Chapter 4.2 The Exchange of Ideas in the Public Sphere
Chapter 4.2 The Exchange of Ideas in the Public Sphere
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Explain the role of the public sphere as a place for debate and dissent
- Identify the role of public and private forms of expression in the Enlightenment
- Discuss the role of universities in fostering public debate
As the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment continued over the course of the eighteenth century, new ideas about religion, political power, and the human condition proliferated alongside a growing revolutionary spirit. Helping to spread these ideas was the emergence of the public sphere, spaces beyond the home and under the control of neither the church nor the state, such as coffeehouses and taverns, where people could engage in free and open intellectual exchange without fear of retribution.
Before the late seventeenth century, public forums had been relatively uncommon in Europe outside England. But in the urban centers of the Islamic world and the trade centers of East Asia, informal spaces for conversation and political discussion, such as the many Turkish coffeehouses and the Confucian academies in Korea, were prominent features of social life. As international trade and cultural exchange increased between Europe and its Eastern neighbors during the Enlightenment, these autonomous secular spaces had a profound influence on the development of the public sphere in Europe.
Public Debate and Dissent
In the medieval period in Europe, opportunities for social encounters and the exchange of ideas had generally been limited to the domestic sphere of private households, or to spaces in which monarchical or church authority could quash dissent or criticism. Over the course of Europe’s seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, public spaces became a pervasive feature of its intellectual culture for the first time.
Coffeehouses, which became a staple of European cities by the end of the eighteenth century, had long been centers of intellectual exchange and informal socialization in cities of the Islamic world after the practice of roasting coffee beans and making them into a drink began in Yemen in the 1400s. After its subsequent adoption in Arabia, coffee drinking spread to Egypt, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. By the mid-sixteenth century, coffeehouses had become a fixture of social life in many communities of the Islamic world, where people could participate in a wide variety of conversations. Istanbul’s cosmopolitan district of Tahtakale, where merchants, artisans, sailors, tradespeople, and travelers congregated, was an especially fitting site for the development of such establishments. After the first cafés there gained a wide following, portable coffee stalls and neighborhood coffee houses became popular throughout the Ottoman Empire (Figure 4.7).
In Europe, the first coffeehouse based on the Turkish model opened in the cosmopolitan port city of Venice in 1645. Coffee shops became especially popular in Engl