Abstract
Transparency and publicity are often used interchangeably, despite repeated calls for clearer differentiation in the growing literature on transparency. The chapter investigates whether there is a discontinuity of meaning between the principle of publicity, which appears in classical writings, and the call for transparency emerging in parallel as a metaphor in the eighteenth century. Baume discusses the reasons for distinguishing between the concepts of transparency and publicity and builds on suggestions by Tero Erkkilä, Jon Elster, Erin Kelly, and Daniel Naurin. After analyzing the contributions and limitations of these authors, she suggests a different method of distinguishing publicity from transparency by drawing on the polyvalence in the semantics of the latter.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I would like to thank Yannis Papadopoulos for suggesting this instrument to me in order to understand the evolution of the popularity of “transparency” and “publicity.”
- 2.
Federal Act on Freedom of Information in the Administration (2004, Switzerland): “Art. 1 (Aim and subject matter): This Act seeks to promote transparency with regard to the mandate, organisation and activities of the Administration. To this end, it contributes to informing the public by ensuring access to official documents.”
- 3.
“Von der Schwierigkeit der auf das Fortschreiten zum Weltheften angelegten Maximen in Unsehung ihrer Publicität ” (Kant 1992: 160).
- 4.
“Toutes les barrières civiles, politiques, judiciaires deviennent illusoires sans liberté de la presse. L’indépendance des tribunaux peut être violée au mépris de la constitution la mieux rédigée. Si la publicité n’est pas garantie, ce délit ne sera pas réprimé, car il restera couvert d’un voile. Les tribunaux eux-mêmes peuvent prévariquer dans leurs jugements ou bouleverser les formes. La seule sauvegarde des formes est encore la publicité. L’innocence peut être plongée dans les fers. Si la publicité n’avertit pas les citoyens du danger qui plane sur toutes les têtes, les cachots retiendront indéfiniment leurs victimes à la faveur du silence universel” (Constant 1980: 136).
- 5.
Regarding Starobinski’s contribution, Hammann mentioned that “Starobinski a mis en lumière la permanence du rêve de transparence et l’angoisse de l’obstacle dans l’œuvre de Rousseau” (2006: 516)
- 6.
“Whereas publicity has been primarily understood as a democratic concept, the notion of transparency increasingly carries economic connotations” (Erkkilä 2012: 5).
- 7.
Gosseries underlines today the fact the transparency is associated to both fields: “In everyday life, calls for more transparency or openness in political and economic life may seem rather uncontroversial” (2010).
- 8.
Regarding Jevons’ contribution, I am particularly grateful to Amanar Akhabbar, with whom I elaborated a research project that partly responded to the question raised here.
- 9.
There are five other reasons: second, “to secure the confidence of the people and their assent to the measures of the legislature”; third, “to enable the governors to know the wishes of the governed”; fourth, “to enable the electors to act from knowledge”; fifth, “to provide the assembly with the means of profiting by the information of the public”; sixth, and probably the anecdotical reason, “the amusement with results from [the appliance of the principle of publicity ]” (Bentham 1999: 30–34). For a development regarding these six reasons , see Baume and Papadopoulos (2018).
- 10.
“Rasmusen (1989: 133) describes these terms as follows: ‘Moral hazard with hidden actions: Smith and Brown begin with symmetric information and agree to a contract, but then Smith takes an action unobserved by Brown. Adverse selection: (Smith knows things about himself that Brown does not). Smith and Brown then agree to a contract. Information is incomplete’,” cited in Lupia (2003: 41).
- 11.
“All transparency obligations seem to have a common core. They are all concerned with the availability, accessibility , and comprehensibility of information. A transparent government is one that provides people with the information they need to ascertain and understand the state of the world and to predict how their actions will affect that world, and that does not unnecessarily complicate that world” (Buijze, 2013: 4). Note that Buijze , in opposition to Naurin (2006: 91), added the element of accessibility of information to her definition of transparency.
- 12.
The following definitions of transparency given by Den Boer; Moser; Oliver; Prat are all quoted by Meijer (2013: 430).
- 13.
Transparency is “the ability to look clearly through the windows of an institution ” (Den Boer 1998: 105).
- 14.
Moser defines being transparent as “to open up the working procedures not immediately visible to those not directly involved in order to demonstrate the good working of an institution” (2001: 3).
- 15.
“Oliver (2004: 2) indicates that transparency can be described as having three elements: an observer, something available to be observed, and a means or method for observation. This type of definition builds on the principal–agent theory: a principal requires information about the agent to check whether the agent adheres to the ‘contract’ (Prat 2006: 92)” (Meijer 2013: 430).
- 16.
“Every claim of right must have this capacity for publicity, and since one can easily judge whether or not it is present in a particular case, i.e., whether or not publicity is compatible with the agent’s principles, it provides us with a readily applicable criterion that is found a priori in reason; for the purported claim’s (praetensio iuris) falseness (contrariness to right) is immediately recognized by an experiment of pure reason” (Kant 1983: 135).
- 17.
- 18.
