Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England

David Zaret’s thesis is that the public sphere originated in the practices of print culture in seventeenth-century England. He disputes Jürgen Habermas’s view of the genesis of the public sphere within eighteenth-century bourgeois culture. His detailed empirical study of printing is meant to support a broadly conceived thesis concerning the emergence of public discussions pertaining to matters of policy and legislation. The result is, on the one hand, an important study of printing in mid-seventeenth-century London, and on the other, an attempt to connect this empirical study with broad claims concerning the public sphere. The latter effort is not completely successful. Repeatedly, Zaret’s rich empirical descriptions of the practices of printing fail to fully support his broader claims. The public sphere refers to “the essentially contestable status of public opinions and their authority for ultimately setting a legislative agenda” (p. 20). Zaret argues that before the mid-seventeenth century, norms of secrecy prevailed concerning decisions of politics and government within hierarchical assumptions about the exercise of political power. The right to petition allowed lower-status individuals to express grievances to rulers in certain predetermined ways. In the other direction, symbolic displays of sovereign authority flowed to the periphery. This highly structured flow of communication changed during the English civil war of the 1640s. The great value of Zaret’s study lies in his detailed investigation of the practices of print, involving the broadcast of news, polemical political texts, and the development of petitions as forms of political propaganda. Such communicative practices, he claims, were highly innovative in midcentury London, leading to a public sphere in which public opinion developed and was solicited, expressed, and manipulated by a variety of actors in order to influence legislation and public policy. Print culture led to the imposition of a dialogic order in which opposing sides sought to discredit each other. Commerce provided the essential context. Profit was the prime motivating factor producing the huge volume of printed materials—broadsheets, pamphlets, petitions—that appeared in mid-seventeenth-century London. Facilitated by new print practices, a political public sphere first appeared during the 1640s. As part of this develT E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E