between consensus and conflict habermas, post-modern agonism and the early american public sphere

Northeastern Political Science Association

Between Consensus and Conflict: Habermas, Post-Modern Agonism and the Early AmericanPublic SphereAuthor(s): Robert W. T. MartinReviewed work(s):Source: Polity, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Jul., 2005), pp. 365-388Published by: Palgrave Macmillan JournalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3877112 .Accessed: 09/11/2011 00:36

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Palgrave Macmillan Journals and Northeastern Political Science Association are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Polity.

http://www.jstor.org

Polity e Volume 37, Number 3 e July 2005 ( 2005 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/05 $30.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/polity

Between Consensus and Conflict: Habermas, Post- Modern Agonism and the Early American Public Sphere* Robert W.T. Martin Hamilton College

Efforts thus far to bridge the distance between Habermasian public sphere theory and post-modernism have failed, and recent studies only reify the bifurcation. Some theorists trace this problem to misreadings of Habermas's recent works that overemphasize the weight he places on consensus. I argue instead that Habermas's stress on consensus is genuine and first emerged in his early historical work on the public sphere, wherein he focused on an absolutist theory of consensus and relegated dissent to a marginal ancillary position from which he has never really recovered it. Had Habermas turned from Europe to early America, he could have found early public sphere theorists that were much more alive to the irreducible centrality of dissent. More importantly, if current theorists will return to this history they will be better able to understand a model of the dissentient public sphere (and its counterpublics) that lies between Habermasian consensus and post-modern agonism. Polity (2005) 37, 365-388. doi: 10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300018 Keywords public sphere; deliberative democracy; Habermas; dissent; post-modernism; agonism

Robert W.T Martin is Associate Professor of Government at Hamilton College. He is author of The Free and Open Press: The Founding of the American Democratic Press Liberty and co-editor of The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton (forthcoming). He is currently working on a book project entitled Government by Dissent: Dissent, Democracy, and the Early American Public Sphere. He can be reached at [email protected].

*This article was first presented at the 2003 meeting of the Association for Political Theory, and I thank the participants at the "American Roots" panel and especially Simona Goi, Russell Hanson, and Darren Walhof. I also gratefully acknowledge a Research Fellowship at the New-York History Society.

366 BETWEEN CONSENSUS AND CONFLICT

Introduction

The title of Chantal Mouffe's recent essay captures precisely-if inadver- tently-the state of the debate over democratic theory: "Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?" I have taken the liberty of adding emphasis to the word "or" to highlight the binary assumption that typifies much of this debate. Mouffe examines the Habermasian approach to discursive democracy as the "most theoretically sophisticated" version, but immediately applies an "either/or" analysis, juxtaposing Habermas's discursive democracy to her more agonistic and plural politics.' And she is hardly alone. A similarly reductionist bifurcation is evident in the exchange between Dana Villa and James Johnson over the relationship (or lack thereof) between public sphere theory and postmodern agonism. Although Villa's original essay attempted to break down the "polemical opposition" between public sphere theory and postmodernism,2 Johnson reads Villa's essay as polemical as well. Johnson tries to suggest ways of closing this gap and moving beyond the "present impasse'," but it is clear from Villa's "Response" that the theoretical chasm has only deepened.3

Aspects of this divide are reflected in recent debates over the sort of democratic discourse that belongs in the public sphere. For example, one of the main concerns of Mouffe and Villa is the way certain norms of discourse can be used to exclude difference. Many theorists have analyzed the contemporary public sphere for ways in which difference is excluded by certain definitions of "rationality" or various deployments of authority. In turn, these debates over the nature of democratic discourse relate back to the ongoing dispute over whether Habermasian public sphere theory undermines difference and forces consensus. Mouffe's essay, for instance, defends an agonistic pluralism and fears the "consensus without exclusion" that she sees Habermas "[pretending] to achieve.'5 She criticizes Habermas's legitimating proceduralism, which is based on free and open rational discourse, as non-neutral because it is always unable to exclude-since it always already presupposes-some fundamental background.

1. Chantal Mouffe, "Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?" Social Research 66 (1999): 746. 2. Dana R. Villa, "Postmodernism and the Public Sphere:' American Political Science Review 86

(1992): 717. 3. James Johnson, "Comment: Public Sphere, Postmodernism, and Polemic:' American Political

Science Review 88 (1994): 428; more generally 427-30, 432-33; and Dana R. Villa, "Response:' American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 430-32.

4. E.g., Iris Marion Young, "Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy" in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed., Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 131-32; Young, "Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy," Political Theory 29 (2001): 670-90; Lynn M. Sanders, 'Against Deliberation'," Political Theory 25 (1997): 370-73; and Jane Mansbridge, "Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System,' in Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

5. Mouffe, "Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?:' 755.

Robert W.T. Martin 367

This background may be seen as an ethical form of life, following Wittgenstein, or an authoritarian discursive structure, following Lacan.6 In either case, some form of precondition structures human action in a non-neutral, non-rational manner. Rejecting this preconditioned consensus, Mouffe turns to its reductionist mirror opposite, a politics of "antagonism" and "hostility.'7

Dana Villa's attempt to bridge the chasm between public sphere theory and postmodernism sets out to avoid the either/or analysis of Mouffe, attempting to create a sort of theoretical middle ground between a Habermasian consensual intersubjectivity and postmodern agonistic subjectivity. Villa fills that middle ground with a particular reading of Hannah Arendt, one that stresses her "Foucauldian/Lyotardian concern with the preservation of agonistic subjectivity.8 Rightly rejecting contemporary agonists whose interest-based politics is "merely fighting" and "simply conflict'," Villa has recently fleshed out his earlier arguments and conceptualized an Arendtian politics that lies between all-consuming conflict and anticipated agreement.9 What lies between is a politics of detached judgment, of "disinterestedness." This certainly seems to point us away from a politics constrained by interests and identities. However, as Villa concedes, this theoretical effort will strike some theorists as "still too aristocratic (or self- deluded)." Yet Villa does nothing to address this concern; he only holds fast to the Arendtian hope that a "public-spiritedness" will emerge from "debate and deliberation."'1

Early American radicals shared that hope, but they could not afford to be as sanguine as Arendt and Villa about a middle ground populated by the "disinterested," those who were capable of "detached judgment" due to their freedom from "material want "" The radicals I discuss and their Antifederalist predecessors were successfully portrayed as (self-) "interested" cranks or traitors by self-appointed paragons of "disinterestedness." Thus, the language of

6. Mouffe, "Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?'," 749-52. 7. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), 101. See also, Chantal Mouffe,

"Which Public Sphere for a Democratic Society?" Theoria 99 (2002): 57. Because of her binary framework, however, Mouffe is unable to travel the divided landscape she creates. By the end of 1999 essay it is Mouffe-to her credit-who is conceding a presupposed background consensus: "To be sure, pluralist democracy demands a certain amount of consensus, but such a consensus concerns only some ethico-political principles" (Mouffe, "Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?," 756, emphasis added). Or even more recently: "I agree with those who affirm that a pluralist democracy demands a certain amount of consensus,' but "such a consensus is bound to be a 'conflictual consensus"' (Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 103; see also Mouffe, "Which Public Sphere," 58). Thus, just as I will argue that dissent is a belated and under-theorized concession for Habermas, so a background consensus is never fully integrated into Mouffe's theory.