Original version: [Chaque] “société s’approprie ou crée les concepts dont elle a besoin afin de se comprendre elle-même et [de] ‘se donner’ à la compréhension des autres (des générations futures, des autres sociétés )” (Nadeau 2013: 14).
- 19.
“It is not sufficient to have established the responsibility of ministers; this responsibility has no existence unless it begins with the immediate executor of the act which is its object. It must weigh upon all the levels of the constitutional hierarchy ” (Constant 1988: 244).
- 20.
“It seems to me that responsibility must, above all, secure two aims: that of depriving guilty ministers of their power, and that of keeping alive in the nation—through the watchfulness of her representatives , the openness of their debates and the exercise of freedom of the press applied to the analysis of all ministerial actions—a spirit of inquiry, a habitual interest in the maintenance of the constitution of the state, a constant participation in public affairs, in a word a vivid sense of political life” (Constant 1988: 239).
- 21.
- 22.
However, if the concept of transparency is clearly based on visual metaphors, the concept of publicity is also, if less obviously, associated with such metaphors. For example, for Bentham , “publicity” means “exposure—the completest exposure of the whole system of procedure—whatever is done by anybody, being done before the eyes of the universal public ” (Bentham 1843: 8). For him and his contemporaries, publicity was associated with light and sight, for it illuminates and makes visible. Bentham speaks of “the light of publicity shining in full splendour” (Bentham 1843: 75). Thus , in its usage since the late eighteenth century, the term “publicity” is closely linked with visual metaphors: to become public is to become visible, to place oneself in the public eye.
- 23.
- 24.
According to Richir , the failures of past revolutions can be assessed by their incapacity to achieve transparency: “[C]’est toute la pensée ‘révolutionnaire’ qui est animée de la croyance en une transparence de la société à elle -même” (Richir 1973: 10).
- 25.
Our translation of: ‘[S]ociété de représentation où chacun devait tenir sa place, [...elle] était la scène par excellence de ce jeu de rôles’ (Wahnich 1997: 32).
- 26.
In Considerations on the Government of Poland, and specifically in the chapter dedicated to “Education,” Rousseau indicates that “[t]heir instruction may be domestic and individual, but their games ought always to be public and common to all; for the point here is not only to keep them busy, to give them a robust constitution, to make them agile and limber, but to accustom them from early on to rule, to equality, to fraternity, to competitions, to living under the eyes of their fellow-citizens and to seeking public approbation. To this end, the winners’ prizes and rewards should be distributed not arbitrarily by the coaches or school principals, but by acclamation and the judgment of the spectators; and these judgments can be trusted always to be just especially if care is taken to make these games attractive to the public by organizing them with some pomp and so that they become a spectacle. In which case it is a fair assumption that all honest folk and good patriots will regard it a duty and a pleasure to attend them” (1997: 191).
- 27.
“For the administration to be strong, good and efficient in the pursuit of its aims, the entire executive power has to be in the same hands: but it is not enough that these hands change; if possible they should act only under the eyes of the Lawgiver and that it be he who guides them. This is the true secret of keeping them from usurping his authority” (Rousseau 1997: 200).
- 28.
“In France it is an accepted maxim of State to turn a blind eye on many things; that is what despotism always obliges one to do; but in a free Government it is a sure way to weaken the legislation and upset the constitution ” (Rousseau 1997: 223).
- 29.
“A fear haunted the latter half of the eighteenth century: the fear of darkened spaces, of the pall of gloom which prevents the full visibility of things, men and truths. It sought to break up the patches of darkness that blocked the light, eliminate the shadowy areas of society, demolish the unlit chambers where arbitrary political acts, monarchical caprice, religious superstitions, tyrannical and priestly plots, epidemics and the illusions of ignorance were fomented ” (Foucault 1980: 153).
- 30.
“There does not seem to be a well-established distinction between publicity and transparency as features of decision-making processes” (Elster 2013: 10, n. 41).
Works Cited
Baume, Sandrine. 2011. La transparence dans la conduite des affaires publiques. Origines et sens d’une exigence. Raison publique (Dossier: transparence). http://www.raison-publique.fr/article459.html. Accessed 10 May 2017.
———. 2013. Exposer les affaires publiques au regard des citoyens: les raisons justificatives du principe de transparence. In La transparence en Suisse et dans le monde. Contributions à l’action publique, ed. M. Pasquier, 3–18. Lausanne: PPUR.
Baume, Sandrine and Yannis Papadopoulos. 2018. Transparency: From Bentham’s Inventory of Virtuous Effects to Contemporary Evidence-Based Scepticism. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 21 (2): 169–192.
Bentham, Jeremy. 1843. Principles of Judicial Procedure, with the Outlines of a Procedure Code. In The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. J. Bowring, vol. 2, 1838–1843. Edinburgh: William Tait.
———. 1962. Constitutional Code [1843]. In The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. J. Bowring, vol. 9. New York: Russell & Russell.
