The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe

by James Van Horn Melton

• ISBN13: 9780521469692
• ISBN10: 0521469694
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-10-22
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

James Melton's lucid and accessible study examines the rise of 'the public' in eighteenth-century Europe. A work of comparative synthesis focusing on England, France and the German-speaking territories, this is the first book-length, critical reassessment of what Habermas termed the 'bourgeois public sphere'. During the Enlightenment the Public assumed a new significance as governments came to recognise the power of public opinion in political life; the expansion of print culture created new reading publics and transformed how and what people read; authors and authorship acquired new status, while the growth of commercialized theatres transferred monopoly over the stage from the court to the audience; salons, coffeehouses, taverns and Masonic lodges fostered new practices of sociability. Spanning a variety of disciplines, this important addition to New Approaches in European History will be of great interest to students of social and political history, literary studies, political theory, and the history of women.

Table of Contents

List of tables	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction: What is the public sphere?	1	(16)
Part I Politics and the rise of ``public opinion'': the cases of England and France	17	(62)
The peculiarities of the English	19	(26)
Foundations of English exceptionalism	19	(8)
Politics and the press	27	(6)
Radicalism and extraparliamentary politics after 1760	33	(6)
Ambiguities of the political public sphere	39	(6)
Opacity and transparency: French political culture in the eighteenth century	45	(34)
Jansenism and the emergence of an oppositional public sphere	48	(7)
The politics of publicity	55	(6)
Secrecy and its discontents	61	(18)
Part II Readers, writers, and spectators	79	(116)
Reading publics: transformations of the literary public sphere	81	(42)
Literacy in the eighteenth century	81	(5)
The reading revolution	86	(6)
Periodicals, novels, and the literary public sphere	92	(12)
The rise of the lending library	104	(6)
The public and its problems	110	(13)
Writing publics: eighteenth-century authorship	123	(37)
The status of the author in England, France, and Germany	124	(13)
Authorship as property: the rise of copyright	137	(11)
Women and authorship	148	(12)
From courts to consumers: theater publics	160	(35)
The stage legitimated	162	(4)
The theater and the court	166	(5)
London	171	(6)
Paris	177	(6)
Vienna	183	(12)
Part III Being sociable	195	(78)
Women in public: enlightenment salons	197	(29)
The rise of the salon	199	(3)
Women and sociability in Enlightenment thought	202	(3)
Salon culture in eighteenth-century Paris	205	(6)
The salon in eighteenth-century England	211	(4)
Salons of Vienna and Berlin	215	(11)
Drinking in public: taverns and coffeehouses	226	(26)
Alcohol and sociability	227	(2)
Taverns and politics: the case of London	229	(6)
Paris: from cabaret to cafe	235	(5)
The political culture of coffee	240	(4)
Coffee, capitalism, and the world of learning	244	(3)
Coffeehouse sociability	247	(5)
Freemasonry: toward civil society	252	(21)
The rise of freemasonry	254	(3)
Inclusion and exclusion	257	(5)
Freemasonry and politics	262	(11)
Conclusion	273	(4)
Index	277