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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 611-612



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The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. By James Van Horn Melton (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001) 284pp. $54.95 cloth $19.95 paper


Now we have a well-written and conceptually clear account of the new public that arose in the major states of eighteenth-century Europe. Melton's public sphere encompasses England, France, Germany, and Austria. It relies on the work of many scholars, this reviewer included. Melton eschews the notion that England embraced a social and political backwardness similar to that found on the Continent. The book devotes considerable attention to freedom of the press, literacy, authorship, coffee-house reading, salons, drinking establishments, the rise of the lending library and the theater, and freemasonry, there and abroad. This catholicity of reading amid the secondary sources should be a model for all who seek to write in general terms about the new and vibrant cultural and intellectual life found from Dublin to Vienna. The only regret is the almost total disregard for the Dutch Republic; its pre-1720 world of radical journalists and daring publishing rivals what could be found in England at the time. The pathbreaking work of Wijnhardt and Kloek on literacy and book buying would have pleased Melton had the Dutch in which it is written been open to him.1 But no one can read every European language and gratitude for what Melton has accomplished is due.

Melton recognizes that British electoral politics was at the heart of the new public. Its scrutiny worked on a national level and, as he puts it, "gave Hanoverian politics a measure of public exposure and transparency that simply did not exist in the absolutist states" (25). Not even in the Dutch Republic were nationally contested elections held to rapturous interest at the same time throughout the country. The spin-off came in the form of journals, published parliamentary debates, and the rise of societies with their own constitutions—that is, rules of procedure and bidding agreements publicly acknowledged. In Britain, even the supposedly secret, but constitutionally bound freemasons met openly at funerals [End Page 611] and public processions. London and provincial newspapers expanded decade by decade in number and readership. Oppositional politics became the norm. In France, by contrast, only Jansenism provided the force of an opposition, at least until the 1750s when that energy passed to the philosophes. French political parties were a post-1789 phenomenon.

Summarizing the book's take on Britain should not imply that it is an Anglo-centered affair. With the exception of using English jargon, like "a stone of beef" (104), Melton has tried to provide a genuinely European perspective; he is as comfortable in Vienna as he is in London. At times, he seems uncritical in accepting the interpretations of others—for one, Goodman's characterization of the French salonnieres as selfless promoters of truth, a hagiographic approach now contested in some quarters.2 Yet he is perceptive about the wariness that women of the middling classes had about their names appearing in print, despite the explosion of female novelists writing in almost every European language. The book is judicious in its treatment of women without for a second falling into the trap of attacking the Enlightenment as a "masculine" phenomenon or the French Revolution as a defeat for women. He is also careful to note the remarkable entry of male and female Jews into integrated settings within the major cities by 1780.

Good books on general aspects of the European Enlightenment, or just on eighteenth-century European cultural forms, are still rare. Melton's book on the public sphere can be recommended for undergraduate teaching, or just as a good place to get graduate students started in the field.

 



Margaret C. Jacob
University of California, Los Angeles

Notes

1 J.J. Kloek and W.W. Mijnhardt, Lees Cultuur in Middelburg ann het begin van de negentiende eeew (Middleburg, 1988); Mijnhardt, Over de consumptie van cultuur (Utrecht, 1993).

2 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural...

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