Influencias en las tomas de decisiones agrícolas

In the following, I would like to exemplify some of these developments by discussing the role of cultural journals as one of the formative agents of the original public sphere. The aim here is to illustrate some of the developments sketched out above and to highlight more clearly how the model of the public sphere can “confer causal power”16 on developments such as reading and writing practices which evolved in the journals at this time. Two relevant aspects will be mentioned: firstly the development of argumentative reason and the practice of written exchanges between a journal and its readers, and secondly

15

Dena Goodman, ‘Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime’,History and Theory, 31 (1992), 1-20 (p. 5). 16

John Brooke, ‘Reason and Passion in the Public Sphere: Habermas and Cultural Historians’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 24 (1) (1998), 43-67 (p. 48).

the development of intellectual sociability, which was vital to build and foster intellectual networks in which the journals could take root and extend their reach.17

To begin with, one brief note on the use of the word “journal” in the eighteenth century. While the term “journal” or “periodical” initially referred to

either a newspaper or a periodical, it increasingly came to denote a daily

publication. Anthony Smith points out that:

[i]n the mid eighteenth century a journal was defined by Diderot as a ‘periodical work which contains extracts from a newly published book, together with details of recent discoveries in the arts and sciences’. […] Yet by the end of the eighteenth century the meaning had shifted considerably, and in 1777 the first enduring daily paper in French, containing political as well as cultural information, called itself ajournal.18 However, contemporary literature almost exclusively employs the termjournal in order to denote the emerging periodical press: in rare instances, the term “literary periodical”, “learned periodical” or “printed periodical” is used, but in line with most secondary literature, I will use the term journal in reference to the periodical press.

Even though most journals were mainly directed at the enlightened intelligentsia, such as the French philosophes, the German Gebildeten, or the English men of letters, many journals existed also in order to “instruct the ‘common man’”.19 Initially, they developed an “ethos of servicing others” by “announcing discoveries and publishing requests for data, announcing and reviewing new publications”.20 On a basic level journals were responding to a 17

These developments have been researched by social or cultural historians who have mapped for example the spread of Enlightenment ideals by considering the increase in book-trade and the rise of the printing press. See: Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775-1800(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979) andRevolution in Print: The Press in France 1775-1800, ed. by Robert Darnton, Daniel Roche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Others, such as Roger Chartier, have referred to transformations in reading practices from a reverential to a more critical style of reading or concentrate on the new social structures which emerged from literary societies, reading and book clubs, and the coffeehouses..

18

Anthony Smith, The Newspaper: An International History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), p. 9.

19

Eckhart Hellmuth, Wolfgang Piereth, ‘Germany 1760-1815’, inPress, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760-1820, ed. by Hannah Barker, Simon Burrows (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 69-113 (p. 73).

20

Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 29.

demand for information and news, but they additionally fostered a new sense of critical reflection.21

Alongside new approaches to ordering and presenting knowledge, the journals are said to have been crucial in developing a style of argumentative criticism and reasoning which, the historian Reinhart Koselleck has sketched out, grew in the eighteenth century out of a consideration and examination of Christian morals and eventually developed into the application of critical, independent thought.22 In the first instance, Koselleck outlines, writers turned their attention to antique texts, literature, works of art, and later towards a more articulated and sustained critique of the church and the state. Eventually, the use of critical reason was applied to all other scientific enquiries (Kritik und

Krise, pp. 86-105) as expressed as early as 1700 by the French philosopher

and man of letters, Pierre Bayle: “on s’est tourné vers la justesse du raisonnement (…), on devient sensible au sens et à la raison plus qu’à tout le reste.”23 John Gray also points to the shift of “the traditional morality of the past founded on revelation and the authority of the church”, towards “a new morality, grounded in reason”,24 as one of the defining developments of the Enlightenment.

