The incorporation of the public opinion and the freedom of the press in the Rechtsstaat bruno debaenst During the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, pamphlets tried to steer public opinion.8 However, modern public opinion is a child of the Enlightenment. In 1962, Jürgen Habermas explained how the 18th Century created a public sphere that enabled the exchange and discussion of ideas.9 In the coffee houses in England or in the salons in France, the upcoming bourgeoisie, nobility and higher clerics could meet as equals to discuss all kind of matters, such as politics or the new ideas of the philosophers Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau.10 As Speier puts it:11 The dream was to reach some kind of “opinion éclairée”, an enlightened opinion, which contrasted with the popular opinion of the lower, uneducated classes.12 The enlightened public opinion was the natural humus where ideas such as the separation of powers, freedom of expression and the rule of law – or Rechtsstaat as it later would be called in German – could flourish. The public opinion was incorporated in the emerging Rechtsstaat from the beginning. Sweden offers an early example with its 1766 Freedom of 8 Contamine, Naissance médiévale de l’opinion publique, s. 64. 9 Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge MA, 1992. 10 We get a glimpse of these salons in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, who was ambassador in France between 1785 and 1789. See Gabler, James M., Passions. The wines and travels of Thomas Jefferson, Palm Beach 1995, s.15–34 and Hailman, John, Thomas Jefferson on Wine, Jackson 2006, s. 67–119. 11 Speier, Hans, Historical Development of Public Opinion, American Journal of Sociology, 55 (4) 1950, s. 381. 12 Ghins, Arthur, Benjamin Constant and Public Opinion in Post-Revolutionary France, History of Political Thought, 40 (3) 2019, s. 488. 67 In the history of public opinion the French eighteenth-century salons were important because they were the gathering places of intellectually distinguished men and women who cherished conversation, applauded critical sense, and did not regard free thought or irreverent ideas as shocking unless they were advanced pedantically.
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