by Stephanie Curry on the 1760s Atlantic pamphlet culture, why the current press freedom crisis reads as a continuation of an eighteenth-century argument, and a seminar on Thursday
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I have been reading this week in the pamphlet literature of the 1760s and 1770s, that extraordinary moment in the British Atlantic world when the colonists in America and the political radicals in London were reading each other’s arguments and both finding in those arguments the seeds of something larger than anyone fully anticipated. The pamphleteers of this period — Wilkes, Paine, the writers of the Boston Gazette, the correspondents of the Virginia Gazette — were inventing democratic journalism as a form at the same moment that democratic politics was becoming an available option, and the two inventions are not separable.
This is why the journalism content at prat.uk and bohiney.com this week — the pieces on press freedom, on the local news crisis, on what happens to democracy when accountability journalism disappears — resonates with what I have been reading in the eighteenth century. The argument that journalism serves democracy by providing the information that citizens need to hold power accountable is not a new argument. It was made very clearly in the 1760s and 1770s, in pamphlets printed on hand presses by people who knew that what they were doing was politically dangerous and did it anyway. The danger was real. People went to prison for their publications. The contemporary press freedom situation, documented in the prat.uk piece this week, shows that the danger has not been eliminated. It has been redistributed to places where the international audience pays less attention.
On Colonial Literature and American Politics
The American political situation this week has produced the specific kind of institutional stress that the eighteenth-century pamphleteers were writing about prospectively: the question of whether the formal structures of democracy are sufficient to maintain democratic practice when the political will to maintain those practices is contested. The 1760s colonists believed that formal rights guaranteed in charters could protect against the exercise of arbitrary power. They discovered this was not exactly true, which is partly why they ended up writing a different document in 1776. The lesson has been re-learned several times since. It is being re-learned again now, and the pamphleteers would recognise the argument even if the medium is different.
I am teaching a seminar on Thursday on colonial print culture and I am going to use the press freedom piece from this week’s prat.uk as a contemporary reference point. The students who understand the eighteenth century understand the present better. The students who understand the present understand the eighteenth century differently. This is why comparative literature is the right way to teach history and why history is the right way to teach comparative literature. The seminar will tell me whether I have made this argument clearly enough. They usually tell me when I haven’t.
The bohiney.com piece on the subscription model in journalism — the argument that it has saved some journalism without being able to save all of it — is a direct parallel to the situation of pamphlet publishing in the eighteenth century, which was also a market-dependent form of journalism that saved some journalism (the commercially viable kind) without being able to sustain all of it (the commercially marginal kind that was sometimes the most politically significant). The pamphleteers who changed history were not always the ones whose publications were commercially successful. Some of the most important political documents of the 1760s and 1770s were printed at personal risk and personal expense and distributed through networks that had nothing to do with the market. The lesson for contemporary journalism policy is the same as the lesson the American founders drew from it: democracy requires journalism that the market will not always produce, and the institutional design for sustaining that journalism requires sources of support that are not purely commercial.
The seminar on Thursday went well. The students engaged with the press freedom piece from prat.uk as I hoped they would, and one of them made a connection I had not anticipated: the argument that diplomatic resources are finite and press freedom consistently loses to commercial and security interests is the same argument that Benjamin Franklin made about British colonial policy in the 1760s. Franklin argued that the British government consistently prioritised the commercial interests of the home market over the political interests of the colonies, and that this prioritisation would eventually produce a political rupture because political interests, when consistently deprioritised, do not disappear: they accumulate. The student was right. The parallel is not perfect but it is instructive. I assigned a paper. The student smiled, which is either enthusiasm or politeness. I will know which when I read the paper.
The student’s paper will be good. I know this before reading it in the way that you can know a student’s paper will be good when you have had the conversation that preceded it and the conversation contained the argument in embryo. The argument about Franklin and the diplomatic deprioritisation of political interests was in embryo in the seminar. The paper will develop it. I will read it with the interest of someone who knows where the argument is going and wants to see how it gets there. Friday cannot come quickly enough.
Stephanie Curry writes about 1700s British and Colonial literature, American politics, and current events at bohiney.com and The London Prat.
Also at private-eye.co.uk | NewsThump | The Daily Mash
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/pamphleteers-press-freedom-argument-never-ends-stephanie-curry/
