8

The Enlightenment and the Bourgeois Public Sphere (Through the Eyes of a London Merchant-Writer)

Juraj Kittler

In his famous 1784 answer to the question What is Enlightenment?, Immanuel Kant (1959) described it as “the freedom to make public use of one's reason at every point” (p. 87). Yet, added the philosopher, if someone had to ask him whether the Western world was already living in an “enlightened age,” his answer would have been a categorical “no” (p. 90). Kant understood the Enlightenment as a historical process through which humankind can prove to itself that it is capable of creating a society demystified, stripped of all irrationality, relying on the sole power of its own reason (p. 85).

About a century-and-a-half later two other German philosophers assessed the heritage of the Enlightenment era. Adorno and Horkheimer in their 1947 Dialectic of the Enlightenment came to the disquieting conclusion that the entire Enlightenment project was at the very best a missed opportunity, at the worst it resulted in a disaster triumphant, a new type of barbarism. They claimed that the Kantian sapere aude – the audacity of knowing – backfired on humanity which, instead of achieving liberation through knowledge, had now to bear the even more powerful yoke of self-imposed tyranny in the form of rationalism void of morality (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972, pp. xi, 3).

It was paradoxically Adorno and Horkheimer's own apprentice, Jürgen Habermas (1989), who, in the early 1960s, attempted to rehabilitate the centerpiece of the entire idea of Western modernity – the Enlightenment project. Habermas's thesis The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere stood out “for its unflinching defense of enlightenment rationality” and was widely received as a critical response to Dialectic of Enlightenment, especially in regards to the political pessimism permeating Adorno's writings in the postwar period (Honneth, McCarthy, Offe, & Wellmer, 1992, p. ix; Hohendahl, 1992, p. 99). While most of those who studied the Enlightenment before him focused on the revolution of ideas and lofty philosophical disputations which it produced, Habermas was able to construct a tangible sociohistorical argument directly addressing the communicative practices which were at the core of Western democracy and in one great stroke of genius explained its past, present, and potentially even the future (Kors & Korshin, 1987, p. 2). It would be a futile attempt to reconstruct the entire dynamics of the academic debate which erupted chiefly after Habermas's thesis was translated and published in English in 1989. At first it inspired mainly Habermas's supporters, but as time went by and some of the pillars on which the original thesis stood started to shake under the pressure of revisionist scholarship, it rallied mainly the camp of the opponents. The author himself finally admitted that his original design of a grand theory of the public sphere was beyond salvation (Habermas, 1992, p. 421).

Yet Habermas's idea was paradoxically one of those rare contributions to social knowledge which, thanks to the relentless efforts of its critics, continues to drive an enormous amount of new research. With the hindsight of almost half a century one may say that the ultimate historical importance of his contribution to social analysis dwells in the creation of a new ontological category of the public sphere. The author defined it very vaguely as something which “comes to being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body.” Its ultimate goal is to produce public opinion, which Habermas described as “the task of criticism and control which a public body of citizens,” leaving behind their private interests, “practices vis-à-vis the ruling structure organized in the form of the state” (Habermas, 1980, p. 198). In formulating the category of the public sphere, Habermas met the terms of the methodological imperative formulated by Marx (1973, p. 100) that any kind of social inquiry should start from the simplest determinations – general and abstract relations, or the smallest common denominators, characteristic of the systems of complex social structures and relations. His broadly delineated public sphere is, from the outset, ingenious in the way that it spills across the boundaries of artificially created disciplinary divisions within the social sciences, arts, and humanities. It brings together scholars investigating practically any aspect of social life, and as such it may be a perfect answer to Braudel's (1980, p. 25) quest for a complex and contextualized social history. At the same time, the notion of structural transformation, which the author used in the title, implies the need to see social change through the prism of an ever-evolving process. Or even better, as a set of mutually constitutive abstract processes – mainly those which are traditionally attributed to the advent of modernity such as individuation, commodification, rationalization, spatiation, abstraction, or alienation – all acting upon one another in various stages of formation, resulting in unpredictable mutual synergies (Mosco, 1996, p. 8; Ogborn, 1998, pp. 20–21; Ollman, 2003, pp. 13–14). Such processes imply deep structural changes which are slow by definition. To capture them the scholar needs to step back in order to get the feeling of what Braudel (1980, pp. 27–31) saw as the dynamics of the longue durée.

