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is certainly right and prudent to consult public opinion . . . If the public opinion did not happen to square with mine; if, after pointing out to them the danger, they did not see it in the same light with me, or if they considered that another remedy was preferable to mine, I should consider it my due to my king, due to my Country, due to my honour to retire, that they might pursue the plan which they thought better, by a fit instrument, that is by a man who thought with them . . . but one thing is most clear, that I ought to give the public the means of forming an opinion.12

      The public in this sense becomes the spectral authority to which challengers to the existing combination of King and clique can appeal. The public was also the country and, as Habermas points out, ‘the opposition, as the party of the country, always appeared to be in the right versus the party of the court corrupted by “influence”’.13 Perhaps we see in Squire Western’s complaints in Tom Jones about ‘Hanover rats’ a premonition of that staple of modern American politics, the run against Washington. Certainly the emotional resources of Whig and Tory rhetoric, as well as those of Victorian liberalism and conservatism, find uncanny echoes in the brand associations of the Democrat and Republican parties.14

      Habermas makes much of the increasingly public nature of political life in Britain in the eighteenth century; after a series of campaigns by John Wilkes the proceedings of Parliament are finally made available to the reading public; individuals outside the elite take an interest in state policy and draw on new publications for information. Habermas argues that a public sphere emerges in Britain that is the collective achievement of private actors. It is their engagement with the cultural productions of the time, their experience in the new intimacy of the bourgeois household, and their exertions in the market-place that give them the knowledge and confidence to challenge the existing political classes. According to Habermas they aspire to establish truth, rather than authority, as the animating principle of legislation. This public sphere is propertied and male, and its claims to universalism are always suspect, but as a space for rational debate constructed by private individuals and situated outside the state in Habermas’s account it represents something profoundly new.

      The idea of the public sphere as something like ‘a discursive community of citizens . . . who are outside the state but who nonetheless deliberate, debate and otherwise express opinions about state policy’ has become very influential in academia in the United States, especially in debates about media reform.15 Efforts to improve journalism by addressing the profession’s values and practices that go by the name of public journalism draw extensively on the concept. Edward Lambeth has written that ‘were public journalism to require a philosophical patron saint, Habermas, arguably, would appear to be a logical candidate’.16 In some ways this salience isn’t surprising.

      Habermas’s historical account, where the prototypical public sphere emerges from the private actions of private men, appeals to advocates of public journalism since it appears compatible with an acceptance of the prevailing institutional order. If commercial institutions were able to create a vigorous and critical media culture in the late eighteenth century, then there is nothing to stop modern newspaper companies from doing the same. Advocates of public journalism exhort journalists to revive the public sphere and to enliven civil society – ‘to form as well as inform the public’ in Jay Rosen’s formulation – while leaving both market forces and state power untouched. Reform of the media becomes a matter of journalists doing a better job. The formula appeals strongly to liberal self-love, but, as Michael Schudson points out, ‘nothing in public journalism removes power from the journalists or the corporations they work for . . . always authority about what to write and whether to print stays with the professionals’.17 The invocation of the public sphere dignifies journalism by suggesting that media reform can be achieved by a change of attitude by journalists. Habermas’s public of private individuals seems to justify leaving the management of the media in the hands of private actors, whether they be individual employees or the companies they work for. In such circumstances calls for more extensive civic engagement by journalists can scarcely be distinguished from calls for more pervasive market research.18

      Fox appeals to the public, even calls it into existence, to adjudicate between the claims of those who form the government and those who aspire to do so. The public, in the sense of a force outside of the state and the Parliament, takes substance from conflicts within the elite. Public opinion becomes in one sense paramount, inasmuch as the elites, once they have adopted Lockean ideas of a government based on the consent of the governed, cannot be seen to defy the judgement of the new public of sensibility. But this public is an arbiter in struggles at the centre, it does not develop policies and choose the executors of those policies, whatever Fox might sycophantically suggest. Rather it stands in judgement of men who are qualified to act in the political arena and it chooses between them. The educated public listens and observes, critically to be sure. But it does not speak for itself. It chooses between candidates offered in the electoral process, and can applaud or catcall the activities of the political performers. It can be delighted by charisma, by the poetry of the campaign, even by the content of a platform, but it is not expected to share in government. Though flattered with the title of public, the emerging society organized around the club, the tavern, the stage and the novel is better understood as an audience.

      This audience was from the outset subject to every form of dramatic manipulation. The historian Edmund Morgan notes that as early as 1681 constituents were sending instructions to Parliament in which ‘the similarity of the wording suggests not only that they were inspired from above but that they originated in a single source’. In the election of 1742 instructions from the constituencies helped swing the result, prompting the losers to complain that ‘it is the People that speak but the Malecontents dictate. A gross piece of state Mummery, wherein A instructs B how B shall instruct A’.19 This early example of what will later be called ‘astroturfing’ is part of a wider process in which the idea of the public is deployed to undermine or reinforce factions within the ruling class.

      Habermas argues more persuasively that the image of the English public provides an inspiration for liberal movements throughout Europe. Certainly the critical culture that emerges in France and Germany in the later part of the eighteenth century, and provides a venue where a programme of reform can be elaborated, closely resembles his model of a public sphere as a public of private individuals. In the struggle against absolutism and ecclesiastical power, Britain had enormous charisma as a champion of liberty. But in Britain a public of private individuals never establishes itself as the consistent originator of political action. Decisions mostly remain in the hands of aristocratic elites that determine policy within an agreed framework of accommodation with the mercantile and financial interests and the Crown. The public is important for maintaining dynamic competition between the politicians, but while it is guided towards judgements about their competence and probity, it only very rarely determines what they do.20

      Somewhat removed from the metropolitan world of aristocratic intrigue, David Hume and Adam Smith developed an account of political economy, and an accompanying account of the relationship between the public and the private, that achieves massive general authority not once but twice – first in the era of late Hanoverian and early Victorian laissez-faire and again in the generation just past. Hume and Smith both rejected the heroic ideal of active citizenship and insisted that men should, wherever possible, be left to pursue their own interests in whatever way they chose. The owners of property, acting as buyers and sellers, were best left to discover the price of goods. Efforts to intervene by political authority would be useless, if not downright harmful, and would anyway infringe on the right of the individual to dispose of his property as he wished. Canting statesmen could not be trusted to safeguard the public interest. The frankly selfish activities of individuals engaged in free exchange would do a far better job. After all, men strive to improve themselves in order, in Smith’s words, ‘to be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy’.21 The steady impulse to better our condition and our status makes it possible for men to live both freely and in a relative harmony with one another, even when those involved have not ‘the least intention to serve the public’.22

      There is in Hume and Smith a marked reluctance to rely on aristocratic virtue to secure the common interest, though they recognized the need to maintain the distinction between ‘the elegant part of mankind’ and those who were ‘immersed

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