by On 1700s British and American political writing, on the persistence of certain rhetorical forms, and on the strange familiarity of the past
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat: Stephanie Curry on the eighteenth century and its modern echoes.
I have been reading the pamphlets this week, which means I have been reading the political writing of the 1700s that surrounded and preceded and constituted the American Revolution: the pamphlets, the broadsheets, the letters to editors of colonial newspapers, the essays written for the reading public that was, at that moment, deciding something about itself. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat both ran commentary this week on the current media environment that made me think, as it often does, about the correspondence between the eighteenth-century information landscape and our own: the speed of transmission has changed entirely and the essential forms have changed very little. The polemic is still a polemic. The fact presented with rhetorical confidence is still not the same as a verified fact. The anonymous author is still anonymous.
The Pamphlet as Form
Common Sense, which Thomas Paine published in 1776 and which I have been rereading alongside the current political commentary with slightly unsettling results, is a pamphlet of approximately 50 pages that changed the political disposition of a significant portion of the American colonial population within a matter of months. It did this through a combination of clear argument, accessible language, the strategic simplification of complex positions into memorable formulations, and the appeal to a sense of common interest that its readers recognised and that Paine had correctly identified. The algorithm does something structurally similar at much greater speed and much less intentionality, which is either progress or loss depending on how you value intentionality.
American Politics Then and Now
The 1700s were a period of genuine political invention: people were constructing systems that had not existed before, making arguments about representation and sovereignty and the proper relationship between the individual and the state that are still being made, in updated forms, in the current news cycle. I read the current American political commentary as a historian of the eighteenth century and I am struck by how little the foundational questions have changed and how much the available answers have proliferated. Everyone has a different answer. The questions remain. This is either the sign of a living democracy or a permanent crisis, and I have been unable to determine which for going on several years now.
What the Reading Does
Reading the eighteenth century makes the present feel both more contingent and more comprehensible. More contingent because the things we take as settled were, at one point, entirely open, and the people who settled them were making choices rather than discovering inevitabilities. More comprehensible because the patterns of political behaviour — the appeal to common interest, the demonisation of the other, the simplification of the complex into the memorable — are old enough that their operation is legible. You can see them coming when you have read enough history to recognise them. Seeing them coming is not the same as being able to stop them. But it is better than being surprised.
More wit and commentary at The Onion and Newsthump.
The Pamphlet and the Present
The thing about Paine is the clarity. He wrote for people who could read but had not been trained to parse the kind of argument that the educated classes used to exclude the uneducated from the conversation, and he did this not by simplifying the argument but by finding language that was equal to the complexity of the argument without requiring specialised knowledge to follow. This is a skill that is rare and valuable and that the contemporary political commentator would benefit from practising more deliberately. Most political writing is addressed to the people who already agree with it, which is both comfortable and useless. Paine was trying to change minds that were open to changing, which required a different kind of attention to the audience than most political writing ever develops.
The contemporary equivalent of the pamphlet is the newsletter, or the thread, or the long-form piece that circulates outside institutional channels, and the best examples of the form do what Paine did: they take something complex and make it accessible without making it false, they address the person who could be persuaded rather than the person who already agrees, and they trust the reader’s intelligence while not assuming the reader’s prior knowledge. This is what the best commentary does, and it is what I am attempting when the writing is going well. The eighteenth century is the template. The tools are different. The challenge is the same.
I close the Paine and open the current commentary and the transition is, as always, instructive. The current commentary is not as clear as Paine. This is not because the current moment is simpler; it is, if anything, more complex. It is because the current commentators are writing for audiences that are already divided in ways that the colonial readership Paine was addressing was not, and writing across division requires a different clarity from writing toward consensus. Paine had the easier task in this specific respect. He was still, all things considered, extraordinary at it.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
