This means that, as Ray notes, pseudonymity was theatrical, roletaking...and yes, there were some playful roles taken up. But the set of values that a very large subset of pseudonymous cases "performed" was that of the republican citizen who had divested the particulars of individual identity in order to appear in the public sphere as a featureless equal. And there were endless invocations of "disinterest" and "candor" (open-mindedness) as the basic values of public debate. So insofar as the eighteenth-century pseudonym involved a performance, it was quite often a performed submission to a public norm of civility and citizenship. "Hypocrisy upward."
UFO BREAKFAST RECIPIENTS 6/16/20