Paying due tribute to Habermas, it is time to point out that the ultimate flaw of his thesis was in his epistemological approach. Its whole argument was not guided by empirical findings relying strictly on primary sources. Instead, it was driven by an ex ante formulated hypothesis supported by secondary academic literature (Downie, 2003, p. 2; Zaret, 2000, pp. 4–5). Carried astray by this methodological handicap, his study discovered what it was aimed at discovering from the outset: it echoed the (at the time) dominant paradigm with its strong emphasis on the central role of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment period in ushering in modernity (Calhoun, 1992, p. 4; Friedman, 1981, p. 111). The central role of the bourgeoisie in this process may have paradoxically reflected Horkheimer and Adorno's (1972) own nostalgia for “the great bourgeois art” which, as they claimed, “as a separate sphere was always possible only in the bourgeois society” (pp. 126, 156).

Why the Focus on London?

Habermas selected Great Britain as a “model case” for his study. London coffeehouses serve as the backdrop for private individuals who assemble in the public body which almost immediately laid claim on the early periodical press, only recently freed of censorship (Habermas, 1989, pp. 57–61). Yet in answering the question “How useful to the eighteenth-century English studies is the paradigm of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’?,” Downie (2003) comes to a conclusion which is rather dismissive of the entire Habermasian model. He argues that the author twisted important historical developments to support his thesis. The very notion of the public sphere which was bourgeois in its nature is completely misplaced because English society continued to be dominated by the aristocracy up until the late 1700s (Downie, 2003, p. 1). But eighteenth-century London, as a key to our understanding of the advent of modernity, continues to be the research focus of even those who took harsh revisionist positions against the original Habermasian thesis (Zaret, 2000, pp. 6-7; cf. Downie, 2003; Melton, 2001; Ogborn, 1998).

In the ensuing paragraphs, I would like to make my own justification for the study of the public sphere in eighteenth-century London. Consequently, I would like to offer the reader an opportunity to peek into Habermasian coffeehouses and observe the dynamics of London social life, mainly through the writings of Daniel Defoe. I further argue that to interpret the empirical material collected in London, one needs to see English society from a holistic perspective – not just in the sense of looking inwards at different alternative publics and counterpublics as many of Habermas's critics do, but even more importantly in the context of the social experiences of other important commercial and political centers of the Western world (Zaret, 2000, p. 11).

It was Braudel (1982–1984, vol. 3, pp. 27–34), in his monumental study of Western civilization and capitalism, who devised the classic sequence of dominant cities – i.e., Bruges, Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, London, and beyond. We can reasonably assert that such places held, for a limited period and in mutual succession, a hegemonic power-grip over the entire supranational Western civilization and as such “refer to the system as a whole at different stages of its development” (Arrighi, 1994, p. xi). If we follow this advice we may discover that the key subcategory of the public sphere – public opinion – was as a concept already discussed in Renaissance Italy – mainly at the level of reflexive practice, but implicitly also as a philosophical category. Yet, as Pirenne (1909, 1915, 1956) suggested, the real roots of Western democracy must be searched for in the experience of the High Medieval period with its rediscovery of Aristotelian rational argumentation and dialectic, its merchant urban communities with their bodies of civic government and independent judiciary systems. These were, according to Pirenne, the real training grounds of modern democracies.

The era of London's hegemony over Western thought roughly corresponds with what historians labeled the long eighteenth century, a term which is often used interchangeably with the English Enlightenment (Clark, 2000, p. x; Porter, 2000, p. xvii). It was the period in which English society enjoyed an indisputable economic, political, cultural, and military supremacy in the West. Merchants, artists, and philosophers were coming to London to study the peculiarities of the English system in order to discover the secrets of its success, trying to “borrow” some of the know-how and implement it at home (Voltaire, 1947, p. 54). In 1711, Joseph Addison confessed in a London coffeehouse newsletter that there was no place in the town which he so much loved to frequent as the Royal Exchange. “It gives me a secret satisfaction, and in some measure, gratifies my vanity, as I am an Englishman, to see so rich an assembly of countrymen and foreigners consulting together upon the private business of mankind, and making this metropolis a kind of Emporium for the whole earth” (Addison & Steele, 1852, p. 82).

Daniel Defoe, London Merchant and Writer

Daniel Defoe (ca. 1659–1731) was one of the key protagonists of London's public life whose lifespan corresponds with the early period of the English Enlightenment. Defoe was a poster child of Marx's man who “makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth” (2007, p. 13). His complex personality is riddled with internal contradictions. His all but straightforward life-journey makes him an almost perfect metaphor for the ambiguity and confusion on whose wave modernity rode. And his humble pedigree can help us to shed more light on those who became the protagonists of the Habermasian bourgeois public sphere (Downie, 2003, pp. 11–12).

