"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 . . . into that peculiarly free-floating / but clearly
demarcated sphere of `good society' in the
eighteenth century" (10-11).
"
The nobleman was authority inasmuch as he made it present.
He displayed it, embodied it in his cultivated personality; thus
"He is a public person, and the more cultivated his movements, the more
sonorous his voice, the more staid and measured his whole being is, the
more perfect is he... and whatever else there may be in him or about him,
capacities, talents, wealth, all seem gifts of supererogation."
Goethe one last time caught the reflection of the representative publicness
whose light, of course, was refracted in the
French rococo court and
refracted yet again in its imitation by the petty German princes. The
different hues emerged all the more preciously: the appearance
of the "lord," who was "public" by virtue of representation,
was stylized into the embodiment of gracefulness, and in
this publicity he ceremoniously fashioned an aura around himself.
Goethe again used "public person" in the traditional sense
of public representation, although in the language of his age
it had already taken on the more recent meaning of a servant
of public authority or of a servant of the state. The "person"
however, was immediately modified into the "cultured personality." Strictly
speaking, the nobleman in the context of this letter preserved
as something of a pretext for the thoroughly
bourgeois idea of the freely self-actualizing personality that
already showed the imprint of the neohumanism of the German
classical period. In our context Goethe's observation that
the bourgeoisie could no longer represent, that by its very
nature it could no longer create for itself a representative
publicness, is significant. The nobleman was what he represented;
the bourgeois, what he produced:
"If the nobleman,
merely by his personal carriage, offers all that can be asked of
him, the burgher by his personal carriage offers nothing, and
can offer nothing. The former has a right to seem: the latter is
compelled to be, and what he aims at seeming becomes ludicrous
and tasteless."
The representative bearing that the nouveau
riche wanted to assume turned into a comical makebelieve."
(Habermas, J. 1962/1989 p. 13)
The Prussian King regulated the Hallenser Intlligenzblatt from 1729 on: "In
general `the scholars were to inform the public of useful truths.' In this
instance the bourgeois writers still made use of their reason at the behest
of the territorial ruler; soon they were to think their own thoughts,
directed against the authorities" (25).