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Arendt was wholly ambivalent about the liberal discourse of human rights and by extension, it is argued, wars justified in their name. She can be read as far less sanguine about the apparent progressiveness of human rights ideologies than other of her readers have suggested. This argument is made through an analysis of her writing on violence and hypocrisy. Arendt's work is filled with examples of violent rage against hypocrisy, but also how hypocrisy can enable cruelty. Above all, Arendt was a defender of the created, public world where it is only possible to judge words and actions, not motives. And yet Arendt does not leave us without grounds to act against genocide. These grounds are not based on the large numbers of dead, on levels of cruelty as such. Wars of annihilation cannot be tolerated because they attack the fundamental basis of all politics which is human plurality.

The place of faith in the public realm has been one of the contested issues over a long period, involving conflicts that resonate across a spectrum of public feeling and thought. Some of these conflicts are embodied in the public imaginations or events such as the Reformation, the Crusades and the Inquisition which remain alive for many in a distant and generalised form of atrocities in the name of religion. Others have more immediate resonance because of their political and social implications for the lives of those important to an individual including the persons's own life. Such events include Kashmir, Iraq and Israel-Palestine or the so-called ‘war on terror’ (prompted by acts of religiously inspired terrorism) which reconstructs a beginning of a new ‘global history’ through the struggle of Islamic fundamentalism and Western democracy. In addition to these events that showed faith in the public realm is a difficult interplay of religion and politics, debates also arise on the significance of faith within the public spaces. Secularist arguments have emerged contesting and arguing that public faith is irrelevant and an anachronistically anomaly of contemporary times. This introductory chapter discusses the role of faith and faith-based groups in governance and civil society. It looks at how faith-based groups gain access and assure people that governmental policies and welfare services can address their needs. It also discusses the challenges faced by the ‘public faith’. The introductory chapter ends with a short discussion on the contents and subjects of the succeeding chapters.

Chapter 2 discusses the arguments on the opposing views of the secularists in terms of modern society and traditional religion regarding religion's involvement in the public realm. Secularists’ notable views on the involvement of religion in modern democracy is examined here. The chapter states that religion, in essence, is undemocratic and repressive. It also disucsses the idea that religious beliefs are irrational, and thus have no place in the organization of society; religious values are, at best, peripheral to environmentalism, which should be shaped by science not faith; an involvement in politics is bad for religion; and religion has become increasingly irrelevant to modern life. Religious environmentalism is one part of a global movement that seeks to integrate the most creative, humane, and hopeful parts of both secular society and religious tradition.

What is the appropriate role of government in avoiding harms by means of influencing citizens' behaviour? How does individual responsibility enter into the answer? Traditional liberalism's answer to this question assumes the priority of private responsibility. This chapter examines a naturalistic challenge to this assumption. Work in the cognitive sciences suggests that individual responsibility is not prior to the public realm, so cannot independently parameterize the limits of the public realm. Rather, individual responsibility has a public ecology. The capacity for responsible action assumed by liberalism isn't simply a given, but has social and political conditions. As a result, we need to revise our understanding of liberalism. A progressive social liberalism should serve the public good within the public ecology of responsibility in ways that counter manipulation and support the rationality and responsibility of citizens. Such an ecological conception of liberalism is not a way of abandoning liberalism, but a way of revitalizing and strengthening it for the future.

This concluding chapter draws on the preceding chapters to determine the key themes in this volume. ‘Strong secularists’ argue that religion should be excluded from public life and the public realm and should be instead confined to private life. This argument stemmed from the notion that religion is a destructive ‘other’. However, in a wider assessment of public faith, the drawing of fixed binary divide and the ‘othering’ of faith and secularism is rather unfounded. Sharp and ongoing controversies, and science and rationalism failed to confront faith in a necessarily philosophical opposition. In terms of practical action, although there can be important organisations in the public realm, there is much common sentiment and practice in approaches to both caring and radical campaigning, and shared tensions experienced by organisations in their relationship with the state. Both the secular and the religious can engage in constructive deliberation and both can address arguments marked by unhelpful circularity. While some of public interventions by faith communities and organisations can be divisive, others are marked by their attempts to build dialogue, trust and negotiations of differences. All are operating in an ever more diverse and changing public realm which is not straightforwardly ‘neutral’ and which challenges both the liberalism of classical liberals and the capacity of faiths to address tensions between reform and tradition.