Born as Daniel Foe in a poor neighborhood outside of London's Cripplegate, the aspiring merchant, failed brick manufacturer, and later in life a famous writer and secret government spy gradually changed his name first to the more reverent De Foe and finally to Defoe (Defoe, 1955, p. 17; cf. Bastian, 1981). As a merchant and early industrialist, Defoe was a failure, yet he was very proud of the role that tradesmen, this nascent class of urban aristocracy, played in English society. “This being the case in England, and our trade being so vastly great, it is no wonder that the tradesmen in England fill the lists of our nobility and gentry,” he claimed. And the comparison to aristocracy was not just a metaphor. Defoe observed the prosperous English tradesmen “coming every day to the herald's office, to search for the coats-of-arms of their ancestors, in order to paint them upon their coaches, and engrave them upon their plate, embroider them upon their furniture, or carve them upon the pediments of their new houses.” Contrary to the customs prevailing at that time in most of the other European feudal countries where the traditional landed aristocracy did not mingle with the merchant class, in England “the gentlemen of the best families marry tradesmen's daughters, and put their younger sons as apprentices to tradesmen” (Defoe, 1726, vol. 1, pp. 310–311; cf. De Saussure, 1995, p. 133). Just as the new ruling classes in post-communist Europe are a blend of old apparatchiks, former secret spies, and some new blood which was ready to seize the window of opportunity to slip among the elites, the emerging London bourgeoisie was from the beginning an amalgamation of the old aristocratic establishment and new social elements. “Marchauntes, they becoime lordes and lordes bleth, marchaundyte,” an anonymous London poet observed already in 1550 (Anonymous, 1550, p. 4).

The Habermasian Utopia

The periodical press in England started booming shortly after the Licensing Act lapsed in 1695 and was not renewed. “We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days, to spread rumors and reports of things,” wrote Defoe in the opening paragraphs of his memoirs of the plague year of 1665. “But such things as those were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them were handed about by word of mouth only” (Defoe, 1722, pp. 1–2). A typical Englishman, regardless of class, was known for an insatiable appetite for news. According to Ward (1703), he was “a great news monger, and all public reports must occur to his knowledge, for his business lies most in coffee houses, and the greatest of his diversion is in reading the newspapers” (p. 186). Consequently, a typical coffeehouse boasted foreign and domestic journals covering a wide array of international issues important to merchants, but also “papers of morality and party disputes” (Macky, 1714, p. 109). Even groups of poor London shoeblacks would be customarily seen to purchase a farthing paper together and one or two of them who were literate would read the news out loud to their fellows gathered around the table in a coffeehouse (De Saussure, 1995, p. 101). Defoe's own journal, A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France, was reportedly read by many cobblers and porters (Downie, 1979, p. 6). The author himself claimed that “you will find very few coffee-houses in this opulent City, without an illiterate mechanic, commenting upon the most material occurrences, and judging the actions of the greatest councils of Europe” (Defoe, 1951, p. 17). An amused Swiss visitor to London conferred that he could indeed often see an Englishman “taking a treaty of peace more to heart than he does his own affairs” (De Saussure, 1995, p. 101).

In 1711 two of the most prominent early British journalists, Addison and Steele, founded The Spectator, a special coffeehouse journal whose mission was to imitate Socrates who “brought philosophy down from heaven, to inhabit among men.” Addison claimed that similarly their ambition was to bring philosophy “out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables, and in coffee-houses” (Addison & Steele, 1852, p. 15). Steele in one of his editorials explained in detail the daily rhythm of the coffeehouse with its changing clientele. From six in the morning when the men “who rise early for no other purpose but to publish their laziness” started to read their newspapers and discuss politics, through quarter of eight at which time they were interrupted by the students of law dressed for Westminster, then the first well-to-do customers appeared “in their night-gowns to saunter away their time.” When the day drew on, they gave place to men of business. Their entertainments, emphasized the author, are “derived rather from reason than imagination.” A typical coffeehouse was open till midnight and as such became “the place of rendezvous to all that live near it.” Steele concluded that, London coffeehouses became “little communities which we express by the word neighborhood” (pp. 58–59).

The earliest known coffeehouses were licensed in London in the 1650s and in 1714 Macky counted “by modest computation” about 8,000 of them (p. 30). This was surely an inflated number but it reflected their ubiquity in the city's urban texture (Ellis, 2004; Hatton, 1708, p. 30). Foreigners often noted that it was the peculiar institution of a coffeehouse which made London so different from any other European city. Those who wished to find a gentleman commonly asked not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow (Macaulay, 2006, p. 361).

