Jonas Hanway exemplifies a person engaged in public reason. In eighteenth-century England, he actively discussed important public issues and led prominent philanthropic organizations. Hanway, however, probably did not engage in discussions in London coffee houses. Hanway considered tea drinking to fail social cost-benefit analysis to an egregious degree. He also considered social gatherings to be unhealthy and social visiting to be “laborious idleness.”^

Recent influential scholarship, led by Jürgen Habermas, has tended to idealize the public sphere.^ ^ Hanway’s life-work provides a rather less inspiring view. Like any other sphere of human competition, the public sphere needs a good structure of institutions, norms, and rules to produce good effects.