ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a narrative of change over time, wherein hitherto diffuse critical voices contesting absolutist government in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe were concentrated in the journal form. As such, political criticism experienced a major transformation with this release from its function as the mirror for princes and transference to the public. Daniel Defoes Review presents an interesting case in that he claimed an authority to speak of political, religious and economic affairs in his journal as a political activist rather than a man of letters. The formation of public opinion then was not just a spontaneous amalgamation of the general middle-class population's ideas and thoughts. The journal form in effect challenged the states monopoly of symbolic violence, and the scriptural economy it theretofore largely controlled. Bickerstaffs policy recommendation for a tax on equipage begins as something like a political critique, condemning a use of the road that seems to privilege the wealthy but also the pretenders.
