The Return of the Public. Dan Hind

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, both the pressures of war and the re-emergence of religion as a force for reform play an important role in convincing political elites of the need to take into account the demands of an informed and sensible public. Pitt and later Prime Ministers recognized the need to make the administration of state business ‘more accountable to an emerging public ideology shaped in part by Evangelical morality’.1

      After the American War of Independence and in the midst of a debt crisis, the British government set up a commission to consider reforms to the system of financial administration. The commissioners invoked what they called the ‘principle of public economy’ and recommended a number of changes to the way civil servants were paid and government offices were organized. The commissioners argued that ‘all positions in Government, including Parliament and the bureaucracy, were public trusts to be discharged for the benefit of the public, not to satisfy rights inherited or acquired by their incumbents’.2 This reform of public appointments – the decision to see them as public, rather than as private, possessions – marks an important expansion of impersonal government.

      Yet while the truth discovered by a public of private individuals occasionally lent weight to calls for legislative change, as in the campaign to abolish the slave trade, for the most part the aristocracy remained free to shape the content of state policy. Even after the expansion of the electorate in 1832, Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli in their different ways found the public opinion that they needed in the country through skilful electioneering, but they did so within the confines of an elite consensus. Certainly the state changed in the face of pressure from an engaged public but the partial reform of government fortified the elites by allowing them to re-imagine themselves as indispensable servants of the people. The move away from aristocratic justifications and towards arguments based on efficiency and expert knowledge in some senses provided a rationale for continued aristocratic control. Public service was useful to those who resisted democracy. As legitimacy ceased to be conferred by the Crown or secured by the excellence of an aristocratic character it came instead to depend on particular properties of mind.

      And so in an expanded franchise the aristocratic cliques that controlled the eighteenth-century Parliament, the Whigs and the Tories, reinvented themselves with little difficulty as national parties, rechristened Liberals and Conservatives. They became fluent in the language of public service and public trust and less likely openly to insist on aristocratic privilege to justify their position. Nevertheless the initiative remained with mostly aristocratic operators who reserved the right to determine the public interest. The voters ratified and legitimated decisions taken elsewhere. Politicians sought their support and approval for their platforms but the voters’ role was to choose between those platforms, not to develop and promote their own. I am not sure that one voter in a hundred in the expanded electorate of the 1830s registered the significance of the opium trade both to state revenues and to the country’s balance of trade. It can, however, hardly have escaped the attention of the elite, with its close ties to the East India Company and the trading interests of the City.

      While those controlling the state emphasized its public character, the doctrine of laissez-faire in early Victorian Britain left the economy in private hands. Property owners insisted on their right to negotiate with their workforce as one individual to another and saw government regulation as an unacceptable interference in the sacred rights of contract. But by the mid-nineteenth century industrialization had expanded