How Music Created a Public

The phrase "public sphere," originating as a tool for clarifying the nature of a diffuse but perfectly genuine phenomenon, has declined into a piece of slack intellectual shorthand. Its main usefulness today is to illustrate the problems that arise when a deductive formulation is mistakenly assumed to possess explanatory power. In fact it explains nothing at all. If we wish to understand the ways in which private persons learned how to communicate with each other in a public way during the Enlightenment, or the creation of institutional foundations, independent of the state, for the critical use of reason, we need to descend, with Adrian Johns and David Zaret, to much lower levels of organization and the specific kinds of work it took to sustain them.¹ We would also need to accept that different national cultures had very different notions of the public/private distinction and that they acquired these along very different timelines. My concern here is primarily with the Anglophone working through of this distinction, which is only one strand of a much more complex story, though one that is agreed to have exercised a formative influence.

Our problems with the historical public sphere begin with the assumption that it originated from the discursive culture of the London coffeehouses and was enlarged by the freeing of journalism and pamphleteering from prepublication censorship. This seems intuitively plausible; yet it has never satisfactorily been explained how such inherently separatist institutions as coffeehouses and newspapers could have been responsible for the creation of a public. In the early seventeenth century, London and through it the nation had, indeed, possessed a single, vast clearinghouse for news and opinion in the form of Paul's walk—the central aisle of the cathedral—to which every Londoner with the itch for news would go in person every day to tap into what had been delivered by rumor, gossip, or personal witness; but this space and the secondary oral information hub of the Royal Exchange were destroyed by the great fire of 1666, and no particular venue was ever to recover their dominance. The retreat to the coffeehouses, which grew enormously in number from the 1660s, was one from the broader community of Paul's and the Exchange to a multitude of fragmented communities, defined by membership of a particular trade or allegiance to a particular political or religious viewpoint. The notion of the coffeehouse as a place of free and frank discussion between people of differing views is at odds with what we know about actual examples. Non-juring clergy headed straight to Sam's, where they were unlikely ever to meet a Presbyterian. Insurers at Lloyd's had no wish for their negotiations to be overheard by interloping ships' captains or Turkey merchants. Addison at Button's was rarely if ever buttonholed by a Tory. In essence, these were places one went to in order to avoid meeting people who might disagree with one. The turning to the coffeehouse as a primary meeting place coincided in Britain with the outburst of clubmania, which is the subject of Peter Clark's British Clubs and Societies, 1580-1800.² Yet clubs even more than coffeehouses were a retreat from any sense of a collective public sphere, through being composed of tightly knit groups of individuals united by a common interest, through strictly controlling entry, and through restricting discussion to matters about which members were in broad agreement. Clubs constructed upon a more eclectic basis would often have explicit rules forbidding political and religious discussion, thus removing one of the assumed engines of the public sphere. Clark specifically acknowledges the difficulty of reconciling the historical reality with Habermas's prescription without attempting to solve it.³ If one was to look for a social concomitant to the public sphere it would be neither coffeehouses nor clubs but the ritual of the visit as it has been described by Susan E. Whyman;⁴ but this, although politicized from an early stage, was an institution of urbanized gentry and pseudo-gentry rather than of the bourgeoisie, who had more pressing things to do with their time.⁵ Was...