SOURCE: Warburton, Penny. “Theorising Public Opinion: Elizabeth Hamilton's Model of Self, Sympathy and Society.” In Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830, edited by Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton, pp. 257-73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Warburton addresses references to Adam Smith in A Series of Popular Essays and compares Smith's concept of “sympathy,” as defined in Theory of Moral Sentiment, to Hamilton's idea of the “Selfish Principle.”

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas argues that a bourgeois reading public capable of rational, critical debate and competent to form its own opinions emerged over the course of the eighteenth century within the context of a developing market economy. In his seminal account, he claims that there are two forms of public: a literary public sphere and a political public sphere. In general, according to Habermas...