Dan Hind’s first book, The Threat to Reason, sought to salvage the Enlightenment from caricature and forgery. Politicians, intellectuals and media commentators routinely portray themselves and their allies as intrepid pioneers of Enlightenment reason running up against the twin maleficences of ignorance and dogma. The irony is that those who loudly proclaim their adherence to Immanuel Kant’s motto – “have courage to use your own reason!” – routinely subordinate both their courage and their rationality to state corporate interests.
The Enlightenment that Hind champions is one in which people invoke their reasoning powers in a measured distance from the concentrations of power. In The Return of the Public, he moves from critique to advocacy; from examining the policies and postures of elite groups to the means of attaining a true public democracy.
But who or what is the public? Since ancient Greece and Rome conceptions of the public have not only differed markedly but have, generally, been made to fit the political systems within which they are embedded (rather than the other way around). Contemporary notions of the public have their roots as far back as the English Civil War but were extended upon considerably by two prominent intellectuals of the 1920s: Walter Lippmann and Edwards Bernays (the latter was the founder of the modern public relations industry). The consensus between them was that the public was at best amorphous and inchoate, at worst lawlessly anarchic.
The public was therefore something to be managed. The only question was how and it is here that contemporary opinion diverges. Should the public be managed by a disinterested and enlightened group of public servants (the Keynesian model)? Or is the market the appropriate custodian of the public’s interests (the neo-liberal model)?
Hind rightly rejects the first option on the basis of its elitism (not to mention the readiness of said elites to conflate the interests of the public with the interests of the state), but it is the second option that has recently been the most damaging. Hind devotes a full three chapters to the neo-liberal model, particularly on the systems of publicity (the media, academia and advertising industries, etc) that have left many of us divorced from the world, estranged from each other and alienated from ourselves. These three chapters are the strongest and most original of the book.
However, it is possible that Hind has mistaken diagnosis for symptoms so that when he moves towards prescriptions in the final part of the book his argument becomes more contentious. “Whether one wants to address the worst abuses of the current order or to secure a total transformation,” he writes, “everything flows from a reformed system of publicity.” Thus some of the reforms he advocates are not really reforms at all, but are positively revolutionary.
For example, succeeding in changing the law so that limited liability privilege only applies to worker controlled co-operatives would require precisely the kind of radical transformation in society that Hind hopes his reforms would precipitate. Some of his other suggestions are more modest.
Experiments with publicly commissioned media, for example, are already underway, notably with The Real News Network. Hind is also right when he points out that even moderate reforms that bring about a change in the general climate of opinion “will have unpredictable effects on the course of our shared life.” After all, we must start somewhere.
The Return of the Public lacks the sting of The Threat to Reason, but its object of critique is just as pertinent. The next few years will be crucial in determining the future of democracy and this, in turn, largely depends on how the public conceives itself. Hind has the courage to use his reason but, more importantly, trusts in the capacity of everyone to use theirs. “Liberty is not something that one is given,” he reminds us. “It is something that one achieves.” The Return of the Public is a rallying call for the public to re-discover just what it can achieve when it believes in itself.