The Less Utopian Reality of the London Coffeehouse

From the empirical evidence gathered above the reader may indeed get an idea that there once was an ideal universe of London coffeehouses in which everybody had access to public debates centered around rational arguments, where nothing was immune to criticism and every participant had free access to information unadulterated either by political or by commercial interest. Yet there is a much less flattering image of this world captured in the writings of Defoe. “The tea-table among the ladies, and the coffee-house among the men, seem to be places of new invention for a depravation of our manners and morals, places devoted to scandal,” cautioned the writer (Defoe, 1726, vol. 1, p. 188). What made Defoe so hostile toward an institution which Habermas saw as one of the catalysts of modern democracy? Well, even during their “golden age” between 1680 and 1730 (Habermas, 1989, pp. 32), coffeehouses were not utopian islands but genuine social worlds susceptible to all human propensities and pitfalls. Those who met in their precincts were real people who were not able to leave behind their private interests when participating in public debate. And finally those who mediated such discussion through early London newspapers customarily had their own fish to fry. Overall, London coffeehouses and their newspapers were everything but the ideal image painted by Habermas in his seminal opus. Yet to understand Defoe's scorn, we need to first know more about the author himself.

Shortly after his marriage in 1684, Defoe opened a small trading business next to Lythe's coffeehouse in Freemen's Yard adjacent to the Royal Exchange. His own experience transpired later in the portrait of an ideal merchant who could have sat as a model to Max Weber for The Protestant Ethic (1958) – Defoe's merchant was a global citizen, who, sitting in his counting house, could have at once conversed with the whole world through business correspondence and private intelligence letters. “This and travel make a true-bred merchant the most intelligent man in the world, and consequently the most capable, when urged by necessity, to contrive new ways to live” (Defoe, 1702, pp. 7–8). The universe of Defoe's merchants revolved around their counting houses, the Royal Exchange, and company halls, all places which offer “suitable occasions to discourse with their fellow tradesmen, meeting them in the way of their business, and improving their spare hours together” (Defoe, 1727, vol. 1, p. 45).

Yet Defoe, the old-world commodity trader, saw a new form of trade arise right in front of his eyes based on the exchange of abstract values, and with it also a new type of merchant. “The face of trade has its new turns in the heads of the people to such a degree, that it is worth our reflection,” argued the author (Defoe, 1727, vol. 2, part 2, p. 161). The late seventeenth- century commercial boom in London gave birth to what he called projects – intricate financial schemes involving any kind of commercial activity from international exchange schemes to technical innovations, but increasingly also wagering and lotteries. Defoe traced the origin of the “projecting humor that now reigns no farther back than the year 1680, dating its birth as a monster then.” He acknowledged that many of the projects, such as London's waterworks, resulted in practical innovations which significantly improved the life of his city (Defoe, 1702, p. 24). But others, such as the famous South Sea bubble which burst in 1720, ruined many credulous people (pp. 12-13). Indeed, the South Sea folly had all the symptoms of the irrational exuberance of Greenspan's era (Ward, 1720, p. 1). Defoe (1728) argued that the entire South Sea bubble was “a scheme trully infernal, in which the Devil was as certainly the principal operator” (p. 262). At the same time, the author nostalgically recalled “the good old days of trade, which our fore-fathers plodded on in, and got estates too at, there were no bubbles, no stockjobbing, no South-Sea infatuations, no lotteries, no funds, no antiquities, no buying of navy bills, and publick securities, no circulating Exchequer bills.” Instinctively, he knew that something important in the very nature of his world was changing. And he described this change through a simple metaphor without using fancy terms like abstraction or alienation – In his youth, Defoe (1727) argued, “trade was a vast great river, and all the money in the Kingdom ran down its mighty stream; the whole wealth of the Nation kept in its channel.” But with the advent of stockmarket speculations, the flow of this mighty river was artificially distorted by private interest, there are suddenly “new channels or side-drains laid open to abate its waters, to divert its current, and to carry its stream off from the ordinary course” (vol. 2, part 2, pp. 7–8).

Among such new turns of the trade was also the one which he called “by a new name, stock-jobbing.” At first, it was only an occasional “transferring of interest and shares from one to another, as persons alienated their estates.” But as the brokers realized that there was money to be made on speculations with stocks, they “got the business into their hands and turned it into a regular trade, managed with the greatest intrigue, artifice, and trick, that ever anything that appeared with a face of honesty” (Defoe, 1702, p. 29). In the 1690s, merchants who dealt with stocks got their first own walk among the other commodity traders in the Royal Exchange. Their business increased but by the end of the decade they were expelled for rowdiness and moved into the adjacent coffeehouses in Exchange Alley where “the brokers, those vermin of trade, got hold of it” (Defoe, 1702, p. 173; London Stock Exchange, 2010). This was the dark side of the metropolis's bourgeois public sphere which Habermas's thesis-driven research completely ignored. In 1719 Defoe famously noted that “the center of the jobbing is in the kingdom of the Exchange-Alley, and its adjacencies” (p. 35), which was a cluster of 20 or so coffeehouses squeezed in narrow passages connecting the Royal Exchange with the main Post Office.

Despite his open disdain for coffeehouses, Defoe himself couldn't avoid frequenting them either. During the time when he worked as a spy and hired pen for Robert Harley, the future lord treasurer and prime minister in all but name, Defoe was reportedly seen “frequently, but privately at a coffee-house in St. James's.” It was one of the upscale establishments near Westminster frequented by Whig politicians where they could privately discuss their party affairs (Peterson, 1979, p. 316). He must have been a known entity also at Jones's coffeehouse in Finch Lane near the Royal Exchange, whose personnel mediated the writer's correspondence with Harley during his clandestine service (Defoe, 1955, p. 13).

With the ascent of the role of Parliament in the English constitutional system throughout the seventeenth century, leaders of political factions and their followers naturally gravitated to taverns and coffeehouses. Many of such semi-public spaces, open originally to everyone, were gradually turned into more-or-less private social and political clubs (Allen, 1933, p. 15). In 1711, after a failed assassination attempt on his political patron Robert Harley, Defoe (1711, pp. 82–99) anonymously published a pamphlet against the members of a secretive group of Tory radicals who met at Bell Tavern in Westminster and became known as the October Club (Downie, 1979, pp. 126, 135). Indeed, by the early 1700s London had several coffeehouses famous for attracting either Whigs or Tories where an opponent was not always welcomed. As a Whig “you may talk politics at the Smyrna and St. James's [. . .] but a Whig will no more go to the Cocoa Tree or Ofinda's, than a Tory will be seen at the coffee house of St. James's,” advised his reader John Macky (1714, p. 108).

London coffeehouses were significantly polarized especially in the aftermath of the Triennial Act of 1694 that turned English politics practically into a state of permanent electioneering (Downie, 1979, p. 1). Many propagandistic tricks, perfected previously by stock-jobbers, were suddenly adopted also by those who ran for political offices. Defoe strongly denounced the fixing of elections and the selling and buying of votes in Parliament as “a new trade of parliament-jobbing” and linked it directly to powerful financial interest groups and stock-jobbing combinations. “Thus let them job, trick, and cheat one another,” warned the author, “but for God's sake, gentleman, do not let the important affairs of the state come under their wicked clutches” (Defoe, 1701b, p. 22). Because, he added elsewhere, “when statesmen turn jobbers, the state may be jobbed” (Defoe, 1719, p. 42).

What “Bourgeois” Public Sphere?

Indications that Defoe himself was early-on involved in some schemes and speculations may further illustrate his complex character (Bastian, 1981, pp. 187–189). It could have been an initial failure or his strict Protestant upbringing which discouraged him to pursue this form of business further. This is perhaps unsurprising, as the new group of traders was certainly a very bizarre stock. Addison portrayed a typical projector as someone who could be easily recognized by “shabbiness of his dress, the extravagance of his conceptions, and the hurry of his speech” (Addison & Steele, 1852, p. 70). Macky (1714) compared stock-jobbers at Jonathan's to the “set of sharp faces” he previously experienced at Little Mann's coffeehouse, a notorious gathering place of petty criminals and gamblers (pp. 108–113).

This new group of aspiring “bourgeoisie” consisted usually of men of little means with a sense for adventure, who saw in this murky business a unique opportunity to escape their social predicament. A typical stock-jobber was “led on by the mighty hopes of advancing himself to a coach and horses, that he may lord it over his neighboring mechanics” (Ward, 1703, p. 391). Many were Jewish refugees escaping the Spanish Inquisition. They were generally tolerated in London, but their rights were curtailed and they were always suspect, if not openly hated by many Londoners. Exchange-Alley in Defoe's writings “throungs [sic] with Jews, jobbers and brokers, their names are needless, their characters dirty as their employments” (Defoe, 1719, p. 41). Yet from the hundreds who tried to walk the path of the stock brokerage, only a few lucky ones were able to advance themselves materially and socially. Those who made it became part of the emerging group of British bourgeoisie, the nouveaux riches of the Enlightenment era.

Habermas has been justly criticized for the fact that his idealized public sphere in London coffeehouses did not include other social categories such as class and gender in the overall analysis (Fraser, 1992). The author himself admits the parallel existence of – for example – a plebeian public sphere, yet he claims that even such alternative publics remained “oriented toward the intentions of the bourgeois public sphere” which, from the very beginning, enjoyed almost absolute social and cultural hegemony (Habermas, 1989, p. xviii). While the images of petty gamblers trying to imitate the life of those who were well off, or the workers immersed in passionate coffeehouse discussion while taking the problems of royalty closer to their hearts than their own, may partially justify such a claim, the social body of the English metropolis undeniably contained alternative publics and counterpublics whose goals and identities were clearly differentiated from the aspiration of the nascent bourgeoisie.

