Description: In this original and illuminating study, Mark Knights reveals how the political culture of the eighteenth century grew out of earlier trends and innovations. Arguing that the period 1675-1720 needs to be seen as the second stage of a seventeenth-century revolution that ran on until c.1720, the book traces the development of the public as an arbiter of politics, the growth of a national political culture, the shift towards a representative society, a crisis of public discourse and credibility, and a political enlightenment rooted in local and national partisan conflict.
Review Quotes: "An interesting new book.... The 'new media' of later Stuart Britain were pamphlets and periodicals [and their authors] were the bloggers and citizen journalists of their day, and their influence was far greater (though their audiences were far smaller) than what anybody on the Internet has yet achieved.... Then as now, [the new media] delighted in mocking or even abusive criticism, in part because of the conventions of anonymity. One of Knights's most useful observations is that this was a self-limiting phenomenon."--Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker
"This long and detailed study is well worth reading." --The Scriblerian