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CHAPTER TWO

Private Vices and Public Virtues

THE REPUBLICAN MODEL did not establish itself in Britain as its advocates had hoped. Monarchy was restored, albeit on ambiguous terms. William III insisted on his ancient prerogatives and Parliament accepted his demands. The monarchy’s control of policy weakened only gradually, since it was possible for both William and the Hanoverian Kings to use foreign funds to coordinate support from the political elite. But an activist King would not challenge the system established in 1688 and seek to rule in defiance of Parliament. The popular charisma of the monarchy declined. Where the Stuarts had been able to call on a national constituency – and would continue to do so in parts of Britain well into the eighteenth century – the dynasties that replaced them had no desire to establish themselves in the hearts of their subjects. Such bonds were dangerous. Better that the King remain a distant figure of duty and tradition than that he become a figure promising a change in conditions.

The bulk of the population were offered a fantasy of unbroken tradition and time-honoured obedience to the ancestral order. The English came to see themselves as a private people, secure in the enjoyment of their God-given freedom, happiest at home, or making themselves at home in someone else’s country. They were encouraged to be ignorant, and proud, of their governing institutions. The philosopher David Hume later argued that even those few who could see through the ‘prejudices in favour of birth and family’ would want to preserve them in everyone else in order to maintain ‘a due subordination in society’.1 Meanwhile, the political class governed in its own interests and acted to ensure that the sum of its private concerns was understood to constitute the public or the national interest.

These oligarchs had no desire to reveal the reality of power in Britain, since to do so might risk awakening memories of the Republic. Better a monarchy in theory and an oligarchy in fact than a system open to scrutiny and a people enlivened by the prospect of radical or apocalyptic change. More than a century after the Civil War observers saw in expressions of mob violence the spectre of the Republic. Edward Gibbon wrote of the Gordon Riots in June 1780 that ‘forty thousand puritans such as they might be in the time of Cromwell have started out of their graves’.2 As long as the Kings accepted the limits of their power relative to the propertied classes, monarchy and aristocracy were safe in the shared space of a constitutional fiction. Political life in England took on the quality of a paradox. From now on what was public was to be clothed in secrecy and deceit. Participation in government was to be tightly restricted and conducted on terms that were not generally explained. Those who determined state policy did so as loyal servants of a monarchy that they themselves had installed.

The effectual political nation – the successors to the ‘public men’ of the Tudor and Stuart monarchy – that emerges in England after 1688 was tiny: Henry Fielding famously said that a ‘nobody’ was ‘all the people in Great Britain, except about 1200’. But this ruling elite owed more to the republican tradition than its propagandists through the ages would want to admit. The magnates that brought William and Mary to the throne and negotiated the terms on which they would govern appreciated that their own freedom depended on their participation in the political sphere. Rather than contenting themselves with ‘negative’ freedom, they secured positive control of revenues and legislation. They tacitly held in reserve the ultimate power, to remove one King and put another in his place. The oligarchy organized in Parliament did not wish to be left in peace, to pursue their private concerns and to enjoy their private property. Freedom from state interference was not enough. Instead they engaged with the state both to protect and to promote their interests. The popular language of liberty elaborated in the eighteenth century, and the social egalitarianism that famously accompanied it, were something of a cover for an active ruling class that used its control of legislature to deliver the policies it desired. The burden of taxation fell on consumption and successive acts of enclosure further consolidated aristocratic power at the expense of small and middling independent farmers.

As noted, this effectually governing public justified itself at first through appeals to the ancient constitution. There was no trace in the Bill of Rights of the idea that the people were the ‘fountain and efficient cause’ of power. But a comprehending public was now in effective control of the state. It was much more narrowly circumscribed than many republicans had hoped, and in place of Roman candour it spoke with carefully organized hypocrisy. But it was the political nation, and its common concerns constituted the animating principles of state power. Hence those who had planned the coup against James II could not resist justifying themselves retrospectively through an appeal to the idea of a contract between people and sovereign. After 1688 John Somers argued that James II had not simply left the throne vacant. He had broken the compact that existed between Crown and people and therefore lost his right to rule. What at the time had been all nervous improvisation became a vindication of the idea that Kings could not rule without a decent respect for the opinions of their subjects. John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government provided an elegant vindication of the plotters of 1688. The first treatise put an end to the notion of divine right and the second established the necessity of consent from at least some of the governed if power was to be legitimate.

