The Fourth Estate is a societal or political force or institution whose influence is not
consistently or officially recognized. "Fourth Estate" most commonly refers to the news media;
especially print journalism or "the press". Thomas Carlyle attributed the origin of the
term to Edmund Burke, who used it in a parliamentary debate in 1787 on the opening up of press
reporting of the House of Commons of Great Britain. Earlier writers have applied the
term to lawyers, to the British queens consort, and to the proletariat. The term makes implicit
reference to the earlier division of the three Estates of the Realm.
The press In current use the term is applied to the
press, with the earliest use in this sense described by Thomas Carlyle in his book On
Heroes and Hero Worship: "Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in
the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they
all." In Burke's 1787 coining he would have been
making reference to the traditional three estates of Parliament: The Lords Spiritual,
the Lords Temporal and the Commons. If, indeed, Burke did make the statement Carlyle attributes
to him, the remark may have been in the back of Carlyle's mind when he wrote in his French
Revolution that "A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up; increases and multiplies,
irrepressible, incalculable." In this context, the other three estates are those of the French
States-General: the church, the nobility and the townsmen. Carlyle, however, may have mistaken
his attribution: Thomas Macknight, writing in 1858, observes that Burke was merely a
teller at the "illustrious nativity of the Fourth Estate". If Burke is excluded, other
candidates for coining the term are Henry Brougham speaking in Parliament in 1823 or
1824 and Thomas Macaulay in an essay of 1828 reviewing Hallam's Constitutional History:
"The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm." By 1835,
when William Hazlitt applied the term to an individual journalist, William Cobbett, the
phrase was well established. Oscar Wilde wrote:
In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. That is an improvement certainly.
But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism
the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is
the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the
Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says
it. We are dominated by Journalism.
In United States English, the phrase "fourth estate" is contrasted with the "fourth branch
of government", a term that originated because no direct equivalents to the estates of the
realm exist in the United States. The "fourth estate" is used to emphasize the independence
of the press, while the "fourth branch" suggests that the press is not independent of the government.
The networked Fourth Estate Yochai Benkler, author of the 2006 book The
Wealth of Networks, described the "Networked Fourth Estate" in a May 2011 paper published
in the Harvard Civil Liberties Review. His explains the growth of non-traditional journalistic
media on the Internet and how it affects the traditional press using Wikileaks as an example.
When Benkler was asked to testify in the United States vs. PFC Bradley E. Manning trial, in
his statement to the morning July 10, 2013 session of the trial he described the Networked
Fourth Estate as the set of practices, organizing models, and technologies that are associated
with the free press and provide a public check on the branches of government. It differs
from the traditional press and the traditional fourth estate in that it has a diverse set
of actors instead of a small number of major presses. These actors include small for-profit
media organizations, non-profit media organizations, academic centers, and distributed networks
of individuals participating in the media process with the larger traditional organizations.
Alternative meanings In European law
In 1580 Montaigne proposed that governments should hold in check a fourth estate of lawyers
selling justice to the rich and denying it to rightful litigants who do not bribe their
way to a verdict:
What is more barbarous than to see a nation [...] where justice is lawfully denied him,
that hath not wherewithall [sic] to pay for it; and that this merchandize hath so great
credit, that in a politicall government there should be set up a fourth estate [tr. Latin:
quatriesme estat] of Lawyers, breathsellers and pettifoggers [...].
The proletariat
An early citation for this is Henry Fielding in The Covent Garden Journal:
None of our political writers ... take notice of any more than three estates, namely, Kings,
Lords, and Commons ... passing by in silence that very large and powerful body which form
the fourth estate in this community ... The Mob.
(This is an early use of "mob" to mean the mobile vulgus, the common masses.)
This sense has prevailed in other countries: In Italy, for example, striking workers in
1890s Turin were depicted as Il quarto stato—The Fourth Estate—in a painting by Giuseppe
Pellizza da Volpedo. A political journal of the left, Quarto Stato, published in Milan,
Italy, in 1926, also reflected this meaning. Far-right theorist Julius Evola saw the Fourth
Estate as the final point of his historical cycle theory, the regression of the castes:
[T]here are four stages: in the first stage, the elite has a purely spiritual character,
embodying what may be generally called "divine right." This elite expresses an ideal of immaterial
virility. In the second stage, the elite has the character of warrior nobility; at the
third stage we find the advent of oligarchies of a plutocratic and capitalistic nature,
such as they arise in democracies; the fourth and last elite is that of the collectivist
and revolutionary leaders of the Fourth Estate. — Julius Evola, Men Among The Ruins, p. 164
British queens consort In a parliamentary debate of 1789 Thomas Powys,
1st Baron Lilford, MP, demanded of minister William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham that he
should not allow powers of regency to "a fourth estate: the queen". This was reported by Burke,
who, as noted above, went on to use the phrase with the meaning of "press".
Fiction In his novel The Fourth Estate Jeffrey Archer
wrote "In May 1789, Louis XVI summoned to Versailles a full meeting of the 'Estates
General'. The First Estate consisted of three hundred clergy. The Second Estate, three hundred
nobles. The Third Estate, six hundred commoners." The book is a fictionalization from episodes
in the lives of two real-life Press Barons: Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch.
See also Estates of the realm
First Estate Second Estate
Third Estate Fifth Estate
Notes
External links "The Fourth Estate", Section V of French Revolution
by Thomas Carlyle, as posted in the online library of World Wide School