Property, Power and Press Freedom: Emergence of the Fourth Estate, 1640–1789

Abstract

This paper employs a theoretical framework that combines political economy and cultural studies to uncover the forces driving the development of press freedom in early modern England, the British North America and France from the launch in 1640 of the English Short Parliament, which temporarily abolished censorship, to the French Revolution in 1789. The factors it found to be determinant were a transnational print technology, the public sphere, social movements and egalitarianism, not liberalism, the liberal ideologues and the nation-state highlighted in the dominant press-freedom theory. Going beyond the rights of commercial news media owners, which is a focus of the traditional press-freedom literature, it examines other manifestations of press freedom, including the use and ownership of the means of publication by formerly excluded groups (including women and tradesmen), publication in vernacular languages, new styles of expression (including ironic treatment of religious and political authorities), and a successful challenge to private monopolistic control over knowledge production, especially printing. This study offers a new theory of press freedom, undergirded by the claim that the production of rights occurs in the realm of social relations, which have cultural, economic and political dimensions.