The Establishment of Periodicals | 59and nor did their readers assimilate regular news stories without forming their
own opinions. Particularly the juxtaposition of the correspondents’ differing
interpretations represented an early form of exchange of ideas, which was sup-
plemented by broadsides, books and other media. This was also recognised by
contemporaries: as early as 1700, history professor Johann Peter Ludewig, for
instance, attributed the task of ‘using existent knowledge to form judgements
on future matters’ to newspapers, as ‘this is what learning to think in a ratio-
nal-critical way means’ (quoted from Böning, in Welke and Wilke 2008: 296).
Likewise, in 1676, dramatist Christian Weise compared the newspaper reader
with the theatregoer who cannot actively intervene in events but ‘reason crit-
ically on the basis of the action’ (printed in Blühm and Engelsing 1967: 56).
For Habermas, however, the starting point for the emergence of a bour-
geois public sphere was to be found in early eighteenth-century England. The
early establishment of coffee houses, the free press and its self-concept of being
a ‘Fourth Estate’, and the local culture of debate served as evidence for his
thesis. Yet this assumption also needs to be modified. On the one hand, the
process began even earlier in England and can be dated roughly from the
upheavals in the 1640s (Raymond 1999: 109–40). On the other hand, Haber-
mas idealised English circumstances, since in fact the press did not start to
develop the potential that Habermas had attributed to it until the last third of
the eighteenth century (Barker 2000).
Moreover, the public sphere was not formed in demarcation from the state,
as posited by Habermas. It was in fact the case that government officials of all
countries interacted within the new medial communication sphere, even in
England and the Netherlands (Barker 2000; Popkin 2005: 26). The example
of the German Intelligenzblätter underlines this as well. In a similar vein, there
have been frequent warnings against reducing the public sphere to the bour-
geoisie, for the aristocracy and the lower classes also participated: the aristoc-
racy by their membership in reading societies and the lower classes by having
newspapers read to them, looking at pictures, joining in protests and partici-
pating in tavern discussions. The same was true for women, whom Habermas
also failed to consider in his observations. As gender history has consistently
criticised, the connection public/male and private/female was an established
construct at the time which cannot be adopted as an analytical tool. And as
previously illustrated, women did share in the public sphere of the media.
Habermas also initiated very productive research on the locations in
which media were collectively discussed and read. This was especially true
for reading societies, but also coffee houses and inns. In London alone,
there were approximately five hundred coffee houses around 1710, in addi-
tion to six thousand pubs. Here, newspapers were freely available, enabling
even destitute people to read or be read to. At the same time, coffee-house
discussions inspired new media. The early moralistic weeklies in particu-