All Intensive Purposes

This tradition goes back to the early days of our nation in which the enlightenment belief that pseudonymous written argument, based in reason rather than authority, democratizes ideas and promotes freedom. Many of the writers and activists who fomented the American revolution used fictitious personaes or wrote pseudonymously -- Sam Adams wrote under 25 different identities. The idea (aside from protecting themselves from charges of treason!) was that the written words standing on their own, without the edifice of credentialed expertise and social status -- or grounding in the received word of religion -- had the greatest persuasive power. (The best example of this, of course, is Publius, of the Federalist Papers.) Writing pseudonymously openly distinguishes between the private person and a citizen of the public sphere by removing all but the disembodied voice from the argument.

// posted by t.s. @ 10:45 AM