This chapter investigates some basic philosophical, theological and socio-political controversies that underpin the place of faith in the public realm. It considers two relevant questions: Should religious faith have an organised presence in the public realm? What are, and what might be, the consequences of a faith presence? Specifically, the chapter addresses a strong secularist critique of ‘public religion’ in the UK. It examines the strong secularist stance of Sam Harris, A.C. Grayling and Christopher Hitchens who strongly argued that: first, religion is irrational and at odds with science and evidence-based dialogues; second, religion is a source of conflict and division; and third, religion is oppressive and a hindrance to free speech, political democracy and personal liberty as well as a threat to neutral public secular space.

This chapter offers an account of the practice of civic life: of the ‘public realm’, within which criminal law operates as public law. ‘Civil order’, the normative ordering of the polity’s life, is central to this public realm: it is structured by the values through which a polity constitutes itself; it can be partly defined by a written constitution, but is also implicit in the polity’s institutions and practices. A conception of civil order depends on a normative distinction between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’: we must attend to different public–private distinctions. We must also attend to the preconditions of civil order: what kinds of shared understanding are necessary; what can be said to dissenters? Given a conception of a polity’s civil order, and its public realm, we can understand a ‘public wrong’ as a wrong that falls within that public realm, and violates that civil order.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) has often been regarded as a very illiberal thinker —a defender of ‘despotism’ and an advocate of the principle that ‘might is right’. While those accusations are false, it is true that there are distinctly illiberal elements in his thinking. These include absolutism, authoritarianism, anti-constitutionalism and a hostility to democracy. Yet his political theory also contains some of the most important building-blocks of modern liberal thinking about the state and its citizens: the crucial role of consent; natural rights; egalitarianism; the idea of the state as a device to protect people against oppressors; the homogeneity of legal authority within the state; the concept of the state as a public realm; and the idea that the sovereign acts publicly—above all, through law. (These last three points are preconditions of a Rechtsstaat.) And whilst Hobbes denies that people are ruled by a constitution, his theory does acknowledge the need for rule through a constitution.

Chapter 2 focuses on the productive domains of the city. It begins by considering the socio-cultural and biological co-evolution of sharing, exploring common features and cultural variations. It examines key ways in which cities are shared domains of production, reproduction and exchange, with shared public services, infrastructures and resources. It outlines how services and infrastructures can be co-produced with particular reference to health and education, and explores co-production in commercial spheres – including peer-to-peer finance and energy, and in cooperatives. It highlights the risks of disowned responsibility and commodification that arise where sharing overlaps public or market provision. It concludes by discussing how a shared collective commons underpins both commercial and communal city functions.

This is a study of children’s play in an urban square as documented and shared through the lens of a dancer, a writer and a painter. The artists’ diverse modes of observation, perception and description revealed profound differences in how children and adults inhabit space and drew attention to the effect of children’s play on the culture of a public square. Using Ingold’s (2007, 2011) concept of lines of movement, Winnicott’s (1971) theory of transitional phenomena and Massey’s (2005) ideas on public space, these findings are discussed in relation to movement and presence, objects and imagination, co-existence and co-formation. The chapter explores how engaging with creative practitioners in the research process, and paying attention to subjective and embodied ways of knowing, can offer something more to traditional methodologies used to observe and represent play, and how this can add to the debate on the management and design of a child-friendly public realm.

The standard “democratic Athens” account becomes still more problematic when the terms of its construction are themselves questioned. As described in chapter one, this account takes for granted a modern, universalist template or model of social being. This theoretical template would have us presume the presence in antiquity of various complex societal phenomena, like discrete realms of nature and culture, sacred and secular, public and private, etc. It would have us presume the prevalence in the polis of specific social objects, like state, society, economy, religion, and the natural, pre-social individual. And it would have us presume the imaginability in Athens of modern-style, proto-liberal forms of equality, rights, and citizenship. Yet there is no explicit evidence that supports any of these presumptions. There is no evidence at all for any close correspