test
Search publications, data, projects and authors

Article

Undefined

ID: <

50|dedup_wf_001::65b1ccd5b0a8355e007f8ae4b8528386

>

·

DOI: <

10.3917/etan.672.0132

>

Where these data come from
The making of public opinion in The Free-Thinker (1718-1721): from theory to practice

Abstract

international audience; Anxious over the hostility to the Hanoverian Dynasty and over the growing politicisation of the lower ranks that prevailed in 1718, the Whig government commission the POET Ambrose Philips and other staunch defenders of the Glorious Revolution to start a bi-weekly essay The Free Thinker which would be Educate the readers and turn from a mere ignorant, unruly opinion into a public spirited, well informed public opinion Judging political and religious events with its reason. The Free-Thinker and its editors thus criticising the shortened views of this opinion composed of women and mecanics who express their flawed views orally and loudly. By contrast it Vindicted the advancements of freelance thinking, based on reason, education and politics. It also stressed the value of the press in providing readings with readings on history, politics, the law or philosophy and on the true reading of words. The thedical therefore sought to instruct readers into beating competent citizens. The Free-Thinker seems to have been one of the early theoreticians of public opinion and to have anticipated to the birth of public opinion, decades before the late Eighteenth century.However, analysing the Free Thinker reveals how it was for the Free Thinker to reach its aim. By defining free thinking along Newtonian lines, namely the liberty to develop intellecally enquiring in a welfare world order and by Equating public opinion with the strict adherence to Whig ideas, The Free Thinker was faced with contradictions. It political tone and bias occasionally made it hard to distinguish it from mere opinion. It hostility to any form of opposition to the Whig government combined with the editory control the precedent exercised on its correspondents also suggested that the Free Thinker was still uncertain about the degree of indirect independence it could allow their correspondents. It has thus challenged its own readings on the necessity to develop one’s reason. All these elements suggest that the Free Thinker was a transitional paper which continued to create an enlightened public opinion, but which it had read it would UNLEASH the force of again subversion.; Faced with anti-hanourian hostility in England after the advent of George I, and the fear of jacobic uprisings that would destroy the political achievements of the Glorious Revolution, the whig government entrusted the poet Ambrose Philips and other members of the Whig party with the publication of Free Thinker, a weekly bi periodic trial whose task was to transform the opinion considered dangerous and factiful because it was unaware and manipulated into an educated and reasonable public opinion that would understand the benefits of the parliamentary monarchy. The Free Thinker therefore began to denounce and educate those who made up the vulgary opinion, women and workers, both of which, according to the newspaper’s editors, expressed pernicious opinions orally and without any measure. To do so, the Free Thinker praised the virtues of freedom of thought, whose founding principles were reason, education and politeness. The strategy of the periodical was to teach history, philosophy, politics, religion, and to regive their meaning to words. In this way, he hoped to provide readers with tools for reflection that would enable them to become citizens. The Free Thinker thus became one of the first scholars and practitioners of public opinion. By redefining freedom of thought as the freedom to decipher the world according to a social reading and by establishing an equation between public opinion and whiggism, Free Thinker contradicted the principle of reasonable objectivity which it placed at the heart of the definition of public opinion. The sometimes very polemic and partisan tone of periodicals added to a form of checking readers’ correspondence shows the difficulty that editors had in not even falling into mere opinion and in trusting the ability to think about their readership. The Free-Thinker’s analysis thus reveals ambiguities and hesitations on the part of writers, who, while designing their periodicals as a preferred tool for conversation and reason, with a view to forming an informed public opinion, nevertheless fear the intellectual exchange with the reader and the plurality of the voices they associate with disorder.

Your Feedback

Please give us your feedback and help us make GoTriple better.
Fill in our satisfaction questionnaire and tell us what you like about GoTriple!