The Power of Nobody: The roots of the public as a political subject

The idea of the public as a designation of political agency is paramount to contemporary and modern notions of democracy. But as an agent itself, the public is known to be feeble and subject to the institutional structures that give it shape. This is most often viewed today through formalized processes of participation, but the figure of the public has an important foil in early English political history. In this paper I explore how the idea of the res publica developed from an idea meaning ‘the state’ to an idea that shaped conceptions of democracy in the early modern period. My central thesis concerns how a Latin adjective ‘publicus’ that meant 'general' attained a sense of political agency in the modern state. I argue that this agency played an important role in the formation of what would become the administrative state, where sovereignty is the central political problem after the collapse of traditional systems of authority. I use texts including More's Utopia, Elyot's Book of the Governour, as well as the works of Locke and Hobbes to explore how the idea of the public originated less to support the emergence of a democratic state than to replace abstract notions of authority as traditions of divine right dissolved. My essay makes extensive use of the texts to understand the contextual meaning of 'public' and attempt to grasp an important, overlooked, and taken-for-granted component of the modern state, namely, how (and to some extent why) did the public become an agent for political activity? Understanding the history of the idea of the public is important for modern conceptions of politics around the administrative state. Many of the proposed solutions associated with the complex array of problems facing administration and policy today – challenges of climate change, inequality, sustainable energy and food production – proceed on an account of ideas such as the public good, public policy, and public interest. Aside from a simplistic utilitarian approach to such ideas, the question of the public is a contestable one. The reason for this contestation, I propose, issues from how the idea of the public as a general notion was used to replace conceptions of the particular, which would have been better expressed through a politics of the commons. A strong case can be made through critical discourse analysis that the notion of the public was party to the erasure of the particularity that was possible under a politics of the commons.