Concept

The Spectator

Overview

The Spectator is a weekly British political and cultural news magazine. It was first published in July 1828, making it the oldest surviving magazine in the world. The Spectator is politically conservative, and its principal subject areas are politics and culture. Alongside columns and features on current affairs, the magazine also contains arts pages on books, music, opera, film, and TV reviews. It had an average circulation of 107,812 as of December 2023, excluding Australia.

Editorship of the magazine has often been a platform to high office in the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom; its past editors include Boris Johnson (1999–2005) and other former cabinet members Ian Gilmour (1954–1959), Iain Macleod (1963–1965), and Nigel Lawson (1966–1970). The former Conservative MP Michael Gove took over from Fraser Nelson as editor on 4 October 2024.

Today, the magazine is a print-digital hybrid. In 2020, The Spectator became the longest-lived current affairs magazine in history (overtaking The Gentleman's Magazine, which published from 1731 to 1922), and was also the first magazine ever to publish 10,000 issues. In September 2024, The Spectator was acquired by British hedge fund manager Paul Marshall, owner of UnHerd and co-owner of GB News.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where The Spectator is discussed.

And if the spectator is conceived as deciding thus to-day, he must be conceived as deciding thus day after day; with the result that one of the group expends all the effort, getting either none of the benefit or only his numerical share, while the others get their shares of the benefit without expending any efforts. That A might conceive the disinterested and benevolent spectator to decide in this way, and might…
Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics
states what it is; names the idea
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In order to produce this concord, as nature teaches the spectators to assume the circumstances of the person principally concerned, so she teaches this last in some measure to assume those of the spectators. As they are continually placing themselves in this situation, and thence conceiving emotions similar to what he feels; so he is as constantly placing himself in theirs, and thence conceiving some degree of that…
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
names the idea; opens on it
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England must contrive to manage its living interests, and quit its dead ones and their methods, or else depart from its place in this world. Surely England is called as no Nation ever was, to summon out its _kings_, and set them to that high work!--Huge inorganic England, nigh choked under the exuviae of a thousand years, and blindly sprawling amid…
Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets
states what it is; author linked in the graph
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After all this, however, the emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned.
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
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Sir Isaac Newton was revered in his lifetime, and had a due respect paid to him after his death; the greatest men in the nation disputing who should have the honour of holding up his pall. Go into Westminster Abbey, and you will find that what raises the admiration of the spectator is not the mausoleums of the English kings, but the monuments which the gratitude of the nation has erected to perpetuate the memory of…
Voltaire, Letters on England
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The Spectator

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed The Spectator

Related ideas

Place in the tradition