media will no longer be responsible for creating public opinion (a responsibility they do not, and cannot, adequately discharge). The public itself will shape the news agenda and the wider information system by commissioning journalists and researchers. This new approach to journalism will enable all of us both to discover and to publicize information when our interests coincide with others’. More profoundly, the mechanisms for commissioning and assessing inquiry will establish local, regional and national publics.
The opening up of commissioning to general participation provides a model for the reform of science and technology. A new structure of information production will change our understanding of both current conditions and future possibilities. The monopoly power to define necessity enjoyed by the expert representatives of powerful institutions will be broken. Subjects that are currently riddled with enchantment and misunderstanding, from taxation, finance and the organization of private enterprise to the waging of war, will perhaps at last be clarified for the attention of a general public. At any rate, as the historical account in the earlier chapters will demonstrate, changes to the structure of information provision have far-reaching constitutional implications. Instead of the situation we have now, where the population is reconciled to the demands of the ‘public interest’ through the combined efforts of journalists, politicians and public relations experts, under the system I propose the general population secures the means to transform itself into a public.
The changes I propose will give us all the means to challenge untruth and to develop an accurate general understanding. They will also give us the means to recognize and defeat illegitimate power, since tyranny must depend at last on claims that are untrue. If our present arrangements seem justifiable to an informed public, then by all means leave them as they are. If, on the other hand, they seem unjustifiable in the light of a general understanding, they ought to be changed in ways that seem reasonable to the majority.
For myself, I believe that the current order of things depends on our accepting the comforts of an hallucinatory system of descriptions and a chain of pretended necessities that is only plausible in the absence of accurate information. This current order can only last as long as we remain unable to constitute ourselves as publics. Our rulers steered us into an economic crisis while those whose job it was to stay tolerably well acquainted with the facts of the world for the most part assured us that all was well. It is time to set aside the bleak lyricism of critical complaint and think practically about how we might alter the regime of truth in which we make our lives. By changing the institutional structures through which we generate and share information we begin to set ourselves free, since only a world more fully and more widely understood can be transformed. The first stage of this transformation, the clarification of general understanding, can only be resisted by the established powers on feeble and unconvincing pretexts. I am simply arguing that the population as a whole should secure access to the same power to inform itself that the powerful have always enjoyed.
These, then, are the aims of the book – to grab whatever seems useful from the last four centuries of Anglo-American history, to describe current conditions in the light of that history, and to set how we can make good on a long-held and long-frustrated hope: that we might live as humans, which is to say, in freedom.
PART 1
The Idea of the Public
CHAPTER ONE
The Classical Public
Every thinker puts some portion of the apparently stable world in peril.
John Dewey
THOUGH THE VARIOUS ideas of the public that survive and overlap derive from particular historical moments they are also contemporary inventions. The tangle of meanings towards which the word now vaguely gestures holds most of us in permanent suspense, at some distance from the points of decision. If we can separate out those that contribute something to the composite sense of the word as it is used today, then some of the rubbish that stands in the way of effective political action will have been be cleared away.
In this regard, I am not so much an archaeologist as a grave robber, in the sense that my aim is not to reconstruct the past, but to take what strikes me as retaining some contemporary currency. For this reason Rome, rather than Greece or ancient Mesopotamia, seems like the natural starting point. For the republican form of government, which has won out over monarchy in much of the world, justified itself in terms of an attempt to renovate classical, and especially Roman, institutions. To be sure, the vague desire to emulate Rome lies close to the heart of the American state project. And if modern republicanism defines itself decisively against monarchy and the idea of power as a private possession, then it takes heart from the Roman traditions of regicide.
The Roman Republic was a res publica, a public possession. That is, it belonged to a community regulated by laws. A public in the Roman sense only exists when the state belongs to its citizens, when, as Cicero puts it, ‘res publica [est] res populi’. Without ownership of the state, citizens cannot engage with one another as properly public actors. Freedom is only possible for those who have a share in state power; the subjects of a King can only ever be slaves. In practice only a tiny minority of Rome’s inhabitants enjoyed full rights to participate in political life. Families with established claims to recognition – that is to say, the nobility – dominated political office and sought constantly to maintain and enhance the rights of their family to a share in the burdens and rewards of administration. Though talented outsiders could reach the ranks of the elite, nobility – the celebrity of virtue that justified claims to a fully public status – was more often inherited.
Rome was an aristocratic Republic – generation after generation a small number of families dominated public life. The heads of these families were intensely conscious of their obligation to maintain the family’s glory and they would often claim pre-Republican and even divine origins to enhance their claim to public status. Each family was a monarchy in miniature and its claim to sovereign control of its own affairs could easily mutate into attempts to subvert the Republic for private glory. Furthermore public status depended on the authority that came from the disciplined control of the private household. The scandal of domestic disorder constantly threatened to cripple the public authority of a Roman noble.
At the same time the Roman Republic was characterized by an anxious insistence that the private world of the family and its obligations could be distinguished from the public world of the state. Rome’s historians endlessly repeat the message that the closest private ties meant nothing when compared with the citizen’s public duties. The consul Titus Manlius Torquatus executed his own son for engaging with the enemy in defiance of his father’s orders; Lucius Junius Brutus went one better and had two of his sons killed for treason.
The Roman patriarch was always pushing at the limits of his private power. As the head of a family he had enormous powers of compulsion and when he went into the city to dispute and build alliances with other heads of family he accepted only those restrictions that could be effectively enforced. In one improving anecdote a consul forces his father, Fabius Maximus Cunctator, to dismount before approaching him. The hero of the war against Hannibal then assured his son that he meant no disrespect but that he considered ‘publicly established laws to be more important than private obligations’.1 While the story repeats the official dogma that duty to the state outweighs filial piety, it shows too that the prerogatives of a head of family could only be restrained by the vigorous exercise of lawful authority.
As long as the Republic survived, its rulers wanted to maintain this distinction between the public, which is to say Rome, and the private, which is to say the family. Their energetic mutual surveillance took place in a culture where the control of the state was both the highest human excellence and the only truly honourable means to secure a fortune. Collectively, aristocrats worked to resist what they craved as individuals – the permanent ascendancy of one patriarch over all rivals.
