Introduction: Digging and Levelling the Capitalist Public Sphere

Abstract

At a church in Putney, London, during November 1647 an astonishing number of meetings took place. Known today as the Putney Debates, these meetings were a singular historical event for two reasons. First, as Wood and Wood (1997) note, they signal a radical redefinition of democratic theory. Second, they represent an early example of the contradictory and ‘multiaccentual’ (i.e. the conflicting utterances of different social groups) nature of the capitalist form of the public sphere and the claims of rights and freedom within it. The result was the construction of a distinctive ideological entity which was to prove a landmark in the constitution and subsequent struggle between bourgeois and proletarian public spheres. Underlying this struggle was a conflict over the enclosure of land.