The ruling class that established itself after 1688, like all durably successful ruling classes, paid close attention to those outside its ranks. The clique that brought William III to Britain went on to create a faction within the Whig Party (the so-called ‘junto’) that acted as a link between the King and the financial powers in the City. And it wasn’t only the merchant princes of the City that concerned the political classes. Locke’s second Treatise reinforced the prerogatives of private property and established limits on those of the monarchy. But this weakening of monarchy in the interests of private property came at a price. The people would have to be taken into account, would indeed have to be granted public status of sorts, to the extent that they qualified in virtue of their private possessions.

This public was defined in various ways. The Earl of Shaftsbury thought that the public consisted of those that had ‘seen the World and informed themselves of the Manners and Customs of the several Nations of Europe’.3 This disqualified most men and nearly all women, but still included more people than sat in Parliament. A more expansive, and less exalted, notion of the public can be detected in the decision to establish a national museum ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public’.4 This public went to the theatre, read the newspapers and supported the settlement of 1688.

As long as the majority of the population could be kept at arm’s length from decision-making there was no harm in the idea of a contractual state. Indeed if the King based his authority on the consent of the governed, the state derived important benefits; the King borrowed money on behalf of the nation, rather than as a steroidal aristocrat acting on his own account, and so the nation stood behind the debt. The historian Sidney Homer notes that ‘by the 1720s the English national credit could be effectively pledged behind the loans of government in the manner of the mediaeval Italian republics, the provinces of seventeenth century Holland, and modern democracies’.5 Rule by consent of the propertied enabled Britain to establish a national system of credit.

At any event, though the public in the sense of the political nation properly defined remained quite small, and certainly smaller than many Civil War republicans had hoped, the scene was set for a new articulation of the idea of the public. In the early modern era the idea had referred to those who held office under the monarchy. The republicans had offered a more expansive notion, where the public, qualified by economic independence and virtue, collectively embodied the state. But in both cases there was no sense that the public might exist outside the state. The republicans looked to a future where all persons capable of independent thought and virtuous action participated in government and together articulated the public interest. They did not have in mind a public that would scrutinize and hold the state to account while remaining at a distance from its institutions. In this sense the republican public was somewhat like the monarchical public that it sought to replace.

But after the 1688 settlement something like modern public opinion, through which the actions of the state could be challenged, began to take shape. During the Civil War, literacy had spiked as a mass readership sought emancipation through the written word.6 Radical ideas had reached vastly more readers than under the King. In 1640 just over 20 political pamphlets appeared. Two years later the number had risen to nearly two thousand.7 The end of the Republic and the return of the monarchy reduced the scope for popular engagement in the political sphere. But a reading culture recovered, driven by energetic publishers who substituted entertainment for agitation, and displaced aristocratic patronage as they did so. This new culture industry, characterized by the novel rather than the pamphlet, supported, and was supported by, the metropolitan culture that developed in the period after the Restoration. Thousands of coffee-houses, each with their devoted clientele, scores of clubs, where men could meet in conditions of formal equality, and taverns, in which all kinds of people were wont to ‘blend and jostle into harmony’,8 provided venues for sociability for writers and publishers, playwrights and poets, financiers and tradesmen as well as aristocrats and gentleman politicians. As early as the 1670s the authorities were complaining, in terms that will become familiar in the centuries that follow, that:

Men have assumed to themselves a liberty, not only in coffee-houses but in other places and meetings, both public and private, to censure and defame the proceedings of the State, by speaking evil of things they understand not, and endeavouring to create and nourish an universal jealousy and dissatisfaction in the minds of His Majesties good subjects.9

As literacy once again expanded and commercial networks grew to satisfy popular appetites, writers came to see an anonymous ‘public’ of book-buyers as a viable source of patronage. And this new literary culture thought of itself as a ‘commonwealth of polite letters’.10 Letters to the editor of the Spectator were posted through the jaws of a lion fixed on the wall of a local coffee-house, Button’s,11 a larky reference to the Bocca di Leone in Venice, where the people could secretly post their suggestions and complaints to the governing authorities.

