Public

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “public” originated from the Latin populus, or “people,” apparently under the influence of the word pubes, or “adult men.” The term’s considerable authority, based on its claim to represent the social whole, has continued to bump up against evidence that large classes of people have been omitted from it, as women and children are omitted from pubes. In American studies, debates have focused on the continuing applicability of this ancient notion within a specialized modern division of labor in which no one has knowledge of the whole (Dewey 1927; Lippmann 1927); on whether the apparent decline of public life (as in Robert Putnam’s “bowling alone” thesis [2000]) might reflect the larger percentage of US women now doing paid rather than voluntary work; on whether “public spaces” in the past were ever really democratically accessible to all; and on how open or universal the goals, values, and membership of so-called identity politics movements ought to be. Recent critics, skeptical that such a thing as a social whole exists except at the level of ideology, have sometimes implied the desirability of removing the word from circulation. If there has been no moratorium, this is in part because current usage also acknowledges a need for the term’s appeal against state despotism, a key motive for its rise in the eighteenth century, and against the free market economy, in which many observers see a newer, decentralized despotism.