Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America.

Abstract

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Materializing the public sphere in American religious history

“…They imagined it as an agentive, open space whereby all consumers could voice themselves without restraint. Hence, printed texts, when signifying the interests of a wide enough collective, could be understood as constituting the ideas of the nation and specifically, the very idea of America itself (Anderson, 1983;Warner, 1990). This mode of reading printed texts as evidencing popularity helped justify Protestant ascendance alongside secular modernity for many scholars of the early modern period and in early America.…”

“…They imagined it as an agentive, open space whereby all consumers could voice themselves without restraint. Hence, printed texts, when signifying the interests of a wide enough collective, could be understood as constituting the ideas of the nation and specifically, the very idea of America itself (Anderson, 1983; Warner, 1990).…”

“…Most scholars trace their use of the public sphere back to Habermas and Warner. Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991) and Warner in Letters of the Republic (1990) proposed distinct, albeit overlapping, conceptions of the public sphere. Habermas' concept operates much closer to that of how historians and social scientists understand the term: publications create informal, discursive spaces where democratic power operates through discussions around ‘public concern’ or ‘common interest’ and it is through dialogue, debate, and exchange that interlocutors could create political communities and hold the state accountable.…”

“…This article will bring into conversation scholarship on the public sphere in American religious history through three fields: intellectual history charted primarily through printed religious sources, studies on early American religious literatures, and religious studies scholarship informed by cultural anthropology and media studies. Since Jurgen Habermas's Structural Transformation (1991) and Warner in Letters of the Republic (1990) was published, each discipline has built on the scholarship on the public sphere through their own field's commitment to analysing agency, power, and structure. However, one of the uniting developments since the early 2000s has been a greater attention to material culture to illustrate the complexities of the printing press as a technology rife with both opportunity and problems for historically marginalized voices to represent themselves in these public spaces.…”

Afterword: Suasion, circulation, and an anthropology of influence

“…Beyond discussions of the public sphere (Habermas 1989 [1962]; Warner 1990; 2002), one of the primary contexts in which theories of linguistic influence have been examined in detail is the studies of changing norms around rhetoric. To follow just one line of thought, Ryan J. Stark (2009) argues that in seventeenth‐century England, there was a radical reformulation of the representational economy (Keane 2007), but it was not just a simple turn away from all rhetoric, as some have claimed.…”