualize more clearly—or at least to argue more specifically about—the place where matters of shared importance unfold in early john l. brooke 208 modern and modern societies. First taken up by historians of the French Enlightenment and of American women, the concept of a public sphere has helped to establish an increasingly broad definition of the nature of ‘‘the political’’, and may well provide a useful framework in which to situate the newest political history of the early and antebellum American republic. Beyond the problem of visualizing the past, the public sphere as a theoretical question is thus a matter of considerable interpretive consequence in its own right. Historians’ first encounter with Habermas’s public sphere came at the height of a grand generational struggle between older and newer histories, histories that give essential priority to law and to language, respectively, as competing outcomes of ultimate significance in the experience of ‘‘the political.’’ Thus the older political history would posit the enactment of statute and constitutional law as the ultimate manifestation of power; the newest cultural-political history would posit subtle but profound shifts in cultural meaning as fundamentally determinative. This essay explores the boundary between the old and new histories , between these priorities of law and language, while recognizing the slippery middle ground where they meet. I will suggest that these histories share far more than many of their practitioners will admit, and that Habermas’s notion of public sphere, and its essential framing corollaries of consent, legitimacy, and civil society, can comprise a common meeting ground. If historical thinking about the public sphere in early America has been almost entirely restricted to the domain of language and cultural history, it stands available as the ground upon which to rebuild a relationship between the old political history of law and the new cultural history of language. This is especially so since the appearance of Habermas’s massive new synthesis , Between Facts and Norms, published in English in 1996.≤ Here he o√ers an extended model of the ideal constitutional and political conditions of liberal democracy, in which the procedures guaranteeing deliberation stand as the foundation of consent and legitimacy. As a philosopher, however, Habermas is interested in ideal conditions, not messy realities. He still has little specific to say in his new book about the complexities of culture, of what I shall call the domain of persuasion, which cultural historians are showing to be equally fundamental in building of consent. But he does leave room for such persuasion, couched as ‘‘distorted communicative discourse’’ undermining the free flow of deliberation. Suitably dissected, qualified, stretched, and amplified, his framework allows us to begin to visualize in a single interpretive field the requirement and variants of consent, the domains of state, public sphere, and civil society, and the various overlapping agencies of deliberation, persuasion, and force, which I will propose Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere 209 encompass a vast field of intersection between the old and the new histories, as they bear on the problem of power. The shape of this field bears particular importance for historians of the early and antebellum American republic, where bizarre extremes along a spectrum of civil condition made the question of consent especially problematic and volatile. deliberation and persuasion In great measure the boundary between older and newer histories involves this distinction between these two modes of purposeful communication...