On Publicity

The concept of publicity is essentially connected with an openness of some issues to the public. Publicity becomes conscious when social apparatuses such as tax, kingship, law, religion, market, public opinion and so on, start functioning in a particular society. Hegel, as well as the critical sociology which has been influenced greatly by him, assumed the modern nation state to be something public which stands high above civil society. However, on the contrary, civil society is based on freedom of contract, which is the very essence of publicity. Citizens share of expenses in the form of tax for contracts can be regarded as a prototype of publicity of a modern civil society. The urgent problem that international society is now facing is to construct a new framework of publicity which will distribute the share of the burden to preserve the global environment as public goods.