Output details

'One spectator is a better witness than ten listeners': Roger North, Making the Past Public

Context and contribution: Ford’s essay makes new claims for the historical significance of the work of the intriguing 17th century figure of Roger North in the light of what Habermas has called 'the Public Sphere'. The article interprets North from a Habermasian and historical point of view, tracing the emergence of the public sphere in the Early Modern period and examining North in the context of questions of ‘social agency’, anonymity and changes in copyright law in the period. Note that there is a biographical section in Ford’s Roger North website (see output 3) but the two outputs do not overlap. Ford’s chapter is a contribution to an edited volume which offers new ways of thinking Marxist approaches.

Research imperatives and process: This output is part of Ford’s on-going research into the writings of Roger North, and especially the critical significance of his Cartesian anti-Newtonianism. North produced an enormous amount of manuscripts across a wide range of topics as diverse as popular language, law, music, biography and autobiography, architecture, and natural philosophy or science. Owing to his Jacobite politics North lived a life of self-imposed internal exile for more than forty years following 1689 and Ford’s essay seeks to understand why he maintained his long retirement, how he managed his continuing and active political engagement outside the public sphere, and what encouraged his anxieties over publicity. The essay makes use of North’s extensive archive, principally his posthumously published material in the British Library. In bringing together this specific empirical research with broader historical topics, Ford offers a new imagining of the 'lived experience' of the public sphere for a man who passed his life in the private and intimate spaces of his study.