Public

In modern usage, public is both an adjective (public interest, public opinion) and a noun (the public). As a noun, it suggests the judging and debating social collective. As an adjective, it marks its object as a matter of common concern and judgment of this collectivity. Both meanings derive from practices of citizen sovereignty or self-rule that arose in the eighteenth century. In the medieval and classical periods, the public did not refer to commonality but rather was associated with leaders (elites, lords) and displays of assembly (the agora) or power (feudal lords) (Habermas 1989). The notion of a public realm of social life, or the public sphere, in which average citizens might debate and critique political matters and state decisions, and also social matters, was part of a shift from absolutism to democratic governance (Koselleck 1988). Jürgen Habermas’s narrative of the evolution of the public sphere is useful here, as a distillation of liberal theory and institutional invocations of publicity and the public sphere. He argues that a political norm of publicity as something like a citizen’s right to know arose in the eighteenth century. People came to expect information about policy and other state decisions to be made accessible as a public matter, and began to critique such decisions. This engagement of citizens in discussions and critiques of decisions that pertained to all, rather than more immediate, private matters of individual or small-group concern, was the initial incarnation of the public sphere. Experiencing themselves not only as private people, but also as representatives of the polis, citizens—or more precisely, bourgeois citizens—began to make demands on the state in the name of the public, or common, good. Thus, the public sphere became the site for claims of representativeness. Ultimately, the public sphere became the reference point for the legitimacy of democratic governments, the manifestation of citizen sovereignty.