2 - Coffee houses and consumers: the social context of Enlightenment

Summary

In opulent or commercial society, besides, to think or reason comes to be, like every other employment, a particular business, which is carried on by a very few people, who furnish the public with all the thought and reason possessed by the vast multitudes that labour. Only a very small part of any ordinary person's knowledge has been the product of personal observation or reflection. All the rest has been purchased, in the same manner as his shoes or his stockings, from those whose business it is to make up and prepare for the market that particular species of goods.

(Adam Smith)

Introduction

Recent historical research has focussed overwhelmingly on the social context in which Enlightenment ideas were produced, received and marketed. Historians such as Robert Darnton have produced a wealth of new information on the readers, the writers and the entrepreneurial publishers of the increasingly large number of books, newspapers and pamphlets sold in this period. Historians such as Roger Chartier and Robert Muchembled have examined the penetration of Enlightenment ideas from the elite to the lower social classes, from ‘high’ to ‘low’ culture. Others have focussed on the spread of literacy, and the changing nature of the experience of reading. The importance of visual representations – pictures, engravings, stage-sets, statues in public places – in the transmission of ideas, alongside the written word, has been closely examined by historians such as Thomas Crow. Many writers have also pointed to the establishment, all over Europe, of new institutions and organisations where ideas could be explored and discussed. Some of these institutions, like masonic lodges, learned academies and societies, were formal affairs, whose membership was carefully controlled. Others, such as public lectures, coffee houses, lending libraries, art exhibitions, operatic and theatrical performances, were nearly all commercial operations, open to all who could pay, and thus provided ways in which many different social strata could be exposed to the same ideas. These different media and social institutions focussed on the diffusion and interchange of ideas and together formed what Jürgen Habermas has described as the ‘new public sphere’ of the eighteenth century. Later in this chapter we will be examining Habermas’ ideas more closely and asking what impact, if any, the social setting of ideas produced on the nature of ideas themselves in the Enlightenment.