Defoe gives us a glimpse into the world of one of these alternative publics in his pamphlet Every-body's business, is no-body's business (1725), in which he strongly condemned the strike of London women-servants. “Thus have these wenches, by their continual plotting and cabals, united themselves into a formidable body, and got the whip-hand of their betters; they make their own terms with us,” wrote the outraged author, revealing his own social bias. From his words it is clear that the maids were organized and quite conscious of their social position. Furthermore, as women, they became the driving force of social protest in London. “They set an ill example to our children, our apprentices, our covenant-servants, and other dependents,” lamented Defoe. “The great height to which women servants have brought their wages, makes a mutiny among man-servants, and puts them upon raising their wages too” (pp. 12–13).

The Not-So-Ideal World of the Early London Press

The spread of intrigue and false rumors around coffeehouses was among the most prominent tools the stock-jobbers used to lure their potential customers into fatal investments. In The Anatomy of Exchange-Alley, published just a year before the South Sea Company bubble crashed in 1720, Defoe (1719, p. 4) explained the exact mechanism by which the combinations of stock-jobbers manipulated the markets through false information. Originally, they relied only on word of mouth. But with the proliferation of the uncensored press in the early 1700s, stock-jobbers quickly figured out that the “free press” was their important ally. As Defoe (1719, p. 9) explained, “the putting false news upon us” became business as usual among the skillful managers of the university of Exchange-Alley who now worked with a combination of sham reports disseminated by word of mouth, false news planted in the newspapers, and phony letters of intelligence. The press gave such speculators the unique power “to spread rumors and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men” (Defoe, 1722, pp. 1–2).

In the early 1700s some of the most powerful coffeehouse brokers were able to build entire international networks of informers which were sometimes superior to the diplomatic service of the states. They became sources of the incessant flow of intelligence from Holland, Flanders, Germany, and Ireland, which gave their patrons the power to know results of “battles fought, victories won, towns taken, etc. before the swiftest expresses of the king's own servants and generals, could arrive.” England was in permanent conflict with France about the Protestant succession and entire fortunes of stocks in Exchange Alley depended on the results of such events. Any broker was well versed in how to “run down true news as if it had been false, and run up false news as if it had been true by the force of his foreign intelligencers.” To illustrate his point, Defoe (1719) analyzed several examples of “exquisite frauds” which were “executed in such manner as to cheat not the town only, but all Europe” (pp. 10, 16). Consequently, the author complained that manipulation of the news practiced by stock-jobbers left “so little regard to intrinsic value, or the circumstances of the company, that when the company has a loss, stock shall rise; when a great sale, or rich ship arrived, it shall fall” (Defoe, 1719, p. 53). But in the meantime, the price of stocks became a universal “rule by which we are to guide our judgment in public affairs.” Thus the destiny of the entire kingdom was in the hands of a few hundred speculators, which led Defoe (1719) to conclude that the coffeehouse clientele in Exchange Alley became “as dangerous to the public safety, as a magazine of gun powder is to a populous city” (pp. 57–59).

Planting false news in London newspapers did not require too much money or ingenuity. Each London paper had one or two “investigative journalists” on its payroll, whose role was “to haunt coffee-houses, and thrust themselves into companies where they are not known; or plant themselves at a convenient distance, to overhear what is said in order to pick up the matter for the papers.” Some of such hack writers could have been bought, others were tricked. An outraged coffeehouse patron claimed that such “sons of Mercury” took down discriminately all the gossip they overheard in public places and consequently “the greatest falsehoods and the idlest fictions are often published for matters of fact” (Anonymous, 1728, pp. 5–7).

London's Grub Street near Moorfields was the place where writers of this stripe traditionally lived and worked, and as such, the place became the earliest metaphor for British journalism. The men from Grub Street were stereotyped in literature as feckless drunkards who were scribbling furiously in their garrets by rush-light to earn enough money for a bottle of gin or to bail their belongings out of the pawnshops (Clarke, 2004, p. 6). In 1698, Ward compared the life of a typical hack writer to a strumpet: “And if the reason be required, why we betake ourselves to so scandalous a profession as whoring or pamphleteering, the same answer will serve us both, viz. that the unhappy circumstances of narrow fortune, hath forced us to do that for our subsistence, which we are much ashamed of” (Ward, 1698, p. 3). Browne's literary character, a news-writer named Harlem, admitted that “I do not mean that I never reported in my paper anything that was false, but that I never confirmed anything to be true, that I knew in reality to be a lie.” Harlem's character proudly boasted that despite the dubious reputation of Grub Street, “news is a great advantage to trade; an improvement of means of knowledge; a diversion to the publick; and the most vendible commodity in the whole kingdom” (Browne, 1715, pp. 230).

