ABSTRACT
The impact of friendship is connected with what has been described as the distinction between the public, and the private. The rise of the middling ranks to first economic, then political power in the long eighteenth century generates the contemporaneous division of British society into public and private realms. Jürgen Habermas lauded this transformation as providing people with increasing opportunities to express their opinions in public. His model has provoked criticism on the basis of its universalist claim, because ‘the mass of the population [continued to be] automatically excluded from
participation in political processes.’2 Other scholars challenged the gendered dimension of Habermas’s distinction, pointing out that the spheres were not so divided after all: according to Elizabeth Johnston, ‘the doctrine of the “separate spheres”’ is ‘a necessary fiction’ that ‘promises a point of origin, a space that is authentic, untainted, true’ yet following the demands of capitalist economy.3 Johnston treats economic power and cultural authority as equals in order to assign ‘women, although seemingly confined to the private, [. . .] immeasurable power in the public sphere by virtue of their idealized position in the cultural imagination.’4