8. Villa, "Postmodernism and the Public Sphere," 719. 9. Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy,

Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 126, 127, emphasis original).

10. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 125. 11. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 124, 118; I owe this reference to Simona Goi.


"disinterest" privileged the status-quo and undermined dissent in a way that was unmistakable to early American radicals, as we shall see.

Patchen Markell has recently taken Villa to task not for his use of Arendt, but for his characterization of Habermas as "the thinker of consensus," and thus the other peak in the ruptured scholarly landscape.12 Markell recognizes that this view of Habermas is shared by many and he therefore spends considerable time arguing that this is a misinterpretation of Habermas's work. Drawing primarily on Habermas's theoretical work from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, Markell traces much of the confusion to the various ways one can read-and translate- Habermas's central claim that communicative action, by its very nature, is oriented toward understanding, agreement or consensus.13 When he speaks of an "orientation toward agreement,' according to Markell, Habermas is not forcing us to aim for consensus, he "simply means a foreswearing of the mechanisms of coercion and influence...in the pursuit of one's goals and a corresponding commitment to provide reasons for one's claims if they are challenged."'14

This, however, misses what I shall argue is the more salient point. Even if Habermas's theory of communicative action does not formally compel consensus, there is still the related question of whether his model of discursive democracy "make[s] room for dissent" in the way Mouffe rightly demands.15 In his more recent writing, Habermas has belatedly sought to suggest that it does.16 Closing the "Postscript" to Between Facts and Norms, for example, Habermas maintains that "law takes advantage of a permanent risk of dissensus to spur on legally institutionalized public discourses."'7 Elsewhere, however, even reasonable dissensus is equated with "something resembling Carl Schmitt's understanding of politics."'8 Thus, even now, dissent is a risk tantamount to conflict, and consensus is, by implication, the unproblematic norm.

Indeed, I contend that Habermas's acute focus on consensus and failure to value dissent has deeper, long-standing and enduring roots in his very first effort to theorize the public sphere. In this essay, I pursue a lingering and under-

12. Patchen Markell, "Contesting Consensus: Rereading Habermas on the Public Sphere, Constellations 3 (1997): 377-400.

13. For the difficulties of translation as a source of some of this confusion, see Markell, "Contesting Consensus,' 389-90; and Thomas McCarthy, "Legitimacy and Diversity: Dialectical Reflections on Analytical Distinctions,' in Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges, ed. Michel Rosenfeld and Andrew Arato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 129 n44.

14. Markell, "Contesting Consensus:' 390. 15. Mouffe, "Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?," 756. 16. See, e.g., Jirgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory

of Law and Democracy trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996 [1992]); Jirgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998 [1996]); and Markell, "Contesting Consensus,' 391-95.

17. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 462. 18. Jiirgen Habermas, "Reply to Symposium Participants:' Cardozo Law Review 17 (1996): 1493.


analyzed weakness in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. I do not mean the obvious and much discussed weakness of a public sphere in which the norm of inclusion was a fiction.19 Habermas conceded as much at the time.20 The enduring problem that I have in mind is Habermas's turn to France, and especially Rousseau and then the Physiocrats, for his first effort to theorize the concept of public opinion that would emerge from the discourse of the public sphere. Here we find the earliest evidence of Habermas's pre-occupation with consensus and marginalization of dissent. Turning instead to early America, we are able to recover a formulation of the public sphere that appreciates the centrality of dissent even as it works from a shared background.21

Habermas's distorted formulation of the French public sphere has been exacerbated by a second mistake that Habermas and other theorists have made: avoiding historical analysis. It is perhaps understandable that Habermas himself would move away from historical study after Structural Transformation, given the problems he admits to have encountered trying to separate an ideal form from its historical context and imperfect realization.22 Nevertheless, I want to suggest that to bridge this important and continuing scholarly lacuna we need to take recourse to history its difficulties (and possibilities for error) notwithstanding. Historians have taken Habermas's concept of the public sphere in myriad directions.23 Yet Habermasians and post-modernists-indeed, political theorists

19. See, e.g., Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); and Pauline Johnson, "Habermas's Search for the Public Sphere" European Journal of Social Theory 4 (2001): 215-36.

20. Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989 [1962]), 55-56. Subsequent citations to this work will be made parenthetically in the text, indicating the relevant page numbers.

21. Arendt, of course, does indeed turn to early America, but ignores the sources and views I explore here. Accordingly, she contends the "Founding Fathers" (apparently presuming they can be grouped together meaningfully) abhorred democracy as a kind of "rule of a unanimously held 'public opinion"' (Hannah Arendt, On Revolution [New York: Viking, 1963], 228). I seek to recover and defend a different and more historically accurate interpretation of certain theorists of the early Republic, including the later Madison.

22. JOrgen Habermas, "Concluding Remarks", in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press,1992), 463.

23. See, e.g., Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); John L. Brooke, "Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies: Voluntary Association and the Public Sphere in the Early Republic," in Launching the "Extended Republic": The Federalist Era, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1997); Simon P Newman, Parades and Politics of the Streets: Festive


generally-have done little to incorporate this work. I seek to demonstrate that we would do well even now to return to historically informed reflections of the strengths and weaknesses, potentials and limitations of the public sphere, both to clear up lingering confusions and to understand better continuing challenges. By turning to certain early American radicals, current theorists can learn from a nascent public sphere theory that made dissent and counterpublicity central, thus carving out a genuine space between consensus and conflict.

English Institutions But French Theory?

"The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public" (27). This public, as Habermas defined it in Structural Transformation, would in turn claim to steer public authorities and policies. "The medium of this political confrontation" with existing authority "was peculiar and without precedent: people's public use of their reason" (28). At its core, then, the bourgeois public sphere presented the new claim that legitimate power emerged from rational-critical public debate. Equal in their lack of formal state authority, these private persons claimed there was "no authority beside that of the better argument" (41). It was thus central to the very logic of this claim that the public sphere is, in principle, open to all. The public sphere was "in truth a small minority," as Habermas readily concedes (84). Nevertheless, "the public sphere of civil society stood or fell with the principle of universal access. A public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely incomplete; it was not a public sphere at all" (85).

As the political public sphere emerged out of, and separated from, the literary public sphere and the world of the salon, the failure to realize this norm was made more apparent, since "women and dependents were factually and legally excluded from the political public sphere." Still, the broader reach of the literary public sphere helped the public sphere writ large maintain its claim to be ideally open to all. Habermas emphasizes this point: "The fully developed bourgeois public sphere was based on the fictitious identity of the two roles assumed by the privatized individuals who came together to form a public: the role of property owners & the role of human beings pure and simple." This fictitious identity was easy to maintain because the bourgeois private persons at the center of the public sphere usually were both educated and propertied. "The acceptance of the fiction of one public, however, was facilitated above all by the fact that it

Culture in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Mary Ryan, Civil Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows, "Introduction" in Press, Politics, and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760-1820, ed. Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).


actually had positive functions in the context of the political emancipation of civil society from mercantilist rule and from absolutistic regimentation in general" (56).

