The difference print makes

The classic or liberal public sphere is separated out of a larger private realm defined in opposition to the early modern state and its public authority.

By means of this simultaneous separation from the state, the marketplace, and the “intimate sphere,” the public sphere, as Habermas formulates it, can negotiate and express “the general interest” in a “rational” fashion (“Encyclopedia,” 53). In the first chapter I argued that the problem Habermas identifies as an incursion of commercial interests into the public sphere is present from the moment a public sphere becomes imaginable. Assessing that assertion and the arguments and evidence I have drawn from late sixteenth-century pamphlets requires closer attention to the ways in which Habermas describes the marketplace simultaneously as separate from the early public sphere and as its enabling condition. The “general interest,” he argues, was “guaranteed according to the presuppositions of a society of free commodity exchange, when the activities of private individuals were freed from social compulsion and from political pressure in the public sphere” (“Encyclopedia,” 53). The condition of formal or abstract equality in turn secures “the general interest” and, most important for Habermas, the possibility of a rational collective consensus within the public sphere.