Jürgen Habermas situates the creation of what he calls the public sphere in London’s new social promiscuity. A public of private individuals educated by both literary culture and the shared life of the city begins to discover itself as a group with shared values and a shared willingness to comment on matters of common concern. He notes that, by the end of the eighteenth century, the public, in the sense of a group outside of the state and Parliament to which politicians had finally to defer, certainly exists as a feature of aristocratic rhetoric. Here is Charles Fox, speaking in 1792:

It is certainly right and prudent to consult public opinion . . . If the public opinion did not happen to square with mine; if, after pointing out to them the danger, they did not see it in the same light with me, or if they considered that another remedy was preferable to mine, I should consider it my due to my king, due to my Country, due to my honour to retire, that they might pursue the plan which they thought better, by a fit instrument, that is by a man who thought with them . . . but one thing is most clear, that I ought to give the public the means of forming an opinion.12

The public in this sense becomes the spectral authority to which challengers to the existing combination of King and clique can appeal. The public was also the country and, as Habermas points out, ‘the opposition, as the party of the country, always appeared to be in the right versus the party of the court corrupted by “influence”’.13 Perhaps we see in Squire Western’s complaints in Tom Jones about ‘Hanover rats’ a premonition of that staple of modern American politics, the run against Washington. Certainly the emotional resources of Whig and Tory rhetoric, as well as those of Victorian liberalism and conservatism, find uncanny echoes in the brand associations of the Democrat and Republican parties.14

Habermas makes much of the increasingly public nature of political life in Britain in the eighteenth century; after a series of campaigns by John Wilkes the proceedings of Parliament are finally made available to the reading public; individuals outside the elite take an interest in state policy and draw on new publications for information. Habermas argues that a public sphere emerges in Britain that is the collective achievement of private actors. It is their engagement with the cultural productions of the time, their experience in the new intimacy of the bourgeois household, and their exertions in the market-place that give them the knowledge and confidence to challenge the existing political classes. According to Habermas they aspire to establish truth, rather than authority, as the animating principle of legislation. This public sphere is propertied and male, and its claims to universalism are always suspect, but as a space for rational debate constructed by private individuals and situated outside the state in Habermas’s account it represents something profoundly new.

The idea of the public sphere as something like ‘a discursive community of citizens . . . who are outside the state but who nonetheless deliberate, debate and otherwise express opinions about state policy’ has become very influential in academia in the United States, especially in debates about media reform.15 Efforts to improve journalism by addressing the profession’s values and practices that go by the name of public journalism draw extensively on the concept. Edward Lambeth has written that ‘were public journalism to require a philosophical patron saint, Habermas, arguably, would appear to be a logical candidate’.16 In some ways this salience isn’t surprising.

Habermas’s historical account, where the prototypical public sphere emerges from the private actions of private men, appeals to advocates of public journalism since it appears compatible with an acceptance of the prevailing institutional order. If commercial institutions were able to create a vigorous and critical media culture in the late eighteenth century, then there is nothing to stop modern newspaper companies from doing the same. Advocates of public journalism exhort journalists to revive the public sphere and to enliven civil society – ‘to form as well as inform the public’ in Jay Rosen’s formulation – while leaving both market forces and state power untouched. Reform of the media becomes a matter of journalists doing a better job. The formula appeals strongly to liberal self-love, but, as Michael Schudson points out, ‘nothing in public journalism removes power from the journalists or the corporations they work for . . . always authority about what to write and whether to print stays with the professionals’.17 The invocation of the public sphere dignifies journalism by suggesting that media reform can be achieved by a change of attitude by journalists. Habermas’s public of private individuals seems to justify leaving the management of the media in the hands of private actors, whether they be individual employees or the companies they work for. In such circumstances calls for more extensive civic engagement by journalists can scarcely be distinguished from calls for more pervasive market research.18

