Introduction: Charting Habermas's "Literary" or "Precursor" Public Sphere

Most of the essays gathered here are elaborated from presentations delivered at the 2002 annual convention of the Modern Language Association. With the dual sponsorship of the Division of Literature of the English Renaissance, Excluding Shakespeare, and the Division of 17th-Century English Literature, three panels were organized to address the general question, "When is a public sphere?" We had organized these sessions in the spirit of historiographical clarity. The divisional executive committees had noticed that, in recent years, Jürgen Habermas's enabling designation of a bourgeois public sphere that emerged at the beginning of the long eighteenth century was eliciting floods of interest among early modernists. Indeed, it was our sense that the length of the eighteenth century was increasing at a striking rate, for we had begun to notice—in books, articles, and dissertation chapters—frequent assertions of the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere in the sixteenth century, and particularly in the print culture of the sixteenth century. Indeed, one of us claimed to have read of the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere at the court of Richard II. Even though Habermas properly implies the existence of secular, civil publicities in Europe prior to the later seventeenth century, we all felt that the specificities of his hypothesis might be endangered by the failure to make crucial distinctions. Recalling what had happened a dozen years earlier, when the misappropriation of the term "deconstruction" contributed to the erosion of deconstructive critique, we were mindful of how a useful critical term can lose its leverage by enthusiastically lavish application, and accordingly we resolved to solicit papers that would interrogate the temporalities proper to Habermasian civil publicity.

Habermas begins his study with a sketchy narrative of the transformation of publicity from a personal attribute of feudal status, what he refers to as "the publicness of representation,"¹ into a feature of the state. He recalls the Roman legal opposition between publicus and privatus, but he does so only to repudiate its relevance to the specific post-absolutist opposition between modern publicity and privacy, the latter an apparent exclusion from the sphere of the modern state apparatus, a mercantilist state apparatus structured by taxation and characterized by a permanent administration and a standing army. He insists, however, that modern privacy is not simply an exclusion, a derivation from modern publicity, but rather its engine: that the rational-critical character of modern publicity is derived from "the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family," which, "by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself" (51).

Habermas solicits the collaboration of the literary historian by ascribing distinctive social agency to literary practice: "Even before the control over the public sphere by public authority was contested and finally wrested away by the critical reasoning of private persons on political issues, there evolved under its cover a public sphere in apolitical form—the literary precursor of the public sphere operative in the political domain" (29). Habermas does not offer a sustained description of this precursor of the bourgeois public sphere, and his discussion suggests that it is somewhat casually conceived—an entirely understandable conceptual lacuna, given the fact that the historical and analytic center of gravity of his study lies elsewhere. Roughly, the precursor sphere is an amalgam that partakes of imperfectly articulated collectives: the audience for printed books, a dimly conceived "reading public"; more specifically, those long-distance traders and financiers who made up the audience for manuscript and, eventually, printed news; alternatively, those who sustained the culture of courtly humanism; the members of early secret societies and academies; theatergoers. Nor does Habermas provide anything approaching a narrative of the conversion of the apolitical precursor to a properly political form of the public sphere.

The major contribution of the essays gathered here in response to the question "When is a public sphere?" is an enriched account of this, Habermas's "literary precursor" sphere. The essays effectively aim to clarify what might most valuably be understood by this conception, sometimes suggesting that features of the "mature" bourgeois public sphere are more than anticipated in formations prior...