Preaching, a Ponytail, and an Enthusiast: Rethinking the Public Sphere's Subversiveness in Eighteenth-century Prussia

Abstract

Recent work on the eighteenth-century public sphere has recast the debate about the Enlightenment's responsibility for the French Revolution. Historians have argued that the print public sphere and its concomitant forms of sociability, such as salons, reading clubs, and coffee houses created social spaces from which criticism of the state emerged. This elite criticism corroded the Old Regime's foundations and the revolutionary crash of 1789, if it was not directly the intellectuals' fault, was sufficiently related to their mental labors to show that enlightened publicness had consequences.