Chapter Six explains how Rogers contributed greatly to a media revolution that reshaped American culture in the early 1900s. Beginning in 1922, he reached a vast new popular audience by becoming a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist (first with a weekly column, then a shorter daily one), writing regulary for magazines, making advertisements, cutting phonograph records, and making sporadic appearances in the new medium of radio. He also updated the old tradition of the lecture,regularly traveling throughout the nation to appear before audiences in town halls, lyceums, and churches. Throughout, Rogers deployed his talents as a cracker-barrel philosopher and down-home wit to interrogate America’s move to embrace a new consumer, urban, leisure-oriented culture.

This chapter considers the music publishing industry in Puccini’s Italy, with a particular focus on Puccini’s principal publisher, the Casa Ricordi. The chapter examines the role that publishers played within the wider operatic industry, which by Puccini’s time included managing contracts between composers and opera houses and influencing casting, as well as the more traditional business of printing, publishing, and promoting scores. The particular musical specialisms of the Sonzogno and Ricordi publishing houses are discussed. The author shows how Ricordi elevated Puccini to the position of national-composer-elect towards the end of Verdi’s lifetime and constructed a ‘Puccini myth’. Expensive, sophisticated publicity tools and marketing strategies were used to promote Puccini’s works, not only in Italy but in territories across the globe. The chapter discusses how Puccini’s relationship with the firm changed as a result of the succession of power from Giulio to Tito Ricordi upon the former’s death, as well as the firm’s management of Puccini’s works after his own death.

This chapter considers how Puccini was represented visually, predominantly through the still fairly new medium of photojournalism. The author discusses the marketing strategies devised by the Ricordi publishing house in order to promote Puccini to the readers of its various illustrated magazines as the successor to Verdi. Initially portrayed as a rather Bohemian young student, Puccini soon came to be depicted as the epitome of stylish Italian manliness. Visual representations of the composer – not only photographs but also paintings and sketches – exploited his connections to the Tuscan landscape of his native region, as Puccini was increasingly co-opted into the project of forging a national identity for the recently unified country. Care was taken to represent Puccini as an emblem of modernity and dynamism, and this was an image of the composer that was presented not only at home in Italy but all around the world.

Rawls’s Original Position, the most influential thought experiment in modern political philosophy, cannot be the justification of Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness. The Original Position cannot satisfy Rawls’s own publicity condition, which requires justifications that are accessible to all citizens. I hypothesize that over time Rawls weakened his publicity condition because he saw this tension, but that he could not resolve it. However, Rawls’s work contains a justification for justice as fairness that is publicly accessible: that in a well-ordered society, all citizens can have self-respect. I set up this discussion with Rawls’s critique of meritocracy, which, Rawls fears, sets citizens against each other in a zero-sum competition for self-respect. In a meritocracy, elites display their power and wealth, while the less fortunate may fall into resentment, rancor, and possibly a destructive racial nationalism. A Rawlsian society of self-respect offers a more just and stable model of social unity.

In early 1959, Kanyama Chiume escaped arrest during the Nyasaland Emergency. Chapter 4 follows him in his period of exile, focusing on two pamphlets he wrote in London. These pamphlets provide a way to assess the limits of the newly internationalised global anticolonial world of the late 1950s for this regional-generational cohort. These activists honed their vision of publicity and of the party publicity officer by drawing on the regional specificities of the late colonial state in East and Central Africa. Gender and form were of critical importance to this vision. This cohort joined the conversation around colonial violence in the context of the Algerian War of Independence, discussing ideas about permits, police and imprisonment in and beyond the region, in correspondence, conferences and publications. Charting the development of their ideas about totalitarianism at this apparent turning point helps to explain why the UN was largely out of reach, why activists continued to formulate their critiques in terms that echoed the early 1950s and why they increasingly doubted the efficacy and legitimacy of world public opinion.

