ABSTRACT
For the provenance of this other use of the noun ‘public’ we must look to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was a time that saw the birth and rapid growth of an energetic middle class, and with it a spawning of a variety of spheres, or ‘worlds’, of interest, commercial, cultural or political, or a mixture of these. It is here we find our publics. Rather than trying to grasp them by comparing them with the political public, as though they were satellite states within the state, and each public an encapsulated self-ordering population within the one body politic, we may see them rather as spaces formed within the state by a proliferation of opportunities for improvement and the enhancement of life. However, the appreciation of such opportunities is not always endemic to those who grasp them; interest often, even typically, has to be aroused, and that realization makes us reflect on how interests can be generated and publics created and manipulated. That thought directs our attention further towards authority, its influence and its variety.