With his definition in hand, Habermas turns to his "model case:' Britain (57). After the expiration of the press Licensing Act in 1695, the political public sphere emerging in London coffeehouses gave way to a genuinely critical press by the 1720 s. In 1709, Richard Steele's Tatler, for example, addressed itself to "the worthy citizens who live more in a coffeehouse than in their shop" (260 n36). But Habermas's claim about the public sphere was never simply an empirical observation; it is essentially a claim about the role of public debate in legitimating public authority, about "an opinion purified through critical discussion in the public sphere to constitute a true opinion" (95). And it is here that the key lingering paradox of Habermas's study emerges. For although his "model case" of England provides a full picture of the emerging institutions of the public sphere, it is to France he turns for the theory of public opinion that provides the public sphere's rationale.24

England, it is often said, is the original source of ideas of "public opinion" as the foundation of all government.25 However, as Habermas earlier observed, this English view of public opinion is really just an observation about the ostensible sovereign power of the people's "reliable common sense" (93). As J.A.W Gunn rightly explains, the theories of virtual representation and parliamentary sovereignty made popular opinion "out of doors" an intrusion.26 These institutions and theories made public contest, not consensus, the norm, but they also left the concept of public opinion with little significance and left public debate with no power to "purify" and thereby "constitute" true opinions.

Since England's dynamic eighteenth-century public sphere lacks the theoretical underpinnings he is looking for, Habermas turns to France. That Habermas claims to find the theory of public opinion befitting an empowered public sphere in absolutist France gives us good reason to be skeptical. And indeed, it is here that Habermas runs into trouble-but not for the reasons often claimed. Although Dana Villa and Margaret Canovan read Habermas as an heir to Rousseau-a theorist of democratic consensus if ever there was one-this

24. Keith Michael Baker, "Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 189-90.

25. Sir William Temple famously argued in 1680 that all governments rest upon opinion. Hume would pick up on this view, declaring that it is "on opinion only that government is founded"; David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary ed. Eugene F Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 32. Actually, however, Montaigne uses the expression first; see J.A.W Gunn, Queen of the World: Opinion in the Public Life of France from the Renaissance to the Revolution (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), 1 n2; see also, 45-46.

26. Gunn, Queen of the World, 3.


interpretation is flawed.27 Habermas explicitly opposes Rousseau's notion of opinion publique to his own idealization of a public opinion purified in rational- critical public debate: "The volontebgenerale was more a consensus of hearts than of arguments" (99, 98).28

Habermas's real problem at this point in the Structural Transformation is that the theory he is looking for is nowhere to be found in Europe. He tries to get around this difficulty by attempting to reconcile two antithetical discourses: the Physiocrats' absolutist version of political debate and Rousseau's dream of democracy without debate (99).29 However, in so doing, Habermas altogether misreads the Physiocrats in two fundamental respects, which in turn demonstrate the foundational priority in his approach of rationality as consensus over democratic dissent.

Misreading the Physiocrats

"The Physiocrats spoke out in favor of an absolutism complemented by a public sphere that was a place of critical activity; Rousseau wanted democracy without public debate. Both sides lay claim to the same title: opinion publique" (99). Here, Habermas is no more suggesting that the modern public sphere should be patterned on the Physiocrats' absolutism than on Rousseau's unitary democracy But he is suggesting that a genuinely democratic notion of the public sphere emerges from the combination of these conceptions in the crucible of the French Revolution (99). The end result is meant to be a conception of public opinion that refers to "the critical reflections of a public competent to form its own judgments" (90).

Habermas first turns to the Physiocrats for their place in the conceptual history of "public opinion." He rightly sees them as among the first theorists to conceptualize public opinion as more than mere "common opinion:' which was at best common sense, at worst simply widespread prejudice (89-96). Unlike Rousseau, Hume, and many others, the Physiocrats, on Habermas's reading, gave public opinion "the strict meaning of an opinion purified through critical discussion in the public sphere to constitute a true opinion" (95). And it is here that Habermas's cursory conceptual history of the Physiocrats' opinion publique leads us astray regarding both of the pivotal aspects of this claim: the nature of truth and the critical quality of public debate. The nature and extent of

27. Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 71; and Margaret Canovan, "Arendt, Rousseau, and Human Plurality in Politics,' Journal of Politics 45 (1983): 297.

28. Markell, "Contesting Consensus:' 380-86. 29. Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1990), 192-93.


Habermas's misreading in turn demonstrates the fundamental expectation of consensus in his approach and the concomitant devaluing of genuine dissent and acceptance of token dissent.

For Physiocrats such as Quesnay, Turgot and even Condorcet, the truth did not emerge from a purifying critical debate. Rather, they saw truth as part of a natural order in which reason was pre-determined and unitary, much like an absolutist monarch.30 Public opinion had "the self-evidence of the geometrical truths that the Physiocrats, in their contempt for diversity, celebrated as the one authority." It maintained an appeal to a "transcendent authority," "unifying and coercive."31 The Physiocrats, Mona Ozouf observes, made public opinion simply "another name for the self-evident."32 Indeed, "insistence on certainty . .became the hallmark of the Physiocrats."33

The Physiocrats simply could not accept a public opinion that was "a pure aggregate of individual wills, a compromise of varying origins and results struck between dissidences and divergences."34 For Quesnay and other Physiocrats, "true public opinion...emanated from the centre outwards and was something different from the meeting point of all individual opinions."35 Nor is this only true of the Physiocrats, for "to a great extent, public opinion was debated in France within a religion of unity"36

However, if Reason and Truth are pre-determined, self-evident and unitary, then there is little need for critical debate, the aspect of the public sphere that Rousseau lacked and Habermas saw the Physiocrats providing. Here again, Habermas's Habilitationsschrift was wide of the mark, seeing in the Physiocrats' views of scholarly debates some grand theory of public dissent (95-96). To the contrary, for Physiocrats theorizing about public opinion, the "problem" was to avoid conflicts and the instabilities of a politics of contestation.37 The Physiocrats' ideology was thus "hostile to disagreement and conflict...and wary too of fomenting popular unrest." In France generally, contestation was not seen as "illustrating the workings of public opinion." There was simply "no disposition to attach any dignity to the process of disagreement itself."38

30. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 196. 31. Mona Ozouf, "'Public Opinion' at the End of the Old Regime'," Journal of Modern History 60

(1988): S13. 32. Ozouf, "Public Opinion:' S14. 33. Gunn, Queen of the World, 253. See also, e.g., Francois Quesnay, "Evidence"' in Encyclopedie, vol.

6, ed. Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, et al. (Paris: Briasson, 1756). 34. Ozouf, "Public Opinion," S15. 35. Gunn, Queen of the World, 254. 36. Ozouf, "'Public Opinion," S5. 37. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 186. 38. Gunn, Queen of the World, 249, 9.