Another development relates to the flourishing practice of letters to the editors. Although epistolary exchanges between men of letters had long been part of the self-cultivation and self-presentation between individuals within a private sphere, they provided here the basis for a more institutionalized and formalised form of exchange between journals and its readers. This, in turn, had ramifications for the development of journals as “nerve centres”25 for the

21

For a detailed case study about the development of style and content of one exemplary eighteenth-century journal see: Harcourt Brown, ‘History and the Learned Journal’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 33 (3) (1972), 365-378.

22

Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973).

23

Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam: Livineius, 1720) quoted here in Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 289.

24

John Gray: ‘Enlightenment Humanism as a Relic of Christian Monotheism’, in2000 Years and Beyond: Faith, Identity and the ‘Common Era’, ed. by Paul Gifford, et al (London: Routledge, 2003) pp. 35-50 (p. 36).

25

Robert Darnton, George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century(New York: Norton & Company, 2003), p. 33.

transmission and spread of debate and new intellectual trends, since the printing of letters provided the readers with a forum where they could express and exchange their own opinions and respond to those of others.26 For this alleged principled openness and “disinterested” pursuit in presenting all sides of an argument, the historians Bödeker and Hellmuth even state that the “journal is considered, with good reason, as the medium of the Enlightenment par excellence”.27

Finally, the interactions of intellectual sociability that were cultivated in the journals served to build incipient intellectual networks. Historical research has shown how the imaginary framework of the Republic of Letters propagated an ideal of scholarly pursuits that in turn informed the social interactions of its members. For example the German novelist and man of letters Christoph Martin Wieland (and editor of the original Merkur journal, the Teutscher Merkur) propagated the idea that the programme of the Enlightenment was founded “außer auf unbehindertes öffentliches Räsonnement noch […] auf gemeinsinnige […] Aktivitäten der aufgeklärten Individuen”.28 These social or communal interactions, Goldgar writes, took place in the form of “reading and discussing journals, visiting academies, libraries, bookshops, universities, cabinets of curiosities” (Impolite Learning, p. 2) where the stress was placed not solely on scholarly pursuits, but on aspects of social exchange and sociability. In a historical perspective, these networks are said to have strengthened the sense of self-awareness and self-recognition of the journal and its readers as an independently-minded entity, and thus a vital stepping stone for the development of a public sphere.

The point here was to illustrate the way in which journals have been portrayed as a contributing factor in the development of the public sphere conceived by Habermas, and to outline the relevant mechanisms which are at 26

An argument made by Ann Goldgar in Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680-1750(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

27

Hans Erich Bödeker, ‘Journals and Public Opinion: The Politicization of the German Enlightenment in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, inThe Transformation of Political Culture. England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. by Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford: OUP, 1990), pp. 423-447 (p. 435).

28

Wolfgang Albrecht, ‘Wielands Vorstellungen von Aufklärung und seine Beiträge zur Aufklärungsdebatte am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts’,Impulse, 11 (1988), 25-60 (p. 41), quoted here from Klaus Schaefer,Christoph Martin Wieland(Stuttgart: Verlag J.B Metzler, 1996), p. 30.

the basis of this newly emerging print culture. Evidently, the developments sketched here present an idealized version and arguably overstate the contribution and impact of the journals to a public sphere at the time. However, it is not the purpose to claim that the public sphere really existed in the form presented above, as a “Paradise Lost”, which the contemporary cultural journals ought to aim to retrieve. Nor is the concern of this thesis to “test” the extent to which contemporary cultural journals constitute or possibly recreate an ideal public sphere in the Habermasian sense. Indeed, numerous historians have objected that Habermas retrospectively applied and romanticized his model of a public sphere of the eighteenth century.29However, it is important to note in this context that the public sphere should not be understood as a factual historical account. Rather, it serves as a model, an “ideal type” in the sociological meaning of the term, which is, as the next section will demonstrate, precarious and transient, continuously caught between external constraints and internal contradictions, between aspiration and reality.