This chapter explores the cultural significance of the optical telegraph in Ireland. Following the institution of the Chappe télégraphe in revolutionary France, this long-distance communications technology was widely innovated and subsequently adopted by numerous governments including, briefly, the British administration at Dublin Castle. The chapter begins by discussing the promotion, in the Belfast Northern Star, of the telegraph designed by the ‘improving’ Ascendancy landlord, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. It then considers the politics of telegraphic discourse in Ireland in the years leading up to the Rebellion of 1798, with a particular focus on the associations between telegraphy and the United Irish press. Finally, it suggests some points of affinity between Maria Edgeworth’s tale ‘The White Pigeon’ (1800) and her father’s telegraph. In its connection with competing ideas of Irish nationality, security, and surveillance, I argue, the telegraph offers valuable insights into the relations between literature and technology in late eighteenth-century Ireland.

This chapter looks at the tools and procedures that programmes use to assess claims. Assessing a redress claim involves deciding which injuries to redress and how much money to pay. Those judgements are difficult. Since people will reasonably disagree, good procedure is essential. Enabling survivors to choose how the programme will assess their claims can help protect survivors’ privacy and well-being and make programmes more effective and efficient.

Molière’s extraordinary success between 1659 and 1673 was due not only to his virtuosity as a dramatist, his comic talent or his exploitation of current affairs; it was due also to his feeling for an ‘event’ and his ability to capture attention. This contribution studies his unprecedented investment in publicity, which mobilised a multitude of forms and mediums, as well as its reliance on a network of agents with varied motivations. Literary history has long tried to distinguish between Molière’s friends and enemies by relying on their praise or criticism of him. This contribution studies them rather as agents who, depending on the context, opportunity and their own interests, sometimes acted for and sometimes against Molière, without this indicating either personal enmity or ties of affection.

The introduction lays out the major aims of the book.

This chapter develops a selective genealogy of the concept of publicity as it appears throughout the history of political thought, beginning with Plato and ending with Henry Sidgwick. Beyond its intrinsic interest, there is instrumental value to tracing a genealogy of publicity. Two benefits stand out in particular. First, by looking to what the giants of the past had to say about transparency in government, we find a greater diversity of positions than we currently see. Some flatly reject openness in government, embracing opacity in its place. And second, looking to the past shows how the concept of publicity can take on many different forms. Sometimes it refers to being offered justifications for the laws one lives under, sometimes it means that persons must have access to the philosophical theories inspiring the political systems they inhabit, sometimes it is used as a kind of test to probe the morality of public policies, sometimes it means that persons should be able to carefully monitor what public officials are up to, and so on.

On one understanding of the concept, publicity deems it impermissible for public officials to hide the reasons and moral theories that inform their policy choices. As just one example of this, publicity forbids the utilitarian from cloaking her policy recommendations in terms of a moral theory other than utilitarianism. While this might seem like a compelling requirement at first, its proponents have offered little argument for it, as defenders of utilitarianism have been quick to point out. To remedy this, I try to rehabilitate the blanket ban on false rationales demanded by this understanding of publicity, relying on the work of Bernard Williams (himself a fierce critic of esoteric utilitarianism). None of the arguments recovered from Williams successfully rule out secret rationales on the part of public officials. This understanding of publicity, I conclude, lacks compelling justification.

Most democracies are representative. Elected by the people, representatives constitute a legislature and create laws. This is typically done through voting. This raises an interesting question of institutional design: should our representatives vote transparently or by secret ballot? No contemporary philosopher, to my knowledge, has addressed this question. In this chapter I argue that if we take seriously the value of political equality—a normative ideal that nearly all democratic theorists embrace—then voting among representatives in a legislature ought to occur by secret ballot. Representatives should vote just as citizens do in elections. Democratic equality, I argue, thrives in darkness.

John Rawls’s full publicity condition says that persons in the society the philosopher theorizes about must in some sense have access to everything the philosopher says in her theorizing. In other words, everyone living in Rawls’s perfectly just society must have access to A Theory of Justice and related works. This account of publicity is the most difficult to analyze because there are many different interpretations of what, precisely, it requires and also many different arguments in its favor. Not only this, but certain criticisms of Rawls that some deem fatal to his project depend on particular interpretations of this publicity condition that can quite reasonably be rejected. In the current chapter I show that, once again, we face deep trade-offs. Insisting on this account of publicity will change the way political philosophy must be done, but doing so will help achieve normatively worthwhile ends.

