Public Things Research Articles

Mek-Ouyes and Public Things

Mek-Ouyes and Public Things

Mek-Ouyes and Public Things

Republique roman is the name of a cycle of novels undertaken by Jacques Jouet. To date, this project is composed of the following texts: 1. Le Directeur du Musee des Cadeaux des Chefs d'Etat de l' tranger (Seuil, 1994) 2. La Montagne R (Seuil, 1996) 3. La Scene usurpee (Le Rocher, 1997) 4. Une Rdunion pour le nettoiement (POL, 2001) 5. L'Tvasion de Rochefort (Festival de la Nouvelle de Saint-Quentin, 1997) 6. La Republique romaine (Afat Voyages, 1997). 7. Fins (POL, 1999)

Public et litterature en France au XVIIe siecle (review)

Reviewed by: Public et littérature en France au XVIIe siècle Orest Ranum Hélène Merlin, Public et littérature en France au XVIIe siècle. (Paris, Belles Lettres, 1994) 260FF. Erudite, deeply personal, and trenchantly analytical, this work establishes the existence of a public in the France of Montaigne and Richelieu, and of a public autonomous from the old judicial-political public—a literary public—late in the seventeenth century. Specialists in the period may not be surprised by these findings; they know that the words public and citoyen were in the vocabulary, and that these words therefore must have meant something, but they should still read this work with great care. Specialists in the eighteenth century may go on building their Habermasian castles without taking this work into account, but is it not impossible to keep ostriches from burying their heads in the sand? Merlin’s methods are philological and literal reading; her aims are profoundly historical. She asks her reader to come back to several key passages—to reflect on them and incorporate them into his being. The implicit link between ontology, the whole semantic sphere of the verb être, and atticism, the stability of meaning and being, are pursued across time in the public. The book begins with a quotation from Friedrich Schlegel about how the public is “not a thing, but a thought, a postulate, like the Church.” Some of the implications [End Page 806] of this quotation are not explored, perhaps because Paul Bénichou already has done so in Le Sacre de l’Écrivain, but the fact that the public is sacred, and that efforts are made to sacralize it in another way by literature, is a leitmotif. There is a summary of Habermas (not enough attention is paid to his debt to Koselleck) but his thought is only really a frame for studying all the relations between power and writing from the end of the Wars of Religion to the late seventeenth century. After a careful but too static presentation of late Medieval France as an ontological being, at once mystical and human, divine and physiological, public and particulier, Merlin analyzes the semantic field of the word public in order to provide a context about power for the Querelle du Cid. The distinction between the public and the public thing (république) is perhaps stressed more than it merits, in view of the fact that so many of the very good sources Merlin quotes are really about the distinction between the public and the particulier. The ways the French used these words, along with citoyen, société and privé, at once descriptively and analytically, and certainly rhetorically, is at the heart of this book. Curiously, few contemporaries of Montaigne found it necessary to give lengthy definitions of these words, or add modifiers to them (Montaigne does when he says société publique); hence, despite the religious factions and quarrels over what the ancients meant, there could be a civic discourse grounded on generally accepted meanings of these words. Since Plato and Aristotle, the synthesis of the one and the many to the complete fulfillment of both, the individual and the polis, the private and the public, remained the principal mode or frame in which to put hard, direct ethical-political thinking. By Montaigne’s day the more literalist readings of the ancients had ceased to be quite so attractive as they were in Machiavelli’s time, but antique techniques of analysis, notably the binary one of public and particulier, had enormous attraction for the French in the late sixteenth century; and how this technique of analysis could be brought into relation with the equally binary active life versus the contemplative life is evident in almost all the discussions of the Being that was France. Montaigne’s project of self-description, especially in “De Mesnager sa Volonté” appears here in the first frame as an immediate and activist corrective to the passionately politically engaged civil warriors, by Montaigne’s describing the goodness and fullness of life that is possible en particulier. The irony is that there is activism to recommend less activism—in an implicit critique of Machiavelli’s...

Public Things in the Modern City: Belated Notes on Tilted Arc and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Sitelessness and loss of place suggest the instability of boundaries that otherwise sustain the legibility of public institutions. Such conditions negate conventional affinities between architecture, ceremonial urban space, monuments, and monumental sculpture. Nowadays, the theoretical basis for a relationship between these actors is in flux. This article takes up several different contemporary conceptions of public space and the public thing and employs them in an interpretation of two recent projects: Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Richard Serra's ill-fated Tilted Arc. These projects embody changing conditions in the dialogue between art, architecture, and the city.

