Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century EuropeCritique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Reinhart KoselleckThe Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Jurgen Habermas , Thomas Burger , Frederick Lawrence , Jack R. Censer , Gail W. O'Brien

Abstract

To students of eighteenth-century Europe there is something oddly familiar about recent events in the Soviet Union and its former satellites. We recognize the appeals to the as a collective conscience and to public as the record of its judgments; the faith in openness, or publicity, as the high road to reform; the politically charged censure of government in the languages of fiction and philosophy. Were it not for the obvious differences between the East Bloc and the ancien regime, we might be tempted to regard glasnost as a telescoped replay of an eighteenth-century script. It was in eighteenth-century Europe, and particularly in England, France, and the German states, that the first assumed a recognizably modern shape and became a powerful ideological construct. That construct was a characteristic product of the Enlightenment, and it marked one of the critical zones of intersection between Enlightenment discourse and a broad range of socioeconomic and institutional changes. To appreciate the semantic shift, one need only consider how the meaning of changed as it was paired with public. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, usually connoted the fickleness and the narrow particularism of prejudice, in contrast to the unchanging universality of truth. By the end of the century, however, opinion in its guise was endowed with a rational objectivity opposed to the blind adherence that traditional authority commanded. Public opinion was the authoritative judgment of a collective conscience, the ruling of a tribunal to which even the state was subject.1