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

by Warner

The subject of Michael Warner’s book is the rise of a nation. America, he shows, became a nation by developing a new kind of reading public, where one becomes a citizen by taking one’s place as writer or reader. At heart, the United States is a republic of letters, and its birth can be dated from changes in the culture of printing in the early eighteenth century. The new and widespread use of print media transformed the relations between people and power in a way that set in motion the republican structure of government we have inherited. Examining books, pamphlets, and circulars, he merges theory and concrete analysis to provide a multilayered view of American cultural development.

Genres: History, American History

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Letters of the Republic, Michael Warner tries to bring Jürgen Habermas to the New World. Warner argues that print culture in eighteenth-century America was closely tied to the rise of the republican public sphere. Print allowed Americans to imagine themselves as participants in a universal and impersonal deliberating public. Republican politics, in turn, allowed Americans to imagine print as uniquely authoritative. This paved the way for the United States Constitution, which derived its legitimacy from its printedness and which brought "the people" of the United States into being for the first time. But for the same reason, American nationalism was slow to manifest itself in imaginative literature; through the first decade of the nineteenth century, Americans conceived of print as a public medium and could not entirely approve of the European novel's concern with private life. That attitude would change only when the imaginary of the public sphere gave way to the imaginary of the national community, in which private behavior manifested national dispositions.

However, Warner insists (against a deterministic "McLuhanite" interpretation) that print did not have an inherent tendency to cause certain political developments. Instead, its effects were culturally conditioned. In the early eighteenth century, Warner explains, print in the colonies represented local personal or religious authority rather than a universal sphere of critical discussion. In New England, local presses produced mainly religious literature that either encouraged personal devotion or trained a theological elite; a "counterpublic" of cheap folk literature existed but was so inconsequential that little of it survives. In the early South, meanwhile, books were a status symbol of the great, and most printing concerned public documents that reinforced the authority of the wealthy, who had already established themselves through oral performance.

This began to change, beginning in Boston and other urban centers, around 1720. It was then that Boston printers published pamphlet and newspaper attacks from both sides in a dispute over the creation of a private bank and currency. The Massachusetts currency dispute became a public print war between the governor and the assembly -- with the latter using its power in a novel way, to protect the rebellious printers from legal retribution. In New York in 1733, the libel trial of newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger revealed that print was transferring public authority there to readers. Zenger's defense lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, persuaded the jury that the import of Zenger's words could be judged best by the jurors, not by the imperious judge. These examples, Warner argues, reveal that print was becoming a participatory medium of civic exchange rather than a hierarchical medium of revelation. The full flowering of the new conception of print, however, arrived in the imperial crisis of the 1770s, when colonists used an effusion of newspapers and pamphlets to challenge the British ministry.

How did this evolution of print shape American republicanism? Warner argues that Benjamin Franklin, for one, used the emerging conception of print discourse to legitimate his authority as a new kind of republican statesman. Franklin always took pride in his early career as a printer, that is, his career as an engineer of words. More importantly, he used print to describe for American and European readers the life of a new kind of rational man. Unlike learned theologians of the past, his intellection took the form of detachment. In his Autobiography and in his highly ironic essays, Franklin modeled the removal of the self from the process of inquiry and discipline. Franklin thus embodied the depersonalization of rational authority through print publication.

Naturally, the greatest of Franklin's achievements, Warner argues, was the one that finally submerged his name in the American public. The United States Constitution allowed its framers to seize honor for themselves by stepping aside in favor of "the people," a participatory but impersonal entity embodied in the very words of the document. Unlike the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution was not associated with particular signatures. It was presented as the work not of leaders "pledging to each other their lives and fortunes" but rather of "we, the people of the United States." Obviously, this people did not exist as a group of individuals agreeing unanimously on a set of issues; the Constitution was actually written for the purpose of containing irreconcilable differences of interest and opinion, as Madison pointed out in the Federalist. Instead, therefore, the "people" of the Constitution existed by virtue of the document's printedness -- its universal accessibility and its lack of apparent particular authors. The new Constitution was distributed rapidly throughout the states and invoked immediately in political debates. Its meaning was always contested, but that is precisely what gave it such absolute authority. Whatever the Constitution might say, all disputants implicitly agreed, was eo ipso the will of the people of the United States.

What is perhaps most interesting in Warner's account is his claim that this conception of impersonal citizenship prevented the development of a satisfying national literature in the first two or three decades of the republic's existence. The values of eighteenth-century European literature were the values of "politeness" and private distinction through commerce. Literature was supposed to give readers personal pleasure, to fill leisure hours, to provide authors with a means of making a name for themselves outside of politics. American republicans could not approve of that privatized vision of letters. Their ideal for virtuous writing was the newspaper article or pamphlet. When they tried to write novels, they wrote highly didactic stories with indistinct characters and diffuse plots. This is because American authors could not settle into the private life of a character; they had to view novels as public productions for public purposes. Thus even Charles Brockden Brown, the exceptional American novelist of the early republic, was forced by his own expectations to write stories "about" a predictable sort of civic virtue, even though he was drawn into creating characters at odds with this purpose. Brown held his republican expectations in a crippling tension with the liberal self that emerged from the genre of the novel.

[Tim Young · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Derivative use of Habermas’s concept of the public sphere in examining American literary culture of the late 18th century. For a far richer, more wide-ranging and insightful treatment of the same period, see Jay Fliegelman’s Prodigals and Pilgrims.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, but dense read. Very important read early americanists. interesting arguments about print culture, the "printedness" of early american texts, and publicity.