Mark J. Miller. Cast Down

One way to situate recent American literary and cultural studies is by asking which of two constructions of Adam Smith has been referenced. On the one hand, there is the Smith of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), perceived as a foundational text for economic and political liberalisms. In a broad, uncomplicated version, these liberalisms share a core belief in the unfettered individual as the basic unit for consideration and the notion that this individual is known by and made operational through a relational divide between the public and the private. The liberal individual becomes free to trade without interference from the state or caste and guild limits, and private (selfish) interests become “civilized” through shared compacts about public behavior, one of which, beyond the marketplace, is the form of representative government. This ideal came into consideration for American studies through debates in the 1990s and early 2000s about the public sphere as a concept largely derived from the delayed reception of Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962; Eng. trans. 1989). The early chapters of Habermas’s study presented the Smithian sphere of London’s eighteenth-century coffeehouses and associated publications as an exemplary space of disembodied, rational-critical discussion, and thereby as a forge for a typical bourgeois (civil) subjectivity. The egalitarian calmness of Habermas’s version was idealized, given its proximity to the spastic trades of the stock exchange; the entry fees for admission to his cited locations; the fact that these coffeehouses also served alcohol, a less rationalizing consumption than caffeine; and the reality that the period’s publications were rife with sponsored partisan hacks. Yet the concept raised the possibility of a medium of egalitarian incorporation that synchronized with enfranchisement campaigns within the U.S. as well as standing as an early response to the rise of internet discussion forums.

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