of a nascent culture industry, does not usually develop programmes of its own; in Isaiah Berlin’s terminology it is more concerned with negative than with positive liberty.
In the liberal thought of Hume and Smith ‘the public’ all but vanishes as an entity distinct from the sum of economic actors. The ‘public good’ emerges from the decisions of individuals whose motives are purely private.30 More vaguely, we find in the eighteenth century the origins of the public as a term of art – the public as a feature of elite rhetoric and an object of elite subterfuge. All the while an effectually governing group controls the state and uses it as a vehicle to serve its interests. In the din of liberty the rural population is impoverished while the City and the aristocracy, under cover of monarchy, make common cause. Here perhaps we see the paradox of modern power, the fact of a secret public.
Yet this does not exhaust the legacy of the period. In the work of Immanuel Kant we find a conception of the public that presents a much more serious challenge to the established order than is at first apparent. In his essay What is Enlightenment? Kant sets out to explain both what Enlightenment consists of and how it might be made compatible with a stable civil order. His description of Enlightenment itself is familiar now to the point of cliché. Enlightenment, he says, is ‘the process of moving out of a self-incurred immaturity of mind . . . Dare to know, aude sapere, that is the watchword of Enlightenment.’31 But his account of how such behaviour might be possible is much more exotic and much more important, and it turns on his distinction between the public and the private.
Kant argues that when we act in an institutional or social role, we do not and cannot exercise our reason with total or perfect rigour. It is only when we step outside these roles, where we spend much of lives, and in which we find much of what is valuable in them, that we can hope to reason in a manner that is unconstrained. For Kant the crucial distinction is between the public and the private use (öffentlich gebrauch and Privatgebrauch) of reason. He gives the example of a priest who can honourably fulfil his private duties as long as he is not sure that the dogmas of his faith are false. But when he considers faith in the light of reason he is free to state the ways in which he thinks these doctrines might be in error. Indeed as ‘a scholar addressing a reading public’ he is obliged to speak freely and so becomes the prototype of enlightened action. We can labour under any number of private restraints without retarding the progress of general Enlightenment, so long as the sphere of public reason remains free.
Kant’s description of the entirety of our institutional and social life as a realm of private reason runs contrary to a more conventional schema in which the state is understood as a public realm while the family and the market-place are private. It also undermines the separation of a cadre of experts from an inexpert public that emerges in the eighteenth century and remains with us today. Experts who remain bound to institutional roles and interested constituencies cannot make public use of their reason – they are not, in Kant’s sense of the word, enlightened. It follows that the extent to which individuals acting in their capacity as placeholders control general debate traces the remaining work of Enlightenment.
For Kant, everyone, to the extent that they can reason without limits and yet have limits imposed on them by the demands of society, is both a public and a private actor. The reasoning public was not a bourgeois audience that stood in judgement of the state. The state’s officers, from the King down, are themselves private actors. But they are also potentially public actors, to the extent that they are capable of reasoning outside their institutional roles and of transcending the habits of thought that develop within these roles. Only in this way do individuals become capable of enlightened activity. And for Kant the discoveries of reason exercised publicly outweigh the demands of obedience. The public of enlightened exchange runs parallel with the private world of the state, the family and all other institutions. The personnel are the same but the modes of engagement differ profoundly.
Kant situates enlightened activity in a space separate from the ongoing world of institutional and personal commitments. It is a model of Enlightenment that stands in direct opposition to our own arrangements. At present, reliable access to publicity depends above all on institutional position. Individuals are invited to share their views and to contend with one another in debate to the extent that they can demonstrate some private stake in the matter at hand. There are occasional exceptions. Novelists, actors and entertainers sometimes speak out on matters outside their areas of immediate expertise in ways that reach an audience, with mixed results. Celebrity substitutes for institutional interest as grounds for being heard. Members of the public are aggregated in opinion polls whose terms they do not set and cannot challenge. Occasionally they appear in front of the camera, or are quoted in print, edited in ways they do not control. But for the most part, directly interested parties, acting in what Kant would call a private capacity, populate those discussions and debates that become widely known. In the current division of labour the views of individuals, in so far as they are freely reasoning beings, are ‘private’, they do not trouble the major systems of representation and indeed they are often kept secret by those working within powerful institutions. In what is often, revealingly, called ‘the market-place of ideas’, no effectual weight inheres in reasoning that is, or attempts to be, stripped of institutional interest, and that is directed towards truth for its own sake.32
Our times call on us to consider how we might create the conditions in which we can reason publicly in both the Kantian sense and in the general meaning of the word – that is, how we might reason as disinterested individuals and in ways that communicate successfully with others. Later I will argue that we need to create institutions that do not grant disproportionate prominence to those occupying particular institutional roles. Participatory institutions do not enforce disinterest, but they give due weight to the general interest in unencumbered truth. The implications, for both pluralism and neoliberalism, will become more obvious in the sections that follow.
Jean Jacques Rousseau noted that human nature was irreducibly dualist. The desire for personal advantage was innate in man, but so too was what he called ‘the first sentiment of justice’.33 Rousseau does not call for selflessness or self-sacrifice, but rather for an open-eyed recognition of our inescapable ambiguity as beings both narrowly self-interested and generously committed to the cause of justice. This division maps closely onto Kant’s later distinction between private and public reason. The cause of general Enlightenment demands that we recognize the demands of justice even when they are inconvenient to us as institutional beings. All private forms of understanding, no matter how grand the institutions from which they derive and which they serve, must give way to the discoveries of a freely reasoning public if we are to inhabit a world safe for truth.
Kant, in distinguishing between the private and public use of reason made it clear that every public actor was also a private one, and that claims made in a private capacity must be subject to public scrutiny. And if a congregation is a private gathering, then it follows, though Kant does not say it out loud, that so is the machinery of state, in so far as its discussions are constrained by the need for obedience. Even the King is a private man when he acts in accordance with the demands of his institutional role. Kant offers the exercise of universal reason as the model of properly adult action. In place of the civic space of traditional republicanism, he insists that if we want to reason publicly we must reason without regard for the duties we normally owe to our sovereign, to our community and to ourselves as individuals with private concerns. The profoundly radical implications of Kant’s approach to the question of Enlightenment perhaps explain why he was later banned from political writing. They certainly make it difficult to take seriously those British writers in particular who like to claim, as the late Professor Porter did, that ‘Professor Kant’s ideal of freedom was as timid as the man himself.’34
CHAPTER THREE
Public Servants
IN THE 1790S the established system of government in Britain came under sustained pressure. The revolutions in America and France had undermined many of the assumptions supporting monarchy and aristocracy. As Philip Harling points out,