The Physiocratic opinion publique was a pre-ordained, unitary and certain Truth revealing itself to a cohesive elite. The Physiocrats, then, are not a source for thinking about the critical activity of the public sphere, pace Habermas, but rather a font for precisely the kind of unitary, coercively consensual "rationality" Mouffe, Villa and others rightly criticize. Nor did the French Revolution create the sort of critical and legislative public sphere Habermas supposes (99).39 Rather, following Rousseau, "most French revolutionaries seem tragically to have believed" in public opinion as "an essentially unitary consensual force."40 In fact, the Revolution carried out the French "dream of perfect unity" by abandoning opinion publique "in favor of the [even] more unifying and coercive concept of esprit public. 41

Habermas's extreme misreading of the Physiocrats is an early sign of his predisposition to valorize consensus as rationality and his pointed inattention to genuine democratic dissent. Indeed, when Habermas turns to German followers of the Physiocrats, such as Kant, the elitism, exclusion and unity of the public sphere and its "public opinion" is noted but never truly problematized. German institutions, Habermas rightly notes, were even less developed than those of the French, and German theorists would do no more than borrow their notion of "public opinion" from the French for decades into the nineteenth century, when the concept, and the public sphere more generally, would change dramatically (101-02). Even Kant, who developed a highly rationalized notion of the public sphere, would follow the French view of "the public use of reason, at first as a matter for scholars, especially those concerned with the principles of pure reason" (104). To be sure, Habermas is a much more careful reader of Kant than of the Physiocrats. Habermas duly notes the way Kant excludes all but an elite from citizenship and a role in the scholarly discourse he commends (109-11, 105). Habermas also concedes that Kant's philosophy led him to see society as a nascent "moral whole" and to believe the public sphere would bring about an "intelligible unity" (114, 115). However, just as Habermas's focus on consensus leads him to ignore similar themes in his reading of the Physiocrats, it leads him to accept rather than question the rationalized consensus and trivial dissent in his own rendering of Kant.

Of course, critics like Mouffe and Villa are not arguing with Habermas's historiography. Habermas's acute misreading of the Physiocrats' conception of

39. See also Jirgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon, 1973 [1971]), 82-120.

40. Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows, "Introduction," in Press, Politics, and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760-1820, ed. Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10.

41. Ozouf, "Public Opinion,' S21. See also Benjamin Nathans, "Habermas's 'Public Sphere' in the Era of the French Revolution,' French Historical Studies 16 (1990): 620-44.


"public opinion" does not of itself undermine his theory of the public sphere; nor does his failure to address Kant's inattention to significant dissent and the unitary nature of rationality as scholarly consensus. However, they are both symptoms of a problematic focus on consensus in Structural Transformation that aggravates rather than mitigates the divide between Habermasian and post-modern renderings of the public sphere. What's worse, Habermas's examples deepen the divide unnecessarily, since there is a historical example that points us to a conception of the public sphere that envisions a genuinely sovereign and authentically dissentient42 public opinion.

The Early American Public Sphere

If Habermas's first effort to elaborate an ideal model of the public sphere and isolate a conception of public opinion "purified through critical discussion in the public sphere to constitute a true opinion" actually gives rise to the consensualist, plurality-denying notion common in pre-Revolutionary France, where else might he have turned? Eighteenth-century America. In this section, I argue that early America had not only the general institutions of the public sphere, but actually surpassed England in its openness to dissent and difference. More importantly, in the subsequent section I recover and analyze in the works of James Madison and especially the New York Jeffersonian Tunis Wortman a much more nuanced conception of public opinion. This "public opinion" was centered on genuine dissent and predicated not on rationalized consensus but on plurality, reflexivity, and fallibility. Moreover, as we shall see in the final section, the theory of one plebeian radical of the early Republic went further to embrace quasi- institutionalized counterpublics in order to be true to an ongoing contest of publics, discourses, and "public opinions."

With the talents of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Daniel Defoe spurring the London public sphere in the early eighteenth century, it is no wonder that Habermas did not cast his gaze to Britain's colonies, despite the broader distribution of literacy, education, and property ownership in America. However, in 1717, an obscure 20 year old named James Franklin returned to his native Boston after learning the printer's craft in London, the home of Habermas's model public sphere. Following a short stint handling the printing of one of Boston's two, equally staid newspapers-and a longer stint looking for steady work-Franklin started his own newspaper with the help of a few others with recent exposure to

42. I use the term "dissentient," borrowing the term from the early Americans themselves (see, e.g., Philip S. Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790-1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976], 444, 445), to stress both the centrality of dissent, and to distance this theory from more modern images of the (often Soviet) dissident.


the incipient public sphere of the mother country. The New-England Courant immediately established itself as an heir to the London newspapers, opening its pages from the very first issue to those who would criticize the reasoning of the established authorities.43 In fact, the Courant went beyond the Tatler model to embrace its opposition status.44

At its emergence, Habermas long ago noted, the public sphere generally develops an "awareness of itself as the [state authorities'] opponent" (23). This was certainly true for the Courant. In the context of early eighteenth-century Massachusetts, the Courant's insistence that it was open to all sides meant it was primarily to be open to opposition voices, as elites already had sufficient outlets in the pulpits and in those newspapers "printed by authority." And it was this critical, oppositional character that was essential to the success of the nascent public sphere. It was not only that the "Couranteers" were making government policy an issue for ongoing public debate but that they were implicitly criticizing the exclusivity of the public sphere. Thus, whereas London forebears The Tatler (Steele) and The Spectator (Addison) presented themselves to their readers from a social position beyond reproach, happy to provide the particulars of their backgrounds, the New-England Courant is introduced with a voice that aggressively criticizes the readers' desire to know anything about the social rank of the author:

It's an Hard Case, that a Man can't appear in Print now a Days, unless he'll undergo the Mortification of Answering to ten thousand senseless and Impertinent Questions like these, Pray Sir, from whence came you? And what Age may you be of, may I be so bold? Was you bred at Colledge Sir?45

Thus, the Courant's very first words in the emergent public sphere of Puritan Boston maintain that it is "senseless and impertinent" to inquire after the breeding of the author. The author's age is soon disclosed, with the hopes that "no One will hereafter object against my soaring now and then with the grave Wits of the Age." However, all other questions are postponed until the next issue and in fact no such answers ever appeared. And since most locals would have had a

43. Clark, The Public Prints, 131; see also, 126-28. 44. Similarly, when in 1752 William Livingston sought to copy the single-essay format of Steele's Tatler

and Addison's Spectator, his Independent Reflector "differed singularly" from them, in that it "purposed to expose, attack, and reform" (Milton M. Klein, "Introduction,' in William Livingston et al., The Independent Reflector, ed. Milton M. Klein [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963], 3). Furthermore, the most recent research argues that these London newspapers were really efforts to "close off and restrain, rather than to open up" political debate (Brian Cowan, "Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere' Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 [2004]: 346).