But the practices of deception were not limited to cheap hack writers from Grub Street. As a hired pen in the service of Robert Harley, Defoe himself arduously promoted the English union with Scotland through articles planted in the London and Edinburgh newspapers (Downie, 1979; Graves, 1934; McKim, 2006). It was an errand “far from being unfit for a sovereign to direct, or an honest man to perform,” as Defoe later defended his role. According to Downie, it was Robert Harley who for the first time proved that government can survive even under the conditions of the free press. Instead of overtly censoring or fighting the newspapers, Harley used prominent writers like Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift (1704) to create the first viable government public relations machinery in the modern sense of the term (Downie, 1979, pp. 2–3). Inspired by Milton's Areopagitica (1644), Defoe (1951) himself pragmatically argued that while “getting money is the chief business of the world,” so the writers and printers “should be permitted the liberty of writing and printing of either side for bread, free from ignominy” (pp. 4, 21). Yet it was the same Defoe who just a few years earlier openly protested against the fact that London newspapers were full of fabricated stories attributed to dubious sources, an episode that only underscored his conflicted personality (Defoe, 1701a, p. 3).

For an author or publisher of Defoe's reputation, it was not easy to survive in early modern London without compromising what we would call today professional integrity. A publisher “having found a declension in the sale of his newspaper” was often forced to fabricate scandals in order to make sure that his paper would sell sufficiently “to make us amends for our trouble” (Anonymous, 1735, pp. 25–27). From the beginning, London newspapers relied heavily on advertisements. They were filled with amusing announcements of ladies who “offer five guineas reward for a little lost dog worth five pence,” or messages of angry husbands warning merchants not to extend credit to their wives (De Saussure, 1995, p. 102). The alternative was to ally the newspaper with a strong political or business interest which would assure its financial viability. This was clearly the case of Defoe's own Review, which almost fully depended on financial support through Harley (Downie, 1979, p. 12).

The experience of Defoe's London clearly indicates that political spin and manipulation of public opinion through canned stories intentionally “leaked” or directly planted in the media was far from a twentieth-century invention. The English dictionary published in 1735 by Defoe's son Benjamin Norton noted that one of the meanings of the term spin out is also “to make the most of a thing,” though it is not sure whether the term was used also in the context of political manipulation. A 1717 anonymous London pamphlet already challenged the concept of public opinion that by this time became a yardstick by which important social and political forces measured the legitimacy of their actions. Its author claimed that a mere opinion, private or public, doesn't have the power to change reality and produce truth. “The truth will be truth, whatever the opinions of men concerning it may be,” argued the writer. Quite the contrary, the pamphlet concluded, “perhaps what becomes the public opinion, is often owing, only to the power, ambitions and subtle management of the one single man. Or what if it be two or three craft-makers, who knew how to get their own opinions stamp'd with the public seal?” (Anonymous, 1717, p. 8).

Public Opinion and the Policies of Renaissance Venice

It is obvious that Habermas's grand theory of the rise of the public sphere during the Enlightenment era cannot hold ground against the pressure of empirical evidence. Indeed, in order to expose what Lippmann (1927) caled the “phantom public” we may need to go back to Plato and his quest for a face-to-tace society in which “people may fraternize with one another [. . .] and gain knowledge and intimacy.” For Plato, only a society limited in numbers can guarantee that any form of spin and deception can be kept to a minimum simply because the players cannot “conceal their ways one from another in darkness rather than light” (Laws, 5.737d–e). Aristotle importantly added that this requires total exclusion of commercial interests from the public sphere. Indeed, he suggests that his ideal polis has two agoras, one reserved solely for public life and one for commercial activities (Politics, 3.1278a; 7.1331a–b).

