Search

This article attributes the relative lack of attention to the ‘public sphere’ in Geoffrey Holmes's work to the pervasive influence of Lewis Namier and the Namierite conception of political history. Holmes's British Politics can be understood as a product of what might be called the revisionist's dilemma. Because the main thrust of the argument of this work was to challenge the Namierite interpretation of the structure of politics in Anne's reign, Holmes could not fail but to replicate the structures of the original Namierite paradigm. Nevertheless, Holmes's demolition of the Namierite view of Augustan politics also opened up new possibilities for further research; it ultimately widened our understanding of the ‘political’ and it prepared the ground for the remarkable interdisciplinary dialogue between literary historians, intellectual historians, and political historians. The article concludes with a discussion of how Holmes's successors began to build on his work in ways that can help explain why the Habermasian public sphere paradigm emerged to the foreground of current scholarship in a field where it had been ignored for three decades. Historians are now beginning to build a detailed post-Habermasian understanding of the ways in which the public sphere affected the structures of politics in later Stuart Britain. Work along these lines may well finally help explain the transformation of British politics from an age of Stuart revolutions to the age of Hanoverian oligarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a history of British seventeenth-century coffeehouse licensing which integrates an understanding of the micro-politics of coffeehouse regulation at the local level with an analysis of the high political debates about coffeehouses at the national level. The first section details the norms and practices of coffeehouse licensing and regulation by local magistrates at the county, city, and parish levels of government. The second section provides a detailed narrative of attempts by agents of the Restoration monarchy to regulate or indeed suppress the coffeehouses at the national level. The political survival of the new institution is attributed to the ways in which public house licensing both regulated and also legitimated the coffeehouse. The rise of the coffeehouse should not be understood as a simple triumph of a modern public sphere over absolutist state authority; it offers instead an example of the ways in which the early modern norms and practices of licensed privilege could frustrate the policy goals of the Restored monarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]