45. New-England Courant, 7 August 1721. See also, Warner, Letters of the Republic, 7; and Clark, The Public Prints, 130-31.


good idea of the names of the "Couranteers'," these claims are primarily intended to send the message that the authority of the author is unimportant. From this first issue on, the Courant would repeatedly accuse the local elite of asserting its own view solely on the basis of its authority, "on the Merits of their Characters, and for no other reason."46

For 5 years, the Courant provided an open forum for public debate, repeatedly earning Franklin the ire of colonial authorities and generally eluding their circuitous attempts at punishment. Finally, having forced Franklin to sign a bond promising not to print anything further, the ruling elite was dismayed to find the Courant kept appearing, now officially published by James' 17-year-old brother, Benjamin. After 7 months, Benjamin ran away to Philadelphia, beginning the Courant's decline but spreading this tradition of newspapers open to public debate. Soon public spheres would emerge throughout the colonies, building on the broad print culture of increasing literacy and a print medium that provided for anonymous authorship and a seemingly unlimited audience.47 From 1720 to 1760, colonial America, which had long had more newspaper towns than England, increased its number of master printers from 9 to 42, and its number of newspapers from 3 to 22, far outstripping even the burgeoning population.48 "Never had the oral culture been able to provide a stimulus to discussion and creativity in the community comparable to this emerging function of print," the historian Charles Clark concludes. "The public sphere was being profoundly transformed."49

Opening up an effectively exclusive, nascent public sphere was no quick and easy business, of course, but by mid-century the colonies would see a dramatic increase in the number of "free" (i.e., opposition) presses. These opposition newspapers were used as a forum for common shopkeepers and artisans, among others, to challenge the often silent but never subtle class-based exclusivity of the early public sphere. These challenges pushed for a further opening, effectively expanding the public sphere to include more "midling" (though still predomi- nantly white male) participants. For example, one essay began by exalting the press and then baldly maintained that it is "highly commendable" for "every member of the Community" to study subjects of public concern, such as government and religion.50 The fact that this "community" of citizens and readers was expanding had already been suggested in the Independent Advertiser's very first issue. The colophon hinted at this new audience in its simple note that "all

46. New-England Courant, 7 August 1721. 47. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 14, 41-42. 48. Stephen Botein, "'Meer Mechanics' and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of

Colonial American Printers,' Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 150. 49. Clark, The Public Prints, 170. 50. New-York Mercury 27 January 1755.


Gentlemen and others may be supplied with this Paper" at the printing shop. That these "others" were not limited to the educated, propertied classes was clear from the introductory preface. The editors promised that, "for the Benefit of those who are unacquainted with the Geography of foreign Parts, we may insert such Descriptions as may enlighten them therein."'51 By the end of the century, it was generally understood that members of the lower orders made up a significant part of the public sphere; indeed, in order to demonstrate that his proposed newspaper was not solicitous of commoners, Joseph Dennie would have to submit the prospectus to men of "affluence" and "letters:' complete with myriad footnotes, classical quotations, and references to the "motley vulgar" lower classes.52

Madison, Wortman, and the Sovereignty of Public Opinion

Early America, then, even more than eighteenth-century Britain, had the institutions and practices of a dissentient public sphere. And unlike subjects of the British monarchy, American citizens of the early Republic had every reason to theorize a genuinely contested yet effectively sovereign public opinion that would emerge from a reflexive, fallibilistic and increasingly inclusive public sphere. Living in a world where democratic theory had very recently seemed altogether utopian, and in which the practical meaning of American democracy was very much up for grabs, American radicals of the 1790s instinctively knew both that they shared some broad if vague and debatable consensus with their compatriots and that they had to see to it that the argument did not end. There had to be some way between valorizing consensus and validating boundless conflict.

Not surprisingly, it was James Madison who first perceptively analyzed the place and nature of public opinion in a modern republic and in so doing laid the groundwork for the more extensive work that would follow. A careful student of British thinkers, Madison sometimes-particularly early on-followed the tepid British view of public opinion as the general common sense of the people. 'All power has been traced up to opinion:' Madison observed in his "Charters" newspaper essay of 1792. "The despot of Constantinople dares not lay a new tax, because every slave thinks he ought not." However, even as he uses this standard language, Madison reminds us that everything is different in republican

51. Independent Advertiser (Boston), 4 January 1748. Newspapers also took to translating Latin phrases; see, e.g., Freeman's Journal (Philadelphia), 10 April 1782. For the earlier, elitist view of the newspaper audience, c.f., American Weekly Mercury (Philadelphia), 6 November 1740.

52. [Joseph Dennie], "Prospectus of a New Weekly Paper, Submitted to Men of Affluence, Men of Liberality, and Men of Letters," [Philadelphia: Joseph Dennie and Asbury Dickins, 1800], 1-2, Dated Pamphlets Collection, American Antiquarian Society


government. "In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example and France has followed it, of charters of power granted by liberty.53 Even before these statements Madison had begun to explore the new quality of a contested and sovereign public opinion. In a 1791 essay entitled "PUBLIC OPINION," he started out traditionally, but then immediately began to explore the connection between public opinion and republican government. "Public Opinion sets the bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one." Noting the difficulty of ascertaining a republic's "real opinion:' he commended "whatever facilitates a general intercourse of sentiments:' such as "a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people."54

We should not pass this over as "mere" rhetoric. Madison's view here is both sweeping and literal. As the political theorist Colleen Sheehan has noted, "he uses the term public opinion to mean an actual or real sovereignty, not one that is disembodied or abstract."55 Madison was concerned with explaining the active control of a republican people, in stark contrast to Alexander Hamilton and other Federalists, who expected citizens to have enough "confidence" in their chosen leaders to let them govern undisturbed until the next election.56 Accordingly when the Sedition Act crisis (1798-1800) forced Madison to defend a contested, even raucous, public sphere, he drew a distinction between Britain and America, where "the people, not the government, possess the absolute sovereignty." Thus, "it is the duty as well as right of intelligent and faithful citizens to promulge [improper governmental proceedings] freely . .to control them by the censorship of the public opinion"'57

Madison here leads the way in examining the nature of the public opinion in a contested yet sovereign public sphere. He is familiar with the work of the Physiocrats,58 but does not draw from them, since he is speaking of effective sovereignty and broad, effectual dissent. However, he can philosophize this way during the 1790s only in the context of his political (and partisan) duties. By 1800, these duties would engulf all of his time. Thus it fell to another Jeffersonian-Republican, Tunis Wortman, to theorize a public opinion

53. James Madison, Papers of James Madison, ed. Robert Rutland, William T Hutchinson and William M.E. Rachal (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1962-87), 14: 192, 191.

54. Madison, Papers, 14: 170 (emphasis original). 55. Colleen A. Sheehan, "The Politics of Public Opinion: James Madison's 'Notes on Government."

William and Mary Quarterly 3d Series, 49 (1992): 619. 56. Colleeen A. Sheehan "Madison vs. Hamilton: The Battle Over Republicanism" in The Many Faces

of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America's Most Elusive Founding Father, ed. Douglas Ambrose and Robert WT Martin (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming); and Robert W T Martin, "'Reforming Republicanism: Alexander Hamilton's Theory of Republican Citizenship and Press Liberty", in Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Ambrose and Martin.

57. Madison, "Report of 1800," in Madison, Papers, 17: 336-37, 342. 58. Sheehan, "Politics of Public Opinion, " 939-40, 954-55.


purified and made "true" through critical discussion in a dissentient public sphere. Wortman, a New York lawyer, spent much of his Treatise concerning Political Enquiry, and the Liberty of the Press (1800) attacking the law of seditious libel established in the Federalists' Sedition Act (1798).59 However, in the course of 296 pages, he is repeatedly brought around to the nature of public opinion in a republic.

