It was in this old-fashioned manner that at the close of the eighteenth century the public of the educated strata expanded to include strata of the self-employed petty bourgeoisie. At that time retailers, who as shopkeepers were usually excluded from bourgeois clubs, in many places established their own associations; still more widespread were the trade societies which took the form of reading societies. In many cases they were branches of the bourgeois reading societies: their direction and also the selection of the reading materials were left to dignitaries who, so very much in the fashion of the enlightenment, wanted to improve the education of the so-called lower classes. Anyone who owned an encyclopedia was educated; this standard was subsequently taken over also by grocers and craftsmen. The “people” were brought up to the level of culture; culture was not lowered to that of the masses.

Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 165-66.