The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

While media ecologists look at Habermas as someone who fits within their
category, some do question the translation of his most famous work, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.
The phrase, “Bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit,” was rendered into English as “bourgeois
public sphere,” but it has been argued that he meant neither a sphere nor bourgeois.
The first term, “Bürgerliche,” has a larger context in German than simply
“bourgeois,” as “civil” or “citizen.” The second term, “Öffentlichkeit,” more literally
means “publicness.” Bourgeois, or middle class, is not a good term for the colonies
where such an economic class was not fully formed. For media ecologists who view
print and the thought it engenders as linear, the description of a spherical space is
antithetical. Of some importance here is the view that, “literate and print culture
favors the linear, detached, abstract, rational, and individual, while print culture, by
extension, encourages individualism, nationalism, and democracy.” 120 The term,
“Civic Publicness,” may be a more apt translation, although a bit awkward, and
“civic public,” or “civil society” are the most usable translations. While dealing with
the concept of a civic public engaging in such discourse, this study will largely avoid
the term, “public sphere,” using rather the idea of an expanding public engagrd in
civic discourse.
Returning to Virginia, then, what can be observed here is that the small
number of elite leaders who once monopolized such discourse was beginning to give
way by 1760 to a larger, more literate population who read about political disputes
such as the Parson’s Cause and could influence an increasingly important public
opinion. 121 Such participation in civic discourse, which was formerly was above their
station, naturally contributed to a weakening of deference. This civic public, rather
than Habermas’s “bourgeois public sphere,” is seen in the British-American colonies
as a “republic of letters,” a more middling cultural space, with room for both elite
120 Paul Grosswiler, “Jürgen Habermas: Media Ecologist?,” 22-31.
121 Landsman, Colonials to Provincials, 30-37.
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