Heir to a host of British and French thinkers before him, Wortman-like Madison-would occasionally conceptualize "public opinion" in the now traditional way.

With relation to government, public opinion is omnipotent. It is the general will or acquiescence that supports every species of political institution, or rather, to speak more correctly, it is impossible that any government should exist in direct contravention of the general will. Considered in this light, the position is universal in its extent. It is true at Petersburgh and Constantinople, as well as at Philadelphia. (24)

"With respect to government, therefore, every thing is dependent upon the public will" (25). Yet as soon as he begins explaining his view of public opinion at length, it quickly becomes apparent that Wortman is elucidating something different than what his European forebears imagined. "The formation of general opinion upon correct and salutary principles requires the unbiased exercise of individual intellect; neither prejudice, authority, or terror, should be suffered to impede the liberty of discussion." Wortman insists that "all should be permitted to communicate their ideas with the energy and ingenuousness of truth." "Exposed to the incessant attack of Argument, the existence of Error would be fleeting" (121).

More importantly, Wortman emphasizes that a genuine public opinion requires a diversity of views, drawn from a much wider pool than American Federalists, much less French Physiocrats, could fathom. "Society does not constitute an intellectual unity; it cannot resolve itself into one single organized percipient, in which the rays of Intelligence are concentrated and personified: each of its members necessarily retains his personal identity and his individual understanding. By Public Opinion we are, therefore, to imply an aggregation of individual sentiment" (118-19). The public opinion, Wortman continues, can thus be seen as "that general determination of private understandings which is most extensively predominant" (119). However, this predominance cannot be used to

59. Tunis Wortman, A Treatise Concerning Political Enquiry, and the Liberty of the Press (New York: George Forman, 1800). Subsequent citations to this work will be made parenthetically in the text, indicating the relevant page numbers.


silence non-conforming voices. Indeed, recognizing that citizens of an extensive country like the United States cannot be expected to meet all together, Wortman advocates the use of town meetings so that all voices might be heard. As a result, dissent in these town meetings is to be expected: "It is probable, that upon most subjects some dissenting voices would be found. Perfect unanimity is seldom to be expected" (120).

More than expecting dissent, Wortman makes it central. He asks, will there be "diversity of sentiment," a "contrariety of judgment" (121)? Absolutely On many issues, views will be "dissonant and diversified" but "as investigation continues free and unrestricted, the mass of error will be subject to continual diminution, and the determinations of distinct understandings will gradually harmonize" (122). Yet public reason alone is the way to this agreement. "It is the province of Reason to deliberate and determine." "No ideas of terror or restraint should be associated into the discussion; no foreign consideration should enfeeble or perplex the judgment" (122). "Introduce the incessant habit of independent reflection, and the establishment of Public Opinion upon a rational and salutary basis will follow as a necessary consequence" (122-23).

Ultimately for Wortman, dissent is not simply expected or incorporated; it is required for a genuine, reflective, and fallible but sovereign public opinion to emerge. "Diversity of sentiment in the earlier stages of enquiry, is far from being unfavorable to the eventual reception of Truth. It produces Collision, engenders Argument, and affords exercise, and energy to the intellectual powers." What's more, dissent provides for reflexivity and fallibility: "it corrects our errors, removes our prejudices, and strengthens our perceptions; it compels us to seek for the evidences of our knowledge, and habituates us to a frequent revisal of our sentiments" (123).

Wortman's use of "Truth" with a capital T-frequently repeated throughout his Treatise-is fairly typical of a time when the unity of the One Truth (God's Truth) was still taken for granted by many However, the references to "Truth" are not as ominous as they may sound. In Wortman's hands they do not hold the insistence on consensus that the Physiocrats demanded, but that Villa, Mouffe and others correctly reject. Wortman's time was one when Democratic-Republicans were forced to reconceptualize the nature of truth while French and British thinkers were under no such pressure. His Treatise was published when the Sedition Act's provisions still criminalized "false" publications that brought the president or the government "into contempt or disrepute" In response to this assault on press liberty, Wortman and his Republican colleagues took to arguing, inter alia, that opinions unlike facts could not be true or false. More importantly, they argued that if there were any universal verities of politics they would be of a factual nature and of little practical import; rather, on important issues, the only "truths" were a matter of opinion, and where political issues were concerned, "there can


be no standard, besides that of the public opinion."60 "Truth, as an abstract term, is altogether insusceptible of definition," Wortman maintained (48). However, on public issues, the people could arrive at a "tolerably correct opinion" (60).

Finally, the public debate that Wortman sees purifying public opinion into "true" opinions is not meant to have the sterilizing, exclusionary stress on formalized "rationality" that many critics of Habermas's model condemn and the Physiocrats endorsed. To be sure, Wortman, like Habermas, envisions "the empire of judgment" displacing the "pernicious dominion of the passions" through the "salutary discipline of moral discussion" (43, 42). However, Wortman is clear that he would only exclude tyrannical, "uncontroulable" passions (40-41) and that public discourse must not exclude the Otherness of diverse selves: "True virtue cannot require that men should become totally detached from themselves" (104). Ultimately, for Wortman, public opinion wields the sovereignty that British conceptions lacked and the diversity that the French feared. It is, with him, contested rather than consensual, at once sovereign and diverse, empowered and dissentient, reflexive and fallible.

William Manning and the Contest of Discourses

Wortman's theory goes beyond Madison's deliberative public reason to elaborate a conception of public opinion "purified through critical discussion in the public sphere to constitute a true opinion,' and it does so on a basis of plurality, reflexivity and acknowledged fallibility. Indeed, encouraging genuine dissent is so central to Wortman's theory precisely because he sees that reflective criticism and opposition from a plurality of perspectives is the only democra- tically tenable response to our individual and collective fallibility Nevertheless, his vision maintains a lingering element of unitary rather than plural thinking in his evocation of one public opinion and one public sphere of truth. Wortman's contemporary, the radical democrat William Manning, instead saw that any genuine middle ground between consensus and conflict required multiple publics and ongoing contest.

Manning, an obscure Massachusetts farmer and sometime tavern keeper, began to see "public opinion" not as a unitary phenomenon, but as a more fluid, multifaceted aggregation of competing discourses. Public opinion, for Manning, was less a matter of deliberative reason and more the temporary product of the never-ending and irreducible clash of opposing political visions and viewpoints. His radical tract of 1798, "The Key of Liberty" demonstrates that Manning was more alive than his contemporaries to the ways that discursive power could be

60. 'An Impartial Citizen" [James Sullivan], A Dissertation Upon the Constitutional Freedom of the Press (Boston: Joseph Nancrede, 1801), 35.


used.6' Accordingly he saw more clearly than others the need for multiple publics, including even roughly institutionalized "counterpublics,7 as means of encouraging dissent and thus combatting the natural bias of an elite-dominated public sphere.

