ABSTRACT
Public space engenders fears, fears that derive from the sense of public space as uncontrolled space, as a space in which civilization is exceptionally fragile. The proper response, according to Arnold, was repression, the reigning in of “rights,” and the asserting of firmer control over public space, for “without order there can be no society; and without society there can be no human perfection”. From the civil rights movement, the Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the United States, to the stirrings of the anti-war and anti-imperialism movements that were in fact global in reach, to the specific complaints of Parisian students fed up with being molded into uncomplaining “organizational men”, radical social transformation really seemed possible. Marx himself was famously skeptical toward the value of “rights” as an organizing principle of social struggle.
