Anglo-American Clubs: Their Wit, Their Heterodoxy, Their Sedition

Abstract

H ' OW did the public sphere form? How did a social space come clear of direct state superintendence so that popular opinion-the vox populi-could sound? Since the publication of the English translations of Reinhart Koselleck's Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society and JUrgen Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, debate has intensified about how the permissions accorded private conscience during the Reformation were extended to popular criticism during the eighteenth century.' While Habermas identified the separation of civil society from the state in terms of the creation of certain bourgeois institutions-the coffeehouse, the club, and the world of letters-his concern for the structure of the public sphere resulted in scant treatment of the symbolic and discursive means by which this separation took place.2 On this question, Anglo-American materials prove illuminating. The literary remains of British and British-American clubs indicate that the creation of the public of the coffeehouses and clubs depended as much on the formation of communities of wit as it did on communities of conscience. Social clubs in