ity, and politics (Heilbron, 1994). In a patronage structure, writers reflect the
concerns of their sponsors; in this I include self-patronage of the gentry literati,
such as the Chinese gentlemen circulating poems as a form of leisure amuse-
ment and cultivated status display. With the shift to a writers’ marketplace
comes more room to maneuver, but the power of the audience results in a
division between writers oriented toward the mass market and an inwardly
oriented elite of writers pursuing their own standards of technical perfection.
The latter group sets up a possible rapprochement with academic carriers of
culture, but the meeting is laden with tension.
The bases and products of philosophy and of literature have usually been
distinct. The networks of these two kinds of intellectuals have touched on
occasion; a very small number of individuals have overlapped both networks
and produced memorable work in both genres. Most have been successful in
only one attention space or the other; nevertheless, something is transmitted
structurally, for where the networks of philosophers and literary practitioners
have connected, the result has been to energize outbursts of creativity in either
field.
One of the most notable of these literary-philosophical overlaps occurred
in Germany, in the founding generation of Idealism. Kant and Fichte were not
literary figures, but their creativity cannot be explained without taking note of
the rising level of controversy and enthusiasm in the literary networks. Several
transformations in the material base happened in close sequence. This was the
time when the publishing market burst out in Germany. As yet its careers were
ill paid, and writers still relied on old-fashioned patronage where they could,
which in the German Kleinstaaterei included government appointments and
university positions. The Idealists carried off the university revolution, which
opened up autonomously controlled careers within the academic world; a
generation later, philosophers no longer needed the patronage or the literary
connections. At the moment of victory, however, a branch of the Idealist
philosophies expressed the attitude of hybrid academic-literary intellectuals.
This was aesthetic Idealism, formulated first by Schiller and then by Schelling:
the artist directly intuits the axioms of philosophy and synthesizes the opposites
of Nature and the Ideal; aesthetics gives privileged access to the thing-in-itself.
Aesthetic Idealism was adopted as a vehicle for self-exaltation of European
writers at the moment when the market opened. It conveyed the feeling of
freedom from personal deference to patrons, trumpeting the status of the artist
above any lay consumer, no matter how wealthy or powerful. Shelley’s “poets
are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” expresses the extreme claim.
Ironically, this moment of self-glorification was made possible by the fact that
enough of the patronage system still existed so that the writer need not feel
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