Fox appeals to the public, even calls it into existence, to adjudicate between the claims of those who form the government and those who aspire to do so. The public, in the sense of a force outside of the state and the Parliament, takes substance from conflicts within the elite. Public opinion becomes in one sense paramount, inasmuch as the elites, once they have adopted Lockean ideas of a government based on the consent of the governed, cannot be seen to defy the judgement of the new public of sensibility. But this public is an arbiter in struggles at the centre, it does not develop policies and choose the executors of those policies, whatever Fox might sycophantically suggest. Rather it stands in judgement of men who are qualified to act in the political arena and it chooses between them. The educated public listens and observes, critically to be sure. But it does not speak for itself. It chooses between candidates offered in the electoral process, and can applaud or catcall the activities of the political performers. It can be delighted by charisma, by the poetry of the campaign, even by the content of a platform, but it is not expected to share in government. Though flattered with the title of public, the emerging society organized around the club, the tavern, the stage and the novel is better understood as an audience.

This audience was from the outset subject to every form of dramatic manipulation. The historian Edmund Morgan notes that as early as 1681 constituents were sending instructions to Parliament in which ‘the similarity of the wording suggests not only that they were inspired from above but that they originated in a single source’. In the election of 1742 instructions from the constituencies helped swing the result, prompting the losers to complain that ‘it is the People that speak but the Malecontents dictate. A gross piece of state Mummery, wherein A instructs B how B shall instruct A’.19 This early example of what will later be called ‘astroturfing’ is part of a wider process in which the idea of the public is deployed to undermine or reinforce factions within the ruling class.

Habermas argues more persuasively that the image of the English public provides an inspiration for liberal movements throughout Europe. Certainly the critical culture that emerges in France and Germany in the later part of the eighteenth century, and provides a venue where a programme of reform can be elaborated, closely resembles his model of a public sphere as a public of private individuals. In the struggle against absolutism and ecclesiastical power, Britain had enormous charisma as a champion of liberty. But in Britain a public of private individuals never establishes itself as the consistent originator of political action. Decisions mostly remain in the hands of aristocratic elites that determine policy within an agreed framework of accommodation with the mercantile and financial interests and the Crown. The public is important for maintaining dynamic competition between the politicians, but while it is guided towards judgements about their competence and probity, it only very rarely determines what they do.20

Somewhat removed from the metropolitan world of aristocratic intrigue, David Hume and Adam Smith developed an account of political economy, and an accompanying account of the relationship between the public and the private, that achieves massive general authority not once but twice – first in the era of late Hanoverian and early Victorian laissez-faire and again in the generation just past. Hume and Smith both rejected the heroic ideal of active citizenship and insisted that men should, wherever possible, be left to pursue their own interests in whatever way they chose. The owners of property, acting as buyers and sellers, were best left to discover the price of goods. Efforts to intervene by political authority would be useless, if not downright harmful, and would anyway infringe on the right of the individual to dispose of his property as he wished. Canting statesmen could not be trusted to safeguard the public interest. The frankly selfish activities of individuals engaged in free exchange would do a far better job. After all, men strive to improve themselves in order, in Smith’s words, ‘to be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy’.21 The steady impulse to better our condition and our status makes it possible for men to live both freely and in a relative harmony with one another, even when those involved have not ‘the least intention to serve the public’.22

There is in Hume and Smith a marked reluctance to rely on aristocratic virtue to secure the common interest, though they recognized the need to maintain the distinction between ‘the elegant part of mankind’ and those who were ‘immersed in mere animal life’.23 But while the Earl of Shaftsbury had claimed that ‘to philosophize, in a just signification, is but to carry Good-Breeding a step higher’,24 Smith justified, to himself at any rate, the exclusion of most of the population from intellectual autonomy by an appeal to the division of labour: ‘In opulent or commercial society, to think or reason comes to be, like every other employment, a particular business, which is carried on by a very few people, who furnish the public with all the thought and reason possessed by the vast multitudes that labour.’25 The tiny minority who were able to reason had enormous political power, since, according to Hume, ‘the governors have nothing to support them but opinion’.26 A government wins a great deal of security if ‘the generality of the state, or . . . those who have the force in their hands’ tend to believe that ‘the particular government which is established is equally advantageous with any other that could easily be settled’. This Hume calls the opinion of public interest. Added to it are the opinions of right to property and the opinion of right to power. Together these constitute the basis for stable government.27

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.

For Kant, everyone, to the extent 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