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Voltaire's Public and the Idea of Eastern Europe: Toward a Literary Sociology of Continental Division

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Larry Wolff
Larry Wolff*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Boston College
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Extract

The public sphere, according to Habermas, is “in principle inclusive,“ so much so that “however exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people.” Further, Habermas specifies that “the public sphere of civil society stood or fell with the principle of universal access,” that any absolute exclusions made it “not a public sphere at all“—for the public sphere “anticipated in principle that all human beings belong to it.“’ The theoretical tension between principles of inclusion and exclusion thus has been essential to the delineation of the public sphere—in its eighteenth-century historical origins and in its twentieth-century academic formulation—and that tension structured the dual aspect of the public sphere, conceived as a phenomenon of social structure and cultural representation.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , Winter 1995 , pp. 932 - 942
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1995

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References

This work resulted from my participation in the East-West Seminar in Eighteenth- Century Studies which met in Paris in summer 1994, under the chairmanship of Robert Darnton. I would like to acknowledge the very helpful comments and criticisms of the members of the seminar, with special thanks to Andrei Zorin, Jens Häseler and Marco Cipolloni. Finally, I am grateful for the encouragement and advice of Wayne Vucinich.

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7. Ibid., 157.

8. Ibid., 316.

9. Ibid., 241.

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18. Ibid., II: 137, 156.

19. Ibid., II: 741.

20. Ibid., II: 807-8.

21. Charles Montesquieu, L'Esprit des lois, in Oeuvres Completes, ed. Daniel Oster (Paris: Éditions du Seuil/Macmillan, 1964), 631.

22. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs, II: 806.

23. Voltaire, Histoire de I'Empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand, in Oeuvres Completès de Voltaire (Paris: Gamier Frères, 1878; rpt. Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint Limited, 1967), XVI: 456.

24. Montesquieu, 644.

25. Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, in Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire (Paris: Gamier Frères, 1878; rpt. Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint Limited, 1967), XIV: 555-57.

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28. Baker, 189.