Voltaire's Public and the Idea of Eastern Europe: Toward a Literary Sociology of Continental Division

Abstract

The public sphere, according to Habermas, is “in principle inclusive,“ so much so that “however exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people.” Further, Habermas specifies that “the public sphere of civil society stood or fell with the principle of universal access,” that any absolute exclusions made it “not a public sphere at all“—for the public sphere “anticipated in principle that all human beings belong to it.“’ The theoretical tension between principles of inclusion and exclusion thus has been essential to the delineation of the public sphere—in its eighteenth-century historical origins and in its twentieth-century academic formulation—and that tension structured the dual aspect of the public sphere, conceived as a phenomenon of social structure and cultural representation.