Prior to the Renaissance, European economies were
predominantly separated into small, manorial enclaves, left
to the devices of ordained lords who were, in turn,
accountable to the King, divined, of course, by God. This
theological premise very clearly worked its way down through
that hierarchical route, holding the social fabric together
like a skein, a spider’s web of authority and power at
the center of which sat the Church. Given the nature of this
theologically derived system that manifested a solitary
divine "truth", it proved impossible to separate
the public and the private, specifically in the economic
sense that we know today. "A public sphere in the sense
of a separate realm distinguished from the private sphere
cannot be shown to have existed in the feudal society of the
High Middle Ages. In itself the status of manorial lord, on
whatever level, was neutral in relation to the criteria of
‘public’ and private’; but its incumbent
represented it publicly. He displayed himself, presented
himself as an embodiment of some sort of ‘higher’
power" (Habermas, 1992; 7). However, this idea was to
rapidly change in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy. The
concept of democratic politics, and simultaneously a new
meaning of the word "public", emerged in Europe
during the Florentine Renaissance; Machiavelli’s The
Prince (1513) is a notable exposition that reveals this
emergence. Also appearing at that time was Martin Luther, who
reformulated the institution of the Church with respect to
its position on the rising tide of a new public/private
conceptualization. "According to Weber, it is Luther who
(particularly in his German version of the Bible) shapes the
modern concept of ‘calling’ (Beruf), and
places it at the ethical center of the individual’s
worldly existence. [Luther appealed] to the ‘internal
forum’ of one’s private conscience as the ultimate
seat of one’s awareness of God" (Poggi, 1983: 60).
It is important to recognize that "a new form of the
representative publicness, whose source was the culture of
the nobility of early capitalist northern Italy, emerged
first in Florence and then in Paris and London. It
demonstrated its vigor in its assimilation of bourgeois
culture, whose early manifestation was humanism"
(Habermas, 1992: 9). The first vestiges of the private/public
split are seen here as being revealed in the actions of the
early capitalists. Capitalism, here in its early form, can be
seen as intrinsically linked to the issues of the public and
private sociological spheres. Interestingly, it was only
after the Renaissance that the common man fully realized the
potential of seizing upon this democratic notion and brought
it to full political awareness. As Wallerstein says, this
realization fully "crystallized" in the French
Revolution. Meanwhile, in the time between the
establishment of the early Italian capitalists and the French
Revolution,
the aristocratic ‘society’
that emerged from that Renaissance society no longer had
to represent its own lordliness (i.e., its manorial
authority). Only after national and territorial power
states had arisen on the basis of the early capitalist
commercial economy and shattered the feudal foundations
of power could this court nobility develop the framework
of a sociability - highly individuated, in spite of its
comprehensive etiquette - into that peculiarly
free-floating but clearly demarcated sphere of ‘good
society’ in the eighteenth century. Now for the
first time private and public spheres became separate in
a specifically modern sense. The major tendencies that
prevailed by the end of the eighteenth century are
well-known. The feudal powers, the Church, the prince,
and the nobility, who were the carriers of the
representative publicness, disintegrated in a process of
polarization; in the end they split into private
elements, on the one hand and public ones, on the other
(Habermas, 1992: 11).
This split is the same separation that has brought our
original attention to the paradox regarding the balance
between the private good and the public good. What was
revolutionary about this alteration in the nature of social
existence was the change in the maintenance of this
conceptual balance by which a "public" institution
(in the medieval sense) that legitimated political, economic
and (most importantly) moral power (i.e. the Church), was
"polarized" to allow for such legitimation to occur
by a consensus of private individuals acting on an individual
level. This polarization sponsored a modern economic
mentality based on private concerns that was to become highly
relevant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a
mentality that is particularly evident in the classical
liberalism of David Hume, Adam Smith and other economists of
the period.
Next Section - Enamoring Individuality:
The Free Trade Argument