A01=David Zaret
Author_David Zaret
Bookselling
Category=JHM
Category=KNTP1
Category=KNTP2
Category=NHTB
Civil society
Conrad Russell (letter writer)
Critical theory
Criticism
Deliberation
Dialogic
English Reformation
English Revolution
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Freedom of speech
Historical revisionism (negationism)
Ideology
Institution
John Pym
Journalism
Legislation
Levellers
Literacy
Literature
New Model Army
Newsbook
Newspaper
Oliver Cromwell
Pamphlet
Parliament
Petitioner
Philosopher
Political communication
Political faction
Political philosophy
Political science
Political spectrum
Political system
Politician
Politics
Popular sovereignty
Postmodernism
Precedent
Prerogative
Print culture
Printing
Proclamation
Propaganda
Prose
Protest
Protestantism
Public opinion
Public reason
Public sphere
Publication
Publishing
Punctuation
Puritans
Rhetoric
Right to petition
Root and Branch petition
Royal prerogative
Satire
Secrecy
Sedition
Short Parliament
Social theory
Statute
Supporter
Tavern
Tax
Toleration
William Prynne
Writer
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691006949
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 17 Jan 2000
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This innovative work of historical sociology locates the origins of modern democratic discourse in the emergent culture of printing in early modern England. For David Zaret, the key to the rise of a democratic public sphere was the impact of this culture of printing on the secrecy and privilege that shrouded political decisions in seventeenth-century England. Zaret explores the unanticipated liberating effects of printing and printed communication in transforming the world of political secrecy into a culture of open discourse and eventually a politics of public opinion. Contrary to those who locate the origins of the public sphere in the philosophical tracts of the French Enlightenment, Zaret claims that it originated as a practical accomplishment, propelled by economic and technical aspects of printing--in particular heightened commercialism and increased capacity to produce texts. Zaret writes that this accomplishment gained impetus when competing elites--Royalists and Parliamentarians, Presbyterians and Independents--used printed material to reach the masses, whose leaders in turn invoked the authority of public opinion to lobby those elites.
Zaret further shows how the earlier traditions of communication in England, from ballads and broadsides to inn and alehouse conversation, merged with the new culture of print to upset prevailing norms of secrecy and privilege. He points as well to the paradox for today's critics, who attribute the impoverishment of the public sphere to the very technological and economic forces that brought about the means of democratic discourse in the first place.
David Zaret is Executive Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Indiana University. He is the author of The Heavenly Contract: Ideology and Organization in Pre-Revolutionary Puritanism.