Manning came to his views in part due to his reflections on the Democratic Societies of the early 1790s. Following the example of the revolutionary Jacobin Societies in France, plebian critics of the conservative, Federalist Washington administration formed "Democratic Societies," political clubs that sought to invigorate the public sphere and make room especially for their opposition views. They thus operated in part as a counterpublic, a forum for marginalized, similarly-situated people to formulate and articulate their critique of prevailing opinion.62 Although his rural town of Billerica, Massachusetts, had no Democratic Society Manning thought well of the Societies. And he shared their faith in certain elements of a deliberative democracy maintaining that "however confident [one] may be that his own opinion is right, he cannot enforce it on others in any better way than by timely and friendly arguments, counsels, and admonitions" (130). Accordingly, democracy involved a "duty to listen" just as much as a "duty of everyone to speak their minds freely on all laws and measures of government, and all men in office" (134).

The Democratic Societies had been helpful in encouraging such discourse, but as the 1790s progressed, Manning observed them fighting the existing power structure and losing. As his most recent biographers put it, he "found little encouragement in the prevailing forms of dissent."63 The violence of such activities as the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 was immoral and self-defeating, he insisted, but the Democratic Societies had no media of their own, leaving them dependent on an established press that was increasingly dominated by governmental and elite power. "The Few," as Manning often called them, sought to use their financial power to "monopolize the creation and diffusion of knowledge, and to discourage popular enlightenment."64 The economy was being used to neutralize the people politically, numbing and dazzling them with luxuries in order to create a type of passive servility. And it worked: The prosperity of the '1790s, in Manning's analysis, "saw even more of the citizenry simply withdrawing from politics, mainly out of self-satisfied ignorance."65

61. William Manning, "The Key of Liberty," in The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of

William Manning, 'A Laborer," 1747-1814, ed. Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Subsequent citations to this work will be made parenthetically in the text, indicating the relevant page numbers.

62. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 123.

63. Michael Merrill and Sean Wilenz, "Introduction,' in Key of Liberty ed. Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 39.

64. Merrill and Wilenz, "Introduction,' 61. 65. Merrill and Wilenz, "Introduction,' 63, 64; see also Manning, "Key," 140.


In the face of these circumstances, Manning felt that something had to be done to restore real democratic discourse and thus America's democratic promise.66 However, the Democratic Societies were defunct by the later 1790s and their press organs either run down or ruined by "all the arts of the Few" (155). Rather than eschew institutionalized counterpublics as some current theorists seem to,67 Manning proposed a new, national organization, which he called the "Laboring Society," or the "Society of the Many," whose primary purpose would be to establish "a constitutional, cheap, easy, and sure method of conveying necessary knowledge among the Many" (159). Such knowledge included basic political information as well as knowledge of ongoing debates, the sentiments and circumstances of other citizens, and the theories of free government and human nature. The Society would have its own printing press and publish its own magazine. The Society would consist of a national network of local clubs, called "classes'," that would be directed from the bottom-up but linked by a pyramid of annual town, county, state and national meetings. At the town, county, and state level, the meetings would chose officers, but "the main business of all these officers and meetings is to invent the cheapest and most expeditious method of conveying all the knowledge" necessary for democracy to the local meetings (169). There would be "no established, self-appointed hierarchy" and the publications would serve only as "touchstones for political discussions in the classes,7 which might well proceed in the freewheeling spirit of many a tavern debate.68

Such a Society would need some funding, though its costs would be restricted almost exclusively to the printing operation. Manning expected dues from the members if necessary, but was willing to contemplate private, charitable contributions to an endowment, the interest from which would be sufficient to cover the Society's operating expenses. Even private charity would be unnecessary if the government funded the endowment; such government spending was warranted, Manning felt, since it would cost less than was spent dealing with the Whiskey Rebellion and would discourage such violent forms of dissent (161). However, one way or another, such a Society had to be funded. "Without such an organization, magazines and newspapers cannot be read with confidence, nor the necessary knowledge obtained in elections" (123). And it was imperative that the people have a source of public information and discourse they could trust. Therefore, no matter how the Society was funded, its printer/ editor had to be an employee of the Society, so that his self-interest was consonant with the Society's (162). "Every freeman ought to have all [necessary]

66. Merrill and Wilenz, "Introduction," 65. 67. Sheldon Wolin, "Fugitive Democracy," in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of

the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 68. Merrill and Wilenz, "Introduction:' 65.


knowledge independent of any orders of men or individuals who may be interested to mislead or deceive them" (159).

Manning's "Society of the Many" was designed to provide grassroots yet systematic dissent, thus expanding the existing range of public discussion. To be sure, it was not without its limits. For one thing, Manning's purpose was hardly non-partisan; he was an avowed opponent of the Federalists, especially Alexander Hamilton. On the other hand, given the context of the 1790s-the moment when Americans were working out how democratic government should operate-Manning's opposition to the generally less populist Federalists was an integral part of that debate and the effort to establish a more inclusive democracy Most importantly, Manning's proposal may have been limited by his own vision of the "Many" which was ambiguous as to whether it included women and enslaved men. His proposed constitution defined the membership as all adult laboring free men (167), and Manning presumably meant to include free black men as well as the poorest white men.69 He also proposed to admit "all persons of any other denominations" who wanted to join (167). Such an invitation, even if broadly intended, would not, by fiat, erase the prejudiced expectations placed on women and slaves, any more than an institutionalized counterpublic of dissent would erase the influence of socio-economic power. However, it might just provide a counterpublic venue in which a competing discourse of radical democracy might be elaborated and advanced.

Manning went further than the democratic societies not only in explicitly advocating an established counterpublic, but also in emphasizing the need for public education and legal reform, as the lack of these contributed to elite advantage in the discursive contests of democracy "The sole foundation on which the Few build all their schemes to destroy free government is the ignorance and superstition of, or the want of knowledge among, the Many" (138). To combat this problem, Manning advocated mandatory, free public schooling-for girls as well as boys (182). Similarly, he stressed the need for reform in the "intricacy of our laws"' which allowed elite lawyers to hold so much sway in the public realm (180). However, for Manning, talking about the needed reforms was one thing; bringing them about was another, and was not going to happen while the "Few" controlled the discursive terrain.

Members of the Democratic Societies-like Habermas, Madison and Wort- man-might well have sought a proper deliberation in which reason would prevail, convincing free men of the genuine need for law reform. But not Manning. Manning simply did not expect "reason" or one "truth" to prevail, but frameworks of thought to temporarily win the democratic contest. Thus, unlike the theorists of the Democratic Societies or even Wortman, Manning does not

69. Merrill and Wilenz, "Introduction:' 68.


speak of "truth" or of a single, overarching "public opinion." He does speak of the "true sense" of the Constitution and of the Few spreading "falsehoods" (154), but for him there was no sense that there is only one Truth and no faith that public opinion would come to it, even theoretically.

Rather, for Manning, democracy was seen in the ability of certain discourses to outweigh competing discourses. Much of the power of the Few owed, Manning clearly perceived, to their creating powerful, dominant discourses. They gained advantage by "explaining and constructing away the true sense and meaning of the constitutions and laws" (141; see also 146). The problem was not so much the laws, but how debates about them were framed. "The Federal Constitution" was "a good one principally"-"by a fair construction." However, it was intended to be "inexplicit" so the "ruling majority" may put any construction "they please upon it" (148).

