t end with pamphlets; at the same time, coffee houses, salons, circulating
libraries, and other means to accommodate and inform the development of public opinion also
began to emerge.
The public sphere is the very home of public opinion, and public opinion itself is evidence of an
aggregate group of people aware of themselves as holders of rights and members of a secular
community larger than themselves. Without the pamphlets, there would have been no public
sphere; without the public sphere, no transcendent sense of the “public” as an entity with
interests and opinions; and without the public, no modern democratic Europe or, by extension,
North America.
d. varieties of the public sphere
th
Habermas’s original thesis regarding the public sphere dates it primarily to the 18 century: the
time of the French Enlightenment and the diffusion of rational thought across Europe. But it
may be argued that other, albeit more temporary, public spheres opened up as early as the
th th
15
and 16 centuries in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands as theological debates about
Catholic authority were transmuted into political debates about the legitimacy of monarchy.
Royal Roads University AC640 Government, Public Policy, and the Law (Political Communication)
These early experiments in free and open public debate, as discussed in Briggs and Burke
and condensed above, also proved useful to later英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】 political movements looking for precedents
for their claims to greater freedom of expression, the rights of citizens and workers, and other
important staples of liberal society.
Taken together, the printing press, the pamphlets, and other institutions for the cultivation of
public opinion, such as early newspapers, coffee houses, and salons, represented a
communications revolution that preceded by centuries today’s much-hyped high-technology
revolution.
2. Alternatives and Applications: A Different View of Culture and Politics in Early
Modern Europe
a. who was Mikhail Bakhtin?
Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, and Briggs and Burke’s historical treatment of its
emergence, offers a view of the origins of the modern world that describes modernity as the
relentless expansion of reason. The identification of modernity with reason is a common one.
We think of many of modernity’s greatest achievements—technology, the nation-state,
capitalism, industrialization, bureaucracy, secularism, liberal democracy—as inherently
rational. And so reason, by which is meant the exercise of a critical, self-conscious, logical
intelligence, is thought synonymous with the advance of civilization and the rejection of the
medieval.
Mikhail Bahktin was a Russian intellectual and dissident whose writings were considered
dangerous to Stalin’s regime, resulting in him spending years in labour camps. His great
suffering at the hands o
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