ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to locate the origins of a Scottish Enlightenment tradition of intellectual discourse that was materialized as a leading British bourgeois intellectual formation with the founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802. By highlighting the social and political struggle obscured in Habermas's original conception of the public sphere, Calhoun contributes to the articulation of a revised model that foregrounds cultural conflict between competing publics. In their contributions to the 1989 conference on the Habermasian public sphere both Eley and Fraser focus their attention on the intellectual conflict and cultural struggle that were absent from Structural Transformation. An essay published in the 1992 collection Habermas and the Public Sphere both contributions went on to become important revisionist statements on the public sphere model, influencing the direction of scholarship in fields informed by critical cultural theory, Romantic period studies. A cultural materialist approach is a significant aid in negotiating basic questions of cultural and intellectual agency in the Romantic period.
