Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Chapter One Introduction -- Chapter Two Theory and History -- Chapter Three Secrecy and Privilege -- Chapter Four Traditional Communicative Practice -- Chapter Five News -- Chapter Six Printing and the Culture of Print -- Chapter Seven Printing and Politics in the 1640s -- Chapter Eight Petitions -- Chapter Nine Epilogue -- Index

Before its deployment as a practice by insurgent social movements for mobilizing public opinion in the long nineteenth century, petitioning was a ubiquitous, relatively uniform practice with no connection to popular insurgency. It was nearly the inverse, though just as prominent, phenomenon: an instrument of state as opposed to an instrument of protest, occurring wherever rulership relied on administrative techniques for generating and deploying its authority. Humble subjects sought benevolent deployments of power in pursuit of goals that were within and not about the rules of the game. This mode of petitioning is aptly described as petition-and-response, a term of art from classical scholarship that is applicable to diverse patrimonial states across Eurasia with diverse ideological systems. The transition to modern petitioning as a repertoire for contentious politics was an extended, uneven process. It was facilitated initially by the unquestioned legitimacy of petitionary etiquette with regard to form and rhetoric, as opposed to explicit invocation of novel ideas about natural rights. Liminal petitioning had contradictory elements of deference to and defiance of power relations that diminished perceptions of novelty in novel activities that mobilized and invoked popular opinion on contentious political issues.

Assesses the importance of print technology on petitioning in the English Revolution & investigates the emergence of a British public sphere in this period as an extension of new practices of petitioning. It is shown that economic aspects of printing were responsible for the wide dissemination of printed petitions. Moreover, printing fostered the creation of an anonymous body of readers, the public, to whom reasoned debate was directed. It also was directly implicated in the organization of new political bodies called parties, which mobilized to put their arguments into print form. Thus, it is argued that, as a new means of communication, printing was central to the development of the modern public sphere. Other variables, eg, Protestantism & capitalism, commonly associated with the formation of the public sphere are demonstrated to be mediated by their linkage to communicative changes brought about by print culture. This historical study indicates that current debates on the public sphere would do well to focus more closely on the nature & significance of contemporary changes in the means of communication. 74 References. D. Ryfe