It was first the Florentine humanists and then the Venetians who – mainly through their commercial contacts with Byzantium – gradually rediscovered Plato's and Aristotle's work. Such rediscovery ushered in what became the Renaissance, not only in the artistic sense but also in the rebirth of classical social and political thought. In a unique social experiment, the Republic of Venice actually implemented most of the classical republican ideals in its constitution. In his 1454 dedication of Plato's Laws, George of Trebizond (1997) called the Venetian constitutional system far better than “Plato himself had ever imagined for his own republic” (p. 129). Indeed, Venice was organized around two main squares, San Marco and Rialto. In San Marco, the little section called Piazetta or Broglio was traditionally reserved for civic functions, while the commercial activities of the city were concentrated in the Rialto (Sanudo, 1992, pp. 8–11). It was in Broglio where about 2,000–3,000 Venetian nobles, who enjoyed the status of full-fledged citizens, were encouraged to fraternize in a purely Platonic way (Foscarini, 1843, p. 301; cf. Chambers & Pullan, 1992, p. 49). Yet, when they all met once a week in the Great Council to cast their votes for important matters of state, any form of personal contact, even a congratulatory handshake after a succesful vote or election, was considered suspicious (Sanudo, 1879–1903, vol. 40, pp. 664–666; cf. Finlay, 1980, p. 271). Before casting their votes, noble citizens sat quietly in long rows back to back to each other, listening to factual reports of different committee members or dispatches of their foreign ambassadors which were supposed to give them all factual information needed to adopt a responsible position on a debated issue and subsequently to cast their vote. Technical rules made sure that any potential for spin or partisan persuasion was kept to the minimum (Finlay, 1980, pp. 201, 229; de Vivo, 2007, pp. 25–26).

Empirical evidence shows very clearly that the Venetian constitutional system was far from perfect. The Broglio itself later became synonymous with corruption and electioneering (Finlay, 1980, p. 197). But if there ever was a Western society which came close to rationalizing the process of decision-making, this was it. James Harrington, who visited Venice and later strongly contrasted his model of deliberative democracy in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) with the constitutional principles of Venice, was openly puzzled by such mechanized democracy. Watching Venetian noble citizens casting their votes, Harrington noted that “it is for a dumb show the goodliest that I ever beheld with my eyes [. . .] for a council, and not a word spoken in it, is a contradiction” (p. 27). Indeed, this was the same democratic process which Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed in Venice as secretary to the French ambassador and – contrary to Harrington – later recommended in The Social Contract (1762). It has been described as democratic participation without public deliberation. Rousseau called it the general will, a rational sum of individually informed judgments. Translated into modern terms, Rousseau was talking about a society in which every voter receives only objective, factual information void of spin through communication in both personal discussion and mediated form. In other words, Rousseau was willing to sacrifice public discussion – in which participants may have an opportunity to shape their own arguments and understanding of public issues – to deprive skilled manipulators of the opportunity to abuse the deliberative mechanism by deploying their persuasive strategies.

Reflecting on Plato's claims that orators often use their skill for personal aggrandizement (Phaedrus, 258a–b), and the sole purpose of rhetoric is to produce consensus devoid of any ethical standards with little regard for truth (Gorgias, 255a), Venetians detested public opinion, the opinione vulgare as they called it. Their constitutional philosophy saw personal ambition and public opinion as two things that were “very dangerous in governing the state or republic.” They saw passionate public deliberations as a crack through which partisan agendas or hidden personal interests can creep into the decision-making mechanism. After the infamous military debacle at Agnadello in 1509 that definitively derailed Venice from its path of greatness, diarist Priuli (1912–1938, vol. 4, p. 246) blamed the gradual erosion of Venetian hegemony on the irresponsible policies of populist leaders. He argued that they lost the longterm interest of the state from their sight; instead, their decisions were driven more and more by opinione vulgare generated through discussions in Venetian piazzas, loggias, churches, barber shops, and taverns.

Zaret's Origins of Democratic Culture (2000) fills the important gap between Venetian classical republican political philosophy with its negative attitudes toward public opinion, and Habermasian eighteenth-century London where public opinion is already generally recognized, even celebrated as a central feature of political legitimation. Zaret claims that this important shift took place in England before any similar comparable initiatives in other Western societies. The author locates this gradual change in the period of English Revolution (ca. 1640–1660), and derives his claim from the analysis of communicative actions of a wide group of speakers, writers, printers, petitioners, publishers, and readers. The subsequent seminal works of Milton, Locke, and Harrington further corroborate this assertion. While English history is seen by Zaret (pp. 6–7) as the “model case” for this development, such ideas subsequently spilled over to the Continent, were infused with other social and cultural norms, and resulted in similar, yet slightly different normative models of the public sphere in France and in the German lands (Darnton, 2000; Melton, 2001). But, concluding with Zaret, it was mid-seventeenth-century England that ushered in a new paradigm of communicative action based on the importance of consent, open debate, and the authority of opinion in politics that mainstream scholarship nevertheless still continues to attribute to the intellectual discoveries of the Enlightenment. Or shall we, as Robert Darnton (1971) already suggested years ago, simply redefine–eventually relocate in terms of historical periodization – the very term Enlightenment?

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