1. 5 HUM0271: Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Lecture 3: The politics of sociability and the ‘public sphere’

2. Structure of the lecture
Coffee houses and sociability
Habermas’s public sphere
The press

3. Coffee houses and the ‘public sphere’

4. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962; translated 1989)
Conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between politics and society in the eighteenth century
Shift in power away from the Court to private individuals and institutions [= bourgeois]
Rational, critical discourse = exercise of reason through polite conversation → ‘public opinion’
New arenas of communication: coffee houses, newspapers and print culture.

5. Rise of the provincial press, and of the novel

6. The Spectator – Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, 1711-14
The Tatler, 1709

7. The Spectator, no. 10, 12 March 1711
…It is with much Satisfaction that I hear this great City inquiring Day by Day after these my Papers, and receiving my Morning Lectures with a becoming Seriousness and Attention. My Publisher tells me, that there are already Three Thousand of them distributed every Day…
[Addison]

8. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962; translated 1989)
Participants pursued the public good;
Members were equal;
Private sphere could not exist independently of the public sphere.
Problems with this model?

9. Ned Ward, ‘The CoffeeHous Mob’, from Vulgus Britannicus (London, 1710)