Table Of ContentThe Return of the Public
The Return of the Public
DAN HIND
First published by Verso 2010
© Dan Hind 2010
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-594-4
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Perpetua by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Mackays
The aristocrats of intelligence fi nd that there are truths which should not
be told to the people. As a revolutionary socialist, and a sworn enemy of all
aristocracies and all tutelage, I believe to the contrary that the people must
be told everything. There is no other way to restore them to their full liberty.
Mikhail Bakunin
Contents
Introduction 1
Part 1: The Idea of the Public
1 The Classical Public 15
2 Private Vices and Public Virtues 31
3 Public Servants 48
4 The American Republic 59
5 Neoliberal Publics 77
Part 2: The Public in Eclipse
6 The Outlines of the Crisis 97
7 Estranged From the World 107
8 Estranged From Each Other 123
9 Estranged From Ourselves 137
vii
Part 3: The Return of the Public
10 Public Commissioning 153
11 A Public System of Knowledge 175
12 Reforming the Private Sector 191
Conclusion: A Commonwealth of Descriptions 201
Acknowledgements 210
Notes 211
Index 235
viii
Introduction
In a democracy public opinion is sovereign
Alexis de Tocqueville
FOR THE LAST 30 years American and British politicians have
allowed powerful economic interests to manage their own
affairs. Whether liberal, nominally social democratic or conservative,
successive governments assured voters that their surrender to market
forces served the public interest. Once freed from an intrusive state,
self-interested investors would identify economic opportunities and
deliver faster economic growth. Privatized companies would become
dynamic and efficient. Finance could be left to regulate itself, while
government became more business-like.1 The majority would benefit
from government’s refusal to restrain market forces or to take action
in the economy: whatever investors wanted was good for growth and
so, by definition, was in the common interest.
In the summer of 2007 the financial markets, which had epito-
mized the way that private self-interest was supposed to deliver
public goods, began to seize up. In the months and years that followed,
governments around the world, led by the United States and Britain,
committed billions to rescue failing financial institutions and lent
billions more at very low levels of interest. The working majority,
having been told for a generation that deregulated finance would
bring them their hearts’ desires, discovered that they were suddenly
liable for huge new debts. Though the profits of the preceding
decades went disproportionately to the wealthy, the losses belonged
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The Return of the Public
to everyone. The financial sector had justified its vast profits as the
fruits of prudent risk-taking in competitive markets. It was now clear
that their private gains had accrued from the reckless exploitation of
a public guarantee.
For a while, the bankruptcy of the conventional wisdom could
be discussed openly. Speaking in October 2008 Alan Greenspan, the
former head of the Federal Reserve, acknowledged that ‘the whole
intellectual edifice’ for managing risk in the vast global market
for derivatives had collapsed in the summer of the previous year.2
Greenspan admitted that he had found a ‘flaw’ in the ideology that
had guided him during his tenure at the Federal Reserve:
I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been
very distressed by that fact . . . I made a mistake in presuming that
the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others,
were such that they were best capable of protecting their own
shareholders and their equity in the firms.3
By the time the financial crisis broke, the ideology that guided
Greenspan at the Federal Reserve had spread throughout the state
administration. In Michael Sandel’s words, ‘for three decades, the
governing philosophy of the United States and Britain was defined
by the faith that markets are the primary instrument for achieving
the public good’.4 When Samuel Brittan wrote that ‘all provision for
the consumer on a competitive basis in a non-distorted market is
a public service’, he was doing no more than stating the prevailing
delirium.5 Those who doubted the power of self-interest to prevent
systemic collapse struggled to be heard in an intellectual edifice that,
though gimcrack, had been lavishly soundproofed by Greenspan and
his friends in finance, academia and the media.
We have been through a severe recession and are now being told
by Larry Summers, one of Barack Obama’s senior economic advisors
and a partner of Greenspan in the deregulation of finance, that we
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