The Return of the Public. Dan Hind

in jeopardy. The financial markets’ insistence that governments cut deficits while leaving the rich only lightly taxed will weaken demand and may even choke off the recent return to growth.

      The events of 2007 and the ensuing shambles should have put to rest the interconnected assumptions that defined and limited our sense of what was politically and economically possible. They should have emboldened us to consider what it would mean to live in a functioning democracy and to discuss the reforms that are needed if we are to avoid the grotesque future mapped out for us and for our children, in which we struggle under the burden of debts to which we did not consent, the consequence of a crisis we did not cause. The arguments used to deny the general population a meaningful role in shaping policy fell apart when private self-interest drove the financial system to the point of collapse and state intervention saved it. Those who, for a generation, dominated the management of the economy, and hence the substance of politics, should no longer be allowed to set the terms of the debate.

      Yet as I write most of us can only watch as the architects of the old order insist on their right to remain in control while denying that they might be responsible for the crisis they caused. In former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s words, we are all on the hook ‘for the system we all let happen’.7 So now we must reduce the deficit to restore the animal spirits of the financial markets. There has been little open debate about how the deficit is to be reduced. The glut of capital in the offshore system remains weirdly invisible to most mainstream commentators and the interlocking claims and descriptions that constitute the global media have survived more or less intact. The dizzying inequality, the gigantic infrastructure of military power, the deepening social and environmental problems, all remain beyond the reach of democratic debate. We are expected to pay up and keep quiet.

      The peoples of Britain and the United States are now on the hook for more than 13 trillion dollars ($13,000,000,000,000). Money borrowed to rescue the banks has joined vast sums spent on weapons procurement and the steady enrichment of contractors against a background of escalating tax avoidance and evasion by the very rich.8 This book sets out the terms on which we should accept responsibility for these debts after a generation of fairy tales, close confinement and abuse. The current economic crisis should be seen as an opportunity to revise the ways in which we engage with powerful economic institutions, with the state and with one another.

      The book contributes to this process of revision in three ways. Firstly, it sets out how we have tended to construe the idea of the public. A clear understanding of what it means to act in a public capacity and to engage in public life is central to a properly political identity. The current definitions of the public and the assumptions that shaped them have helped bring us to our current condition. Yet our sense of what the word means is often confused and contradictory. In ordinary speech we contrast the private world of family and friends with the world outside, the public world of strangers. Yet the ‘public sector’ – that is, the state – and the ‘private sector’ – that is, business – are both ‘public’ in this first sense. In the last three centuries production has expanded beyond the household and made it seem natural to think of the economy as an aspect of public life in a way that would have been wholly alien to earlier generations.

      The idea of the public does not always become clearer in academic writing. Some theorists, such as David Marquand and Ralf Dahrendorff, attach considerable importance to a ‘public realm’ that combines the state and charitable and philanthropic institutions and is distinct from, indeed stands in opposition to, both commercial and familial relationships. On the other hand an influential tradition associated with Jürgen Habermas emphasizes the role that private citizens connected by markets played in creating the eighteenth-century ‘public sphere’.9

      Early modern writers talked of a select group of ‘public men’, who owed their status to royal patronage. In the seventeenth century in Britain resistance to the monarchy drew on classical republicanism and argued for government by an active public of citizens. Individuals could only count themselves free, fully human even, if they exerted direct control of the state. Later, as candid republicanism gave way to oligarchic discretion and the appearance of monarchy, writers distinguished between the educated and propertied public and the landless and feckless mob.

      When we talk of ‘the public interest’ we often refer to the concerns of a particular polity; Immanuel Kant, however, argued that we only make ‘public’ use of our reason when we transcend the ‘private’ demands of civic and national institutions. Implicit in Kant’s remarks on Enlightenment is a distinction between the public and the private in which the state is a private institution, a notion that upsets almost all other taxonomies of the public and the private. Such is the tangle of even the most obvious meanings that the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary have been moved to admit that ‘the varieties of sense are numerous and pass into each other by many intermediate shades of meaning . . . in some expressions more than one sense is vaguely present’.10

      At a moment when our grasp of the concept of the public has become so confused, paradoxes multiply and compound the confusion. The publics that do exist as sites of effective and self-conscious decision about the future of our countries for the most part deliberate without publicity. Ours is an age of secluded, even secretive, publics. The active citizenship advocated by classical republicans does not venture into the daylight of general recognition.

      A history of the public, even a brief history, will help us to distinguish between these varieties of sense. The intention is not to provide an exhaustive account of the ways in which we have used the word ‘public’ – such a thing would be all but indistinguishable from a history of the modern world. Rather, I want to explore the ideas surrounding the word that continue to inform our efforts to think and act politically. In this I have tended to concentrate on British and US notions. It is impossible to discuss British conditions sensibly without reference to the United States. In part because America has dominated the British political imagination for a generation; in part because America is itself a conscious attempt to re-imagine and improve upon Britain.

      American readers who can forgive a British writer for padding about in their history will, I hope, gain something from what is, among other things, an attempt to reinvigorate the public life of the Republic. Readers elsewhere will be used to Anglo-American parochialism by now, but the ideas and assumptions of the English-speaking world continue to have an uncomfortable degree of influence worldwide. The so-called Washington Consensus drew extensively on British liberalism’s notions of the public and the private spheres and on a highly tendentious reading of Britain and American economic development.11 An historical sketch of Britain and the United States might provide something useful to those in other countries who are struggling to resist and reverse the madcap progress of Anglo-Saxon capitalism.

      Secondly, the book describes how current ideas of the public and the private and of the division between them have contributed to a more general crisis in Anglo-American culture. Public communication has broken down to the point where we lack the means to establish an accurate account of the world as the basis for common deliberation. This breakdown is most obvious in the near-universal acceptance of the fantasy that an unrestrained private economy could be relied on as the provider of public goods. But it can be seen too in the state and the corporation’s efforts to shape personality, culture and opinion, and in the way private categories – character and competence – dominate the description of politics.12

      States and profit-driven institutions downplay or ignore those aspects of reality that undermine their authority. And when omission will not suffice, specialists are on hand to promote falsehoods in the service of a higher truth to which they claim to enjoy privileged access. Far from providing the general population with the information it needs if it is to conduct itself as a public, the major media groups and the institutions of the state endeavour to create a public opinion that amplifies, or least does not challenge, their own power. With this in view, the book explores the media’s record in describing the economy in the long run-up to the financial crisis that began in 2007 and in the coverage of the period directly before the invasion of Iraq. In both cases I want to show how far removed from observable reality mainstream media accounts became.

      Opinion-poll results that confirm the prevailing orthodoxy metastasize through the sources of general information; those that do not barely register.