Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

State censorship of the press in England ended in 1695 with the expiry of the Printing or Licensing Act. Although after that date publications were still subject to the laws relating to blasphemous, seditious, and treasonous libel, writings no longer had to be submitted to an official licenser for approval prior to printing. The end of pre-printing censorship coincided with what has been aptly described as “the first age of party” - an era characterized by conflict within society of such virulence that the nation was divided both at the center of power and in the constituencies. As an unrivalled medium of communication, the press was exploited by Whigs and Tories as they sought to influence political proceedings. Pamphlets and poems on affairs of state, as well as newspapers and essay journals, were published in huge numbers in an unprecedented appeal to what would now be called public opinion. The most influential recent model of the rise of public opinion as a political and social force in the state is Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (originally published in German in 1962; translated into English in 1989). While Habermas's thesis actually concerns the way in which the space for public debate was allegedly transformed into an instrument of state manipulation of the public in the course of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text