The Return of the Public

Democracy, Power and the Case for Media Reform

Dan Hind

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781844678631
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781684139
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Under the incurious gaze of the major media, the political establishment and the financial sector have become increasingly deceitful and dangerous in recent years. At the same time, journalists at Rupert Murdoch's News International and elsewhere have been breaking the law on an industrial scale. Now we are expected to stay quiet while those who presided over the shambles judge their own conduct.
In The Return of the Public, Dan Hind argues for reform of the media as a necessary prelude to wider social transformation. A former commissioning editor, Hind urges us to focus on the powers of the media to instigate investigations and to publicize the results, powers that editors and owners are desperate to keep from general deliberation.
Hind describes a programme of reform that is modest, simple and informed by years of experience. It is a programme that much of the media cannot bring themselves even to acknowledge, precisely because it threatens their private power. It is time the public had their say.

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. 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, however, there is an important shift in the idea of the public as it operates in English political culture. Those who sought the establishment of an English Republic, including James Harrington and John Milton, insisted that all who were capable of citizenship should constitute the political nation. Public status did not derive from monarchical appointment, but from qualities possessed by individuals and from the exercise of those qualities in government. The political nation was understood as a ‘body politic’ of which each citizen was a constituent part. The example set by the free states of ancient Greece and Rome inspired the English republicans, and, according to Thomas Hobbes, led them astray. Writing in the 1690s Hobbes was to denounce the universities as ‘the core of the rebellion’ against Charles I, while his friend John Aubrey put John Milton’s hostility to monarchy down to ‘his being so conversant in Livy and the Roman authors, and the greatness he saw done by the Roman commonwealth, and the virtue of their great Commanders’.3

The argument between King and Parliament had long turned on the origins of political power. The Royalists insisted that power was the King’s god-given possession and that the people were to be understood as subjects of an indivisible and divinely mandated power. On the day of his execution King Charles I rejected Roman notions and insisted that freedom ‘consists in having of Government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in Government, Sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.’4 The Parliamentarian Henry Parker asserted on the contrary that the people were ‘the fountain and efficient cause’ of secular power. Even kingly authority depended on popular consent. After all, as Parker pointed out, ‘the Venetians and such other free nations’ are ‘so extremely jealous over their Princes . . . for fear of their bondage, that their Princes will dote upon their own wills and despise public councils and Laws’.5

The public that will both constitute and stand guard over the state is most fully developed in the writings of James Harrington. Following Cicero, Harrington argued in The Commonwealth of Oceana that citizens could only be truly free in a state when they together determine the content of its policies, that is, when the state was a public possession. Freedom in a free state meant more than the absence of constraint, in the sense of freedom from fear of arbitrary arrest and confiscation. Free men are free because together they constitute the sovereign body of a state that in turn enacts their collective will. This collective power means that they do not have to rely on the goodwill of a prince. And it is in their union as deliberating citizens that a collection of private individuals achieves the status of a public. In Harrington’s words ‘the people taken apart are but so many private interests, but if you take them together they are the public interest’.6

When citizens do not hold power in this sense – when they do not together constitute the public and so together determine the public interest – they cannot be free, since in any other form of government they find themselves in a condition of dependence on a prince or on some combination of magnates. And to be in a state of dependence is to be a slave since, as Algernon Sidney put it, ‘liberty solely consists in an independency upon the will of another’.7 A slave might have a benevolent master, might in practice be able to live as though he were free, but he is still a slave and is as such prone to all the vices of servility. The English republicans drew heavily on Sallust’s account of the collapse of Republican virtue. Sallust’s Catiline prefigures Milton’s Satan when he gives expression to a rhetoric of outraged competence:

Ever since the Republic became the possession of a few great men it is they that have secured all the benefits of power – all taxes and tributes flow to them. The rest of us, for all that we are energetic and decent, nobles and commons alike, have become a mob without dignity or power. We are vulnerable [obnoxii] to those who should by rights fear us.8

Fear of injury is only one of the dangers in a state where effective power is a private possession. Under a despot men may be free from the fear of punishment while being enslaved by the prospect of rewards. The courtier represents for the republican imagination the spectacle of a man corrupted not so much by fear as by hope. If power is not in public hands then falsehood multiplies and virtue is impossible. The powerless compete to tell the powerful what they want to hear, while the powerful move to suppress the civic virtues that would threaten their control of the state. The Romans hated kings precisely because they were seen as a threat to individual excellence in others.9 The republican ideal held out the prospect of a political settlement that was safe for individual virtue and honest speech. Where power is the private possession of a few men or of a prince, candid description menaces the system of power by undermining the lies used to make what is unjust seem justifiable, deception of the people provides a career for the ambitious. Where the citizens share power, the truth can be acknowledged.

In a free state a citizen can rely only on himself and his fellow citizens to preserve the conditions of freedom and to resist the drift towards dependence and slavery. Mutual surveillance and constant exertion to prevent the capture of the state by private interests do not provide a guarantee of freedom. Vigilance bordering on neurotic suspicion would be the natural condition of a Republic of citizens. But the insistence that citizens should take responsibility for their own freedom, rather than relying on the restraint of their rulers, is a distinctive quality of republican thought.

English republicans did not necessarily think most of the population were capable of sharing power and therefore of being free. Many thought, or simply assumed, that women were incapable of citizenship as were those men who, through lack of property, existed in a state of dependence. Indeed in some strains of republican thought the claim to a public status enjoyed by property-owning males depended on the effective subordination of women, children and inferior males. In this they drew on pre-revolutionary traditions that had associated political authority with those who could both manage their own households and ‘live idly and without manual labour’.10

Hence, while John Lilburne – whose doctrine of ‘freeborn rights’ continues to influence constitutional liberalism, especially in the US – argued that ‘the poorest that lives, hath as true a right to give a vote, as well as the richest and greatest’,11 others advocated government in which ‘an elite few governed in the interests of the whole commonwealth’.12 Republicanism could be consistent with support for limited monarc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART 1
• PART 2
• PART 3
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index