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...