The Democratic Societies of Philadelphia and the Limits of the American Public Sphere, circa 1793–1795

Albrecht Koschnik

IN April and July 1793, Philadelphia newspapers carried the first announcements of the local Democratic societies, the German Republican Society and the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania. "Political societies should be established in a free government," readers learned, to secure "a constant circulation of useful information, and a liberal communication of republican sentiments." 1 Subsequent notices situated the new organizations in the ongoing transatlantic and democratic revolutions, revealed their meetings as centers of political education and dissent, and frequently criticized Federalist domestic and foreign policies. The societies broke no radically new ground when they argued that the creation and maintenance of a republican polity depended on knowledgeable and engaged citizens. Rather, the force and controversial nature of their activities arose from the interaction between local partisan action and national publicity. 2 At a time when almost all voluntary organizations were local phenomena and shied away from attracting public controversy, the societies used the widely distributed Philadelphia newspapers to announce their presence to a nationwide audience. The concept of the public sphere allows us to trace the connections the Democratic societies forged between print and association as well as between local and national realms. In contrast to previous work on the early American public, which has focused either on print or on voluntary action, this article combines these distinct approaches to explore the societies' sweeping challenge to the accustomed boundaries of public life in the 1790s. 3

1

Initially associated with the work of Jürgen Habermas, the model of the public sphere has been adopted by a wide variety of scholars looking for new ways to connect society, politics, and culture and to investigate areas outside of electoral and institutional politics. 4 Habermas described the public sphere as a mediating zone between the monarchical state and the civil society of the new urban centers that appeared in eighteenth-century Europe. Here developed a domain of reasoning and conversation, carried by the commercial and professional middle classes and located in periodicals as well as in salons, clubs, and coffeehouses. Criticized for ignoring the distorting effects of unequally distributed economic and political power on the constitution of the public, Habermas incorporated the problem of its potentially unrepresentative nature into his recent inquiry into the relationship between public debate and law-making. 5 In Habermas's revised model of the public sphere, the legitimacy and transparency of a democratic government depend on its ability and disposition to secure every citizen's access to the public and to eliminate all constraints on political deliberation and the formation of public opinion. 6 Even though he now recognizes the potential challenges to a rational, open, and "pluralistic" public, Habermas continues to work with a normative definition of the public that does not incorporate different and often conflicting conceptions of the public sphere itself. 7

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