LITMIR.BIZ

      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. When Augustus, the founder of the first imperial dynasty, allowed the Senate to confer on him the title Pater Patriae, Father of the Fatherland, the significance was clear. Where once the whole Senate had styled themselves patres, from now on there was to be only one parent. The Republic had been finally subordinated to a single head of household, and as it became a private possession it became an empire. After Augustus aristocratic competitors for office no longer assert their right to public status, or secure it through popular recognition of their claims. Men enjoy the public status conferred on them by a monarch. In Europe the notion that a fully political identity is achieved through one’s own exertions revives only when republicanism emerges to challenge monarchy many centuries later.

      The word public was first used in early modern England to describe servants of the Crown. The idea of a public of office-holders became current in Tudor England, as did the notion that the country might be understood as a crowned Republic. Those who held office and served the monarch were public persons. The rest of the population was to busy itself with private matters.2 But the legitimacy of this public of officer-holders rested on its claims to pursue the interests of the nation as a whole, to secure what the sixteenth-century administrator and philologist Sir Thomas Elyot called the ‘public weal’. Public persons were public because the monarch appointed them, but they, like the King, served a public interest that encompassed more than their own interests. These early modern ideas of the public – the notion that public status derived from appointment by the state, and the notion that those who enjoyed this status held it in virtue of their service to the nation as a whole – have proved extremely durable. Together they inform a tradition that conflates the public interest and the national interest and insists on the right of a properly constituted state to promote them both.

      During the English Civil War era,

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