18th century enlightenment tends to enlarge the circulation of knowledge.
Surprisingly, it is not the three major disciplines (Theology, Law, Medicine) nor
the natural sciences that profit most of it, but the Fine Arts of Discourse (Poetry,
Eloquence). Their excessive growth eventually blasts the Latin sphere of the republic
of letters, so that we are left with a nation-wide reading public, which is in no way
›bourgeois‹. To cultivate knowledge now pertains to the academic institutions only,
while the public sphere opens up as an arena for selling, fighting, advertising and
staging. Everyone who enters the arena may enlist his public

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• Der Strukturwandel des Publikums im 18. Jahrhundert