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Humor and the framing of the public sphere and public opinion in Portugal (1797-1834)
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In his Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment (1784), Kant puts forward his
belief that the vocation to think freely, which humankind is endowed with, is bound to
make sure that “the public use of reason” will at last act “even on the fundamental
principles of government and the state [will] find it agreeable to treat man – who is now
more than a machine – in accord with his dignity”. The critical reference to La Mettrie
(1747), by opposing the machine to human dignity, will echo, in the dawn of the 20th
century, in Bergson’s attempt to explain humor. Besides being exclusive to humans,
humor is also a social phenomenon. Freud (1905) assures that pleasure originated by
humor is collective, it results from a “social process”: jokes need an audience, a “third
party”, in order to work and have fun. Assuming humor as a social and cultural
phenomenon, this paper intends to sustain that it played a role in the framing of the
public sphere and of public opinion in Portugal during the transition from Absolute
Monarchy to Liberalism.
The search for the conditions which made possible the critical exercise of
sociability is at the root of the creation of the public sphere in the sense developed by
Habermas (1962), whose perspective, however, has been questioned by those who point
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out the alleged idealism of the concept – as opposed, for example, to Bakhtin (1970),
whose work stresses diversity and pluralism. This notwithstanding, the concept of
public sphere is crucial to the building of public opinion, which is, in turn, indissoluble
from the principle of publicity, as demonstrated by Bobbio (1985).
This paper discusses the historical evolution of the concept of public opinion
from Ancient Greece doxa, through Machiavelli’s “humors” (1532), the origin of the
expression in Montaigne (1580) and the contributions of Hobbes (1651), Locke (1690),
Swift (1729), Rousseau (1762) or Hume (1777), up to the reflection of Lippman (1922)
and Bourdieu’s critique (1984). It maintains that humor, as it appears in Portuguese
printed periodicals from 1797 (when Almocreve de Petas was published for the first
time) to the end of the civil war (1834) – especially in those edited by José Daniel
Rodrigues da Costa but also in O Piolho Viajante, by António Manuel Policarpo da
Silva, or in the ones written by José Agostinho de Macedo, as well as in a political “elite
minded” periodical such as Correio Braziliense –, contributed to the framing of the
public sphere and of public opinion in Portugal.
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Humor studies Public opinion Public sphere Periodical press History of ideas