Nor did Manning expect reasoned deliberation to bring consensus around a fair construction of the laws, or of any other political issue, for that matter. Rather, the democratic contest would inherently be ongoing. As his biographers perceptively point out, Manning expected "organized conflict."70 In fact, his theology held that all people were self-interested in a way that meant conflicts between the few and the many were to be expected. Manning thus attacked the familiar claim that statesmen-unlike mere common folk-could be "disinterested.' Natural human "selfishness may be discerned in every person, let their conditions in life be what they will" (129). This explains Manning's insistence that the printer/editor of the Society's publications be paid by the Society, not by any other source. (This at a time when many printers were selflessly devoted to creating forums for dissenting voices, even to their own economic ruin.71) And unlike Dana Villa, who insists on a "disinterestedness" that seems to exclude the poor, Manning was not sanguine that human interests could ever be reconciled, even

theoretically.72 The difference between the few and the many was largely a

matter of money, and "there always was and always will be a very unequal distribution of property in the world" (136). Manning was not pleased with this reality but he would not advocate the closing down of any association, even an elite one, to manipulate it: "I would not be understood to be against the associations of any orders of men" (182). Rather, William Manning was envisioning a democratic practice between consensus and conflict: a never- ending, inclusive, multifaceted contest of discourses-of publics, counterpublics, and public opinions-producing both generally irreducible differences and particular shared discourses.

70. Merrill and Wilenz, "Introduction," 70. 71. Jeffrey L. Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), especially 153-75. 72. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror, 118.


Conclusion

Only part of my purpose here has been to show that Habermas's own first example of "public opinion" reveals his much criticized tendency to focus on consent to the exclusion of dissent, thus setting the trajectory of his later work. More importantly, we need to see that this was a missed opportunity to set the record straight about the philosophical possibilities of the dissentient public sphere. To be sure, the early American public sphere still excluded women and blacks, enslaved or free. And the "reason" of public opinion envisioned by Wortman and especially Madison is insufficiently multifaceted. However, the Structural Transformation represents a missed opportunity to demonstrate that the public sphere, even at its moment of emergence, was genuinely envisioned by some as diverse and dissentient rather than unitary and consensual.

It is also important to note that the public sphere can be analyzed historically without broadening the very real separation between Habermasian consensual- ism and post-modern agonism. Often, theory makes it easy to see distinctions as divides; historical excursions into the real world are usually both messier and more nuanced, resulting in greater insight into overlaps and similarities that can span the gulf between theoretical positions. To put it simply bridges are best built with concrete, not ether. Thus, we see in the early American public sphere, and in Manning especially, a rudimentary appreciation of diversity, difference and contestation that undermines the consensus/agonism divide that much recent theory essentializes. The lacuna between Habermas and postmodern critics such as Mouffe is not falsely filled in but genuinely bridged.

Take, for example, the ongoing disputes over the type of discourse appropriate to democracy Proponents of deliberative democracy have argued for the power of rational deliberation to counter self-interested claims and demagogic appeals, thus underwriting the normative legitimacy of the reasoned agreement that emerges from such dialogue.73 Critics fear the exclusions-the marginalization of plurality and difference-that come with a norm of rational deliberation. Accordingly, some critics argue for an alternative set of communicative norms, including rhetoric and story-telling, that has been used by marginalized groups to make their voices heard.74

Exchanges like these, however, overlook the centrality of dissent to democratic dialogue of all kinds. To be sure, rhetoric and stories can encourage us-especially in group decisions-to make choices we later come to realize were misguided, unfair, or irrational. However, then again, so can specious

73. E.g., Seyla Benhabib, "Toward a Deliberative Model," in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 83.

74. E.g., Young, "Communication and the Other," 131-32.


rational argument, when it is not chastened by informed, thoroughgoing dissent. We do need rhetoric, story-telling, and appeals to authority in democratic discourse, even though they are sometimes ways of "lying" in discourse. As Mark Twain reminds us, there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics." Even the most rationalized statistical approach can distort, intentionally or unintentionally, public debate. What matters is the robust dissent that provides multiple perspectives and thus can ferret out ignored aspects, outright manipulations and spurious conclusions. And early American radicals, from the New-England Couranteers to William Manning, understood this: They effortlessly blended rhetoric, narrative and reasoned argument, all in the service of dissent.75

Historically informed theorizing, then, is more than solely a matter of distinguishing between real and perceived divergences. Where theory allows ambiguities to float freely real historical examples ground our analysis and point to insights we might otherwise miss, or misunderstand. Contra Villa, Manning demonstrates that democratic publics must make room for the discourse of "interests" To exclude them is to exclude those economically disadvantaged who can be condemned as being blinded by (material) interests-to the undemo- cratic advantage of those claiming "disinterestedness" Similarly, Manning's theory of a dissentient democracy that is ongoing and partially institutionalized argues against conceptions, like Sheldon Wolin's "fugitive democracy," that seem to make a virtue of fragility and ephemerality.76 Finally, appreciating the Democratic Societies and Manning's vision demonstrates vividly that the "subaltern counterpublics" theorized by Nancy Fraser do not emerge with the late twentieth-century feminist movement but were an integral part of initial efforts to make dissentient the early democratic public sphere.77

Habermas's historical study unintentionally laid the groundwork for some later weaknesses in his theory, weaknesses he is still trying to overcome. Nevertheless, we should not follow him-as most theorists have-in abandoning historical analysis altogether. If we do, we risk missing opportunities to argue with one another rather than past one another.

75. See also, e.g., George Keith, New-England's spirit of persecution transmitted to Pennsylvania and the pretended Quaker found persecuting the true Christian-Quaker (New York: William Bradford, 1693); Benjamin Franklin Bache, Truth will out! The foul charges of the Tories against the editor of the Aurora repelled by positive proof and plain truth, and his base calumniators put to shame (Philadelphia: B.E Bache, 1798).

76. Wolin, "Fugitive Democracy," 31, 43. 77. Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere:' 123.

Article Contentsp. [365]p. 366p. 367p. 368p. 369p. 370p. 371p. 372p. 373p. 374p. 375p. 376p. 377p. 378p. 379p. 380p. 381p. 382p. 383p. 384p. 385p. 386p. 387p. 388

Issue Table of ContentsPolity, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Jul., 2005), pp. 295-424Front MatterExposing the Invisible Hand: The Roots of Laissez-Faire's Hidden Influence [pp. 295-314]Civic Engagement and Voluntary Associations: Reconsidering the Role of the Governance Structures of Advocacy Groups [pp. 315-334]Avoiding "Embarrassment": Aesthetic Reason and Aporetic Critique in Dialectic of Enlightenment [pp. 335-364]Between Consensus and Conflict: Habermas, Post-Modern Agonism and the Early American Public Sphere [pp. 365-388]The Overreach of Political Education and Liberalism's Philosopher-Democrat [pp. 389-408]Review EssayReview: How to Defend (Same-Sex) Marriage [pp. 409-424]

Back Matter

between consensus and conflict habermas, post-modern agonism and the early american public sphere

Documents