Description

"Transparency" is the constant refrain of democratic politics, a promised aid to

accountability and integrity in public life. Secrecy is stigmatized as a work of corruption, tolerable (if

at all) by a compromise of democratic principles. My dissertation challenges both ideas. It argues

that secrecy and transparency are best understood as complementary, not contradictory, practices.

And it develops a normative account of liberal democratic politics in which (qualified) duties of

transparency coexist with (qualified) permissions to act behind closed doors.

The project begins with some history. I show that the language of transparency gained

currency only in the last quarter century, and explain how its proximate sources promote three

dubious assumptions-that disclosure should in principle be maximized, that it prevents misrule

more or less automatically, and that its value is either instrumental, or rooted in a reductive notion of

democracy as the rule of popular opinion.