Publicity and transparency as requirements in public affairs: Can these requirements be differentiated?

Tuesday, 2017/10/17, 16:15

Lecture by Prof. Sandrine Baume (University of Lausanne) on occasion of the philosophy colloquium at the University of Lucerne. Abstract: In this presentation, I revisit the scholarly literature’s distinction between transparency and publicity—two major requirements in public affairs. This call for a differentiation has resurfaced many times in the growing literature on transparency, even though the problem has rarely been explicitly tackled. My research question is the following: Is there a discontinuity of meaning between the principle of publicity (which appears in classical writings, notably those of Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant and Benjamin Constant) and the metaphor of transparency (which emerged in parallel in the 18th century and which increasingly has been considered a fundamental principle of democracy)?