Nearly all legal theorists agree that publicity is a key component of the rule of law, but they disagree over what this means. Some mean that persons must know the body of law they are subject to; others say that persons must simply be able to access what the law requires of them, even if they remain completely ignorant of it. Both accounts of legal publicity are deeply flawed, I argue. After establishing this, I develop a new way of understanding what legal publicity means. Legal publicity is not about persons knowing the law or having access to it. Rather, it’s about when persons are held accountable for violating the law. Publicity demands that persons be held accountable for violating a law only if they were aware this law regulated their conduct. This novel account of legal publicity revolutionizes how we should think about the rule of law and also how we should design our legal institutions.

A famous legal maxim holds that “justice should not only be done but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.” On one understanding of the concept, publicity demands that this maxim also apply to questions of social, or distributive, justice. Not only must a just distribution be achieved, but persons must see that a just distribution has been achieved. John Rawls is a defender of this requirement, along with democratic theorist Thomas Christiano. There are compelling arguments in defense of this understanding of publicity. The problem is that there are many different ways of understanding what it means to see distributive justice done, and they all come with significant drawbacks. Perhaps these philosophers are correct that distributive justice must be seen to be done, but letting it be seen will require that we give up other things of value. This chapter highlights these difficult choices.

Democracy is not only about voting. Deliberation plays an important role as well. Just like voting, deliberation can occur behind closed doors in the shadows or be subject to the glare of sunlight. In this chapter I argue that deliberation among representatives in a legislature ought to occur behind closed doors and away from the glare of sunlight, but only if it is structured properly. More specifically, I propose a new way of institutionalizing secret deliberation that secures its benefits while avoiding its costs. The key is to add external accountability mechanisms of a very specific kind to the deliberative process and to select participants in the secret deliberative body in a very particular way. If we do both things, then democratic deliberation is optimized when it occurs behind closed doors.

The well-ordered society, according to John Rawls, is one that is regulated by principles of justice and in which everyone accepts these principles. One understanding of publicity takes this latter requirement a step further. According to Rawls, not only must everyone in the well-ordered society accept the same theory of justice, but publicity demands that everyone know that everyone else accepts this theory. Citizens’ beliefs about morality and justice must be transparent to one another. I examine this understanding of publicity in the current chapter. Why insist on such a requirement? I argue that the main reason has to do with social unity. If social unity in a diverse liberal order is to be achieved, then we must know what our fellow citizens believe about justice. The problem is that generating the knowledge required by this understanding of publicity is riddled with difficulties. I propose some mechanisms that might be capable of getting the job done. These mechanisms are, however, deeply imperfect.

This introductory chapter offers an overview of Secret Government: The Pathologies of Publicity. The book is split into two separate and autonomous parts, roughly tracking what I take to be two distinct traditions in political philosophy. Part I is focused on transparency as it relates to questions of institutional design. Part II focuses on publicity as it relates to the political philosophy of John Rawls and the liberal tradition he inspired. In conjunction, parts I and II jointly offer something like a comprehensive philosophical analysis of transparency in government.

John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick grappled with the perspectival problem arising from Bentham’s full rejection of the theological justification for the legislative point of view. Mill’s intriguing suggestion that “wrong” refers to that which should be punished by law, public opinion, or private conscience combined with his assumption that all three are open to revision on utilitarian principles leads to the interesting conclusion that our moral statements about right and wrong are tacit legislative proposals. When deciding whether to voice our moral opinions we must think like legislators enacting a rule. This was in tension with the idea that our public expressions of moral judgment should be spontaneous reactions to the poor choices of others. Sidgwick grasped the implications of this issue more clearly and more self-consciously than did Mill, since it meant that there was a potentially deep disjunction between what is right according to utilitarianism and what utilitarianism tells us to publicly state as right. Sidgwick’s defense of an esoteric morality is the final outcome of the attempt to secularize morality as legislation.