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The Return of the Public. Dan Hind
Читать онлайн.Название The Return of the Public
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781781684139
Автор произведения Dan Hind
Жанр Экономика
Издательство Ingram
The effectual political nation – the successors to the ‘public men’ of the Tudor and Stuart monarchy – that emerges in England after 1688 was tiny: Henry Fielding famously said that a ‘nobody’ was ‘all the people in Great Britain, except about 1200’. But this ruling elite owed more to the republican tradition than its propagandists through the ages would want to admit. The magnates that brought William and Mary to the throne and negotiated the terms on which they would govern appreciated that their own freedom depended on their participation in the political sphere. Rather than contenting themselves with ‘negative’ freedom, they secured positive control of revenues and legislation. They tacitly held in reserve the ultimate power, to remove one King and put another in his place. The oligarchy organized in Parliament did not wish to be left in peace, to pursue their private concerns and to enjoy their private property. Freedom from state interference was not enough. Instead they engaged with the state both to protect and to promote their interests. The popular language of liberty elaborated in the eighteenth century, and the social egalitarianism that famously accompanied it, were something of a cover for an active ruling class that used its control of legislature to deliver the policies it desired. The burden of taxation fell on consumption and successive acts of enclosure further consolidated aristocratic power at the expense of small and middling independent farmers.
As noted, this effectually governing public justified itself at first through appeals to the ancient constitution. There was no trace in the Bill of Rights of the idea that the people were the ‘fountain and efficient cause’ of power. But a comprehending public was now in effective control of the state. It was much more narrowly circumscribed than many republicans had hoped, and in place of Roman candour it spoke with carefully organized hypocrisy. But it was the political nation, and its common concerns constituted the animating principles of state power. Hence those who had planned the coup against James II could not resist justifying themselves retrospectively through an appeal to the idea of a contract between people and sovereign. After 1688 John Somers argued that James II had not simply left the throne vacant. He had broken the compact that existed between Crown and people and therefore lost his right to rule. What at the time had been all nervous improvisation became a vindication of the idea that Kings could not rule without a decent respect for the opinions of their subjects. John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government provided an elegant vindication of the plotters of 1688. The first treatise put an end to the notion of divine right and the second established the necessity of consent from at least some of the governed if power was to be legitimate.
The ruling class that established itself after 1688, like all durably successful ruling classes, paid close attention to those outside its ranks. The clique that brought William III to Britain went on to create a faction within the Whig Party (the so-called ‘junto’) that acted as a link between the King and the financial powers in the City. And it wasn’t only the merchant princes of the City that concerned the political classes. Locke’s second Treatise reinforced the prerogatives of private property and established limits on those of the monarchy. But this weakening of monarchy in the interests of private property came at a price. The people would have to be taken into account, would indeed have to be granted public status of sorts, to the extent that they qualified in virtue of their private possessions.
This public was defined in various ways. The Earl of Shaftsbury thought that the public consisted of those that had ‘seen the World and informed themselves of the Manners and Customs of the several Nations of Europe’.3 This disqualified most men and nearly all women, but still included more people than sat in Parliament. A more expansive, and less exalted, notion of the public can be detected in the decision to establish a national museum ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public’.4 This public went to the theatre, read the newspapers and supported the settlement of 1688.
As long as the majority of the population could be kept at arm’s length from decision-making there was no harm in the idea of a contractual state. Indeed if the King based his authority on the consent of the governed, the state derived important benefits; the King borrowed money on behalf of the nation, rather than as a steroidal aristocrat acting on his own account, and so the nation stood behind the debt. The historian Sidney Homer notes that ‘by the 1720s the English national credit could be effectively pledged behind the loans of government in the manner of the mediaeval Italian republics, the provinces of seventeenth century Holland, and modern democracies’.5 Rule by consent of the propertied enabled Britain to establish a national system of credit.
At any event, though the public in the sense of the political nation properly defined remained quite small, and certainly smaller than many Civil War republicans had hoped, the scene was set for a new articulation of the idea of the public. In the early modern era the idea had referred to those who held office under the monarchy. The republicans had offered a more expansive notion, where the public, qualified by economic independence and virtue, collectively embodied the state. But in both cases there was no sense that the public might exist outside the state. The republicans looked to a future where all persons capable of independent thought and virtuous action participated in government and together articulated the public interest. They did not have in mind a public that would scrutinize and hold the state to account while remaining at a distance from its institutions. In this sense the republican public was somewhat like the monarchical public that it sought to replace.
But after the 1688 settlement something like modern public opinion, through which the actions of the state could be challenged, began to take shape. During the Civil War, literacy had spiked as a mass readership sought emancipation through the written word.6 Radical ideas had reached vastly more readers than under the King. In 1640 just over 20 political pamphlets appeared. Two years later the number had risen to nearly two thousand.7 The end of the Republic and the return of the monarchy reduced the scope for popular engagement in the political sphere. But a reading culture recovered, driven by energetic publishers who substituted entertainment for agitation, and displaced aristocratic patronage as they did so. This new culture industry, characterized by the novel rather than the pamphlet, supported, and was supported by, the metropolitan culture that developed in the period after the Restoration. Thousands of coffee-houses, each with their devoted clientele, scores of clubs, where men could meet in conditions of formal equality, and taverns, in which all kinds of people were wont to ‘blend and jostle into harmony’,8 provided venues for sociability for writers and publishers, playwrights and poets, financiers and tradesmen as well as aristocrats and gentleman politicians. As early as the 1670s the authorities were complaining, in terms that will become familiar in the centuries that follow, that:
Men have assumed to themselves a liberty, not only in coffee-houses but in other places and meetings, both public and private, to censure and defame the proceedings of the State, by speaking evil of things they understand not, and endeavouring to create and nourish an universal jealousy and dissatisfaction in the minds of His Majesties good subjects.9
As literacy once again expanded and commercial networks grew to satisfy popular appetites, writers came to see an anonymous ‘public’ of book-buyers as a viable source of patronage. And this new literary culture thought of itself as a ‘commonwealth of polite letters’.10 Letters to the editor of the Spectator were posted through the jaws of a lion fixed on the wall of a local coffee-house, Button’s,11 a larky reference to the Bocca di Leone in Venice, where the people could secretly post their suggestions and complaints to the governing authorities.
Jürgen Habermas situates the creation of what he calls the public sphere in London’s new social promiscuity. A public of private individuals educated by both literary culture and the shared life of the city begins to discover itself as a group with shared values and a shared willingness to comment on matters of common concern. He notes that, by the end of the eighteenth century, the public, in the sense of a group outside of the state and Parliament to which politicians had finally to defer, certainly exists as a feature of aristocratic