Government by Secrecy

Shared knowledge is the precondition of shared action. Without knowledge men are automatically excluded from decision making.

I. Whenever the powerless have confronted powerful decision makers, the quest for wider knowledge has been among their key demands. Since ignorance of the many is one of the bases upon which rests the power of the few, all democratic movements felt publicity to be intrinsically desirable. Shared knowledge is the precondition of shared action. Without knowledge men are automatically excluded from decision making.

As long as politics were conducted by an elite for an elite, knowledge of the facts and the grounds for action necessarily remained restricted to that elite. As long as sacred knowledge was the property of an elite of priests, members of the religious community remained bound to traditional observance. The demand for the translation of the Bible into the vernacular was linked with the desire of the Reformers to widen the area of religious choice. Similarly, the rising middle class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries asked for more information and publicity on affairs of state, that is for an end to the upper class monopoly of knowledge, in order to break the traditional political structure and to open the way for political innovation. Restriction of access to new ideas and new facts helped to stabilize the status quo. Newspapers rose in this period to supply the need for widening the circle of those ‘in the know.’

II. LOCKE STILL FELT that “Knowledge and science in general are the business of those who are at ease and leisure,” yet a century later middle class thought, especially in America, was committed to the idea that ignorant people cannot maintain their freedom; to quote Jefferson’s formulation. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free… it expects what never was and never will be”

During the nineteenth century this basic liberal tenet exerted powerful checks on the propensity of powerholders to maintain an aura of ignorance about their decisions. Until the end of the preceding century press communication about British parliamentary discussions had been a criminal offense; but the last vestiges of such attempts to limit access to political knowledge disappeared in the successive parliamentary reforms of the nineteenth century.

Classical liberal thought made full access of all to facts and ideas the cornerstone of the good society. If men can only choose freely on the market place of ideas, John Stuart Mill felt, they will in the long run be able to choose the right ones. Only ignorance and error prevented fully rational action; the reduction of ignorance hence facilitated in itself the probability of rational choice. Open debate, with all the facts of the case openly revealed, was the ideal method for settling both political and intellectual controversy. Parliament was conceived essentially as a kind of market place for the exchange of ideas and information.

Ideologies express but also obscure underlying soci...