———. 1983. Constitutional Code [1843]. In The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. F. Rosen and J.H. Burns, vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 1989. First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code. Ed. P. Schofield. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 1990. Securities against Misrule and other Constitutional Writings for Tripoli and Greece. Ed. P. Schofield. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 1999. Of Publicity. In Political Tactics, ed. J.C. Blamires, 29–44. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bovens, Mark. 2007. Analysing and Assessing Accountability: A Conceptual Framework. European Law Journal 13 (4): 447–468.
Bredin, Jean-Denis. 2001. Secret, transparence et démocratie. Pouvoirs 97: 5–15.
Buijze, Anoeska. 2013. The Six Faces of Transparency. Utrecht Law Review 9 (3): 3–25.
Constant, Benjamin. 1980. Les principes de politique. Ed. Etienne Hoffmann. Genève: Droz.
———. 1988. Principles of Politics Applicable to all Representative Governments. In Political Writings, trans. and ed. B. Fontana, 169–305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cutler, Fred. 1999. Jeremy Bentham and the Public Opinion Tribunal. The Public Opinion Quarterly 63 (3): 321–346.
Den Boer, Monica. 1998. Steamy Windows: Transparency and Openness in Justice and Home Affairs. In Openness and Transparency in the European Union, ed. V. Deckmyn and I. Thomson, 91–105. Maastricht: European Institute of Public Administration.
Eigeldinger, Frédéric, and Raymond Trousson, eds. 1996. Dictionnaire de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Paris: Honoré Champion.
Elster, Jon. 2013. Securities Against Misrule. Juries, Assemblies, Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Erkkilä, Tero. 2012. Government Transparency. Impacts and Unintended Consequences. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Federal Act on Freedom of Information in the Administration of 17 December 2004 (Status as of 19 August 2014, Swiss Confederation).
Fenster, Mark. 2006. The Opacity of Transparency. Iowa Law Review 91: 885–949.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. The Eye of Power. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon, 146–165. New York: Pantheon Books.
Gosseries, Axel. 2010. Publicity. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E.N. Zalt. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/publicity/. Accessed 27 Apr 2017.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1991 [1963]. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hammann, Christine. 2006. Rousseau citant le Tasse, ou les séductions de l’artifice. Dix-huitième siècle 1 (38): 511–528.
Hood, Christopher. 2001. Transparency. In Encyclopedia of Democratic Thought, ed. Paul Barry Clark and Joe Foweraker, 700–704. London: Routledge.
Jevons, William Stanley. 1888 [1871]. Theory of Exchange (chap. IV). In The Theory of Political Economy, Library of Economics and Liberty. http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Jevons/jvnPE4.html. Accessed 10 May 2017.
Kant, Immanuel. 1983. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Moral, translated with an introduction by Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
———. 1992. Der Streit der Fakultäten/The Conflict of the Faculties. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Kelly, E.I. 2013. Publicity. The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 1–8.
Koselleck, Reinhart. 1988 [1959]. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 1997. L’expérience de l’histoire. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard.
Koselleck, Reinhart, Brunner Otto, and Werner Conze, eds. 1972–1997. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historiches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett/J.G. Gotta.
Lord, Kristin M. 2006. The Perils and Promise of Global Transparency. New York: Suny Press.
Lupia, Arthur. 2003. Delegation and its Perils. In Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies, ed. Kaare Strøm, Wolfgang C. Müller, and Torbjörn Bergen, 33–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meijer, Albert. 2013. Understanding the Complex Dynamics of Transparency. Public Administration Review 73 (3): 429–439.
Moser, Cornelia. 2001. How Open Is “Open as Possible”? Three Different Approaches to Transparency and Openness in Regulating Access to EU Documents. Political Science Series no. 80, Institute for Advanced Studies [working paper].
Nadeau, Christian. 2013. L’histoire comme construction politique. Une lecture croisée de Reinhart Koselleck et Quentin Skinner. http://www.creum.umontreal.ca/IMG/pdf/nadeau.pdf. Accessed 10 May 2017.
Naurin, Daniel. 2006. Transparency, Publicity, Accountability—The Missing Links. Swiss Political Science Review 12 (3): 90–98.
Oliver, Richard W. 2004. What Is Transparency? New York: McGraw-Hill.
Prat, Andrea. 2006. The More Closely We Are Watched, the Better We Behave? In Transparency: The Key to Better Governance? ed. C. Hood and D. Heald, 91–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rasmusen, Eric. 1989. Games and Information: An Introduction to Game Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Richir, Marc. 1973 [1793]. Révolution et transparence sociale. In Considérations sur la Révolution française, ed. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 7–74. Paris: Payot.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1981 [1959]. Les Confessions. In Œuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. I, 1–656. Paris: Gallimard.
———. 1990. Rousseau. Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues. Hanover and London: University Press of New England.
———. 1997. Considerations on the Government of Poland. In The Social Contract and other Later Political Writings, translated and ed. Victor Gourevitch, 177–211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Starobinski, Jean. 1988. Transparency and Obstruction. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Wahnich, Sophie. 1997. L’impossible citoyen. L’étranger dans le discours de la Révolution française. Paris: Albin Michel.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baume, S. (2018). Publicity and Transparency: The Itinerary of a Subtle Distinction. In: Alloa, E., Thomä, D. (eds) Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-77160-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-77161-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)