This is March’s one premium post!

German philosopher Jurgen Habermas recently died. He is best known for theorizing “the public sphere”-- the social world in which the public comes together, debates ideas, and forms public opinion– and for denying Israel’s genocide in Gaza. I don’t have much to say about Habermas that others can’t say better, because he’s not one of my major theoretical influences, though while we’re here I suppose I’ll say I found the public sphere a concept both welcome (insofar as it optimistically suggests we can transcend the narrow economic self interest I’m always critiquing) and a bit obvious (people come together and talk about stuff! wow!) (this is going in a blog post and not an article because I assume it’s a result of a shallow read of Habermas, so don’t give it any credence).

But this is an occasion for thinking about what’s up with the public sphere today, and I want to do so with a comparison to the 18th-century print culture that helped give us the American Revolution and so much of the rest of modernity. In the long 18th century world I mostly study, the public sphere consisted of print, coffee houses, pubs if you want to get lower on the social ladder. This could be more democratic than it might seem. In late 1764 and 1765, the colonial American print world was ablaze with discussion of the upcoming and now infamous Stamp Act, which would tax printed documents. Naturally, opponents included printers and lawyers, both of whom had principled and financial objections to the new tax. The Governor of Rhode Island himself, Steven Hopkins, wrote a pamphlet attacking the new law.