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The Return of the Public. Dan Hind
Читать онлайн.Название The Return of the Public
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781781684139
Автор произведения Dan Hind
Жанр Экономика
Издательство Ingram
One can maintain the existing social order if one controls the opinions of those one governs. In the system of political economy described by Hume and Smith private impulses deliver public benefits; society can be at once dynamic and stable while people can enjoy both freedom – in the sense of non-interference – and opulence. But the preoccupations of commercial competition deprive most people of the leisure and resources to think independently and they instead must rely on others to form their opinions. In the market society of the eighteenth-century liberals, the provision of opinion is a trade like any other and the majority therefore lack an independent understanding of their condition. They may feel themselves free and they may be rich in fact, but they cannot reason for themselves. Their liberty remains a kind of license.
If the labouring multitudes depended on a particular business to furnish them with their thoughts, then those who controlled the production of opinion could control the state. From the outset the market-place of ideas favoured the wealthy and was subject to manipulation by powerful interests. Once advertising became an important source of revenue, the thought and reason of the labouring multitudes was made subject to the steady influence of the rich. In liberal political economy we can see the outlines of a modern public as a group furnished with opinions by others, granted public status by virtue of their acquiring the habits of thought and beliefs manufactured for their consumption.
The eighteenth-century state’s respect for private property should not be understood as a simple limit on its power. The state would profit from the expansion of the private economy beyond the bounds of the household. It was hoped that freedom from arbitrary interference would encourage industry, reward individual initiative, and promote domestic order. Samuel Johnson’s remark that ‘there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money’ summed up the hope that the pursuit of wealth begat, if not virtue, then at least blameless immunity from politico-religious enthusiasm.28 It was certainly the case that higher levels of economic activity increased tax receipts and generated a surplus that could be invested in the national debt. Britain’s ability to fight a series of European wars in the eighteenth century while providing large subsidies to its allies derived in part from the massive expansion of the private economy.
The historian Ellen Meiskins Wood has argued that Locke’s celebration of the public benefits of private property helped to legitimate the expansion of English settlement in North America.29 Unlike other promoters of empire, Locke did not attempt to justify imperialism at the level of the state. Rather, settlers were entitled to take possession of land when its current inhabitants were not improving it, or rather when their failure to improve meant the land did not constitute property in the full sense. The English made American land more profitable (calculated in English terms, of course) and so were entitled to drive the natives from it, since insufficiently productive land was a kind of waste. The English could not pretend that they had found in America a terra nullius. But Locke assured them that their efforts to improve the land and the integration of what they produced into a market system justified them in exterminating what Charles Dilke would later call the ‘cheaper peoples’ of the world. Not surprisingly, those British and American intellectuals who sought to renovate liberal ideas in the second half of the twentieth century did so as part of an attempt to restore the dynamism of the state as a force for defending the propertied at home and abroad. In both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan we find the same combination of an apparently sincere admiration for the independent man of property and a sentimental and aggressive nationalism.
The ideas of the public that can be traced back to the period after the Glorious Revolution are distinct from the monarchical and republican ideas that precede them. The public is not a body of office-holders dependent on the Crown for its status, nor is it an expanded ‘body politic’ of republican citizens. In one version the public is external to the operations of the state and acts as a critical audience for the activities of those who seek to determine policy. This public is both literate and reasonable, yet it does not exercise political power directly. It is permanently on guard against threats to liberty – above all threats to the prerogatives of property, being enlisted in defence of the existing, and steepening, inequalities of eighteenth-century Britain. But this public of private individuals, bound together by ties of sociability and by the operations 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.
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