We may sometimes nostalgically look back at the times of Athenian democracy, of English coffee houses (17th and 18th centuries), of French salons (18th and 19th centuries), of worker socialist collectives (19th and early 20th centuries), or even the youthful energy of 1968. “Ah, those were the days”, we say, “when people cared, when everyone engaged in the political, in the public, in the civil sphere. Back then, folks were citizens, not merely idle consumers”. But we often forget that these expressions of political enfranchisement only reached small cliques of the overall population:
