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are in fact just as necessary for absolutism as business and economic secrets are for an
economic life that depends on private property and competition.
Cabinet politics, conducted by a few people behind closed doors, now appears something eo
ipso evil, and as a result, the openness of political life seems to be right and good just
because of its openness. Openness becomes an absolute value, although at first it was only a
practical means to combat the bureaucratic, specialist-technical secret politics of absolutism.
The elimination of secret politics and secret diplomacy becomes a wonder cure for every
kind of political disease and corruption, and public opinion becomes a totally effective
controlling force. Of course, public opinion attained this absolute character first in the
eighteenth century, during the Enlightenment. The light of the public is the light of the
Enlightenment, a liberation from superstition, fanaticism, and ambitious intrigue. In every
system of Enlightened despotism, public opinion plays the role of an absolute corrective. The
power of a despot can be all the greater as Enlightenment increases, for Enlightened public
opinion makes the abuse of power impossible in itself. For the Enlightened, that can be taken
for granted. Le Mercier de la Rivière developed the notion systematically. 12 Condorcet
attempted to draw out its practical conclusions with an enthusiastic belief in freedom of
speech and the press that is very moving when one remembers the experiences of recent
generations: Where there is freedom of the press, the misuse of power is unthinkable; a single
free newspaper would destroy the most powerful tyrant; the printing press is the basis of
freedom, ''the art that creates liberty." 13 Even Kant was in this respect only an expression of
the political belief of his time, a belief in the progress of publicity and in the public's ability
to enlighten itself inevitably, if it were only free to do so. 14 In England the fanatic of liberal
rationality was Jeremy Bentham. Before him, argument in England had been essentially
practical and pragmatic. Bentham proclaimed the significance of a free press from a liberal
ideology: Freedom of public discussion, especially freedom of the
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