Public Things in the Modern City: Belated Notes on "Tilted Arc" and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Public Things in the Modern City: Belated Notes on "Tilted Arc" and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Medical Care for Children: Public Insurance, Private Insurance, and Racial Differences in Utilization

Data from two waves of the Child-Mother module of the National Longitudinal Surveys are used to examine the medical care received by children. We compare those covered by Medicaid, by private health insurance and those with no insurance coverage at all. We find there are substantial differences in the impact of public and private health insurance and these effects also differ between blacks and whites. White children on Medicaid tend to have more doctor checkups than any other children and white children on Medicaid or a private insurance plan have a higher number of doctor visits for illness. In contrast, for black children, neither Medicaid nor private insurance coverage is associated with any advantage in terms of the number of doctor visits for illness. Furthermore, black children with private coverage are no more likely than those with no coverage to have doctor checkups; black Medicaid children are more likely than either group to have checkups although the gap is not precisely estimated. We exploit the longitudinal dimension of the data in order to take account of potential selection and thus include child specific fixed effects in the models. The results are robust to the inclusion of these controls for unobserved heterogeneity. They suggest that private and public health insurance mean different things to different children, and that national insurance coverage will not equalize utilization of care.

On dirty public things

‘Dirty public things’ refers to projects which are public in the sense that they are intended to benefit an indefinite number of people, but which are ‘dirty’ in the sense that they are or would be of net disbenefit to spatially defined groups of people, those who live close to them. Motorways, airports and power stations are typically important examples. Many existing policy-making structures do not perform well when making decisions about dirty public projects, partly because they confuse aggregative issues (those concerned with what should be built) with locational issues (those concerned with where things should be built). It is not possible to stipulate what would constitute a rational system of decision-making, even in an ideal world: some of the conflicts, both of principle and interest, which are raised by dirty public things are fundamental and irreconcilable and it is not possible to detach aggregative from locational issues completely. It can be shown, nevertheless, that some forms of decision-making are irrational, and one of these is the British system of public inquiries in many of its applications.

Représentations de « république » et « démocratie » (deuxième partie)

The concepts of " republic " and " democracy ", whose connotations and uses vary according to historical periods and political contexte, do not seem to cover equivalent contents. The study of the ordinary representations of thèse two notions, at a given moment, based on interviews withfifty individuels, brings out differences and fluctuations of meaning : diverse positions of thé two terms within national Systems which overlap only partially, variations in the uses of terms depending on reference groups. Whereas " democracy ", a less specifie notion, does not seem to fit in a precise historical and geopolitical framework, " republic " appears as a concrete historical and political category, defining a form of state, characterized by the appropriation by everyone of the " public thing ", and opposed to any form of monarchy, the power of one or of a few.

Représentations de « république » et « démocratie » (première partie)

The concepts of " republic " and " democracy ", whose connotations and uses vary according to historical periods and political contexts, do not seem to cover equivalent contents. The study of the ordinary representations of these two notions, at a given moment, carried out during conversations with fifty individuals, brings out differences and fluctuations of meaning : diverse positions of the two terms within national Systems which overlap only partially, variations in the uses of terms depending on reference groups. Whereas " democracy ", a less specific notion, does not seem to fit in a precise historical and geopolitical framework, «republic» appears as a concrete historical and political category, defining a form of state, characterized by thé appropriation by everyone of the "public thing ", and opposed to any form of monarchy, the power of one or of a few.

Government By Insurance Company: the Antipolitical Philosophy of Robert Nozick

ROBERT NOZICK'S recent book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, is a spirited and provocative philosophic defense of the minimal or nightwatchman state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on. (P. ix.) Underlying and integral to its argument is a rejection of politics. Nozick's minimal state is not a political order but a business enterprise: a kind of insurance company which sells people protection against the invasion by others of their individual rights. Politics has to do with public things, and there is no place for public things in the relationship of a business enterprise to its clients. Nozick's defense of the minimal state is thus a proposal to privatize and hence depoliticize virtually all of human life. I wish to examine that proposal. I believe that Nozick's minimal state is indefensible. His justification of the minimal state, however, provides a stimulating backdrop against which to inquire into the nature and value of politics, and I hope that the discussion which follows will serve to clarify and heighten our sense of the significance of political life. I shall begin with a brief sketch of Nozick's defense of the minimal state and then analyze in detail certain specific points which illuminate especially well his concept of the state. I shall conclude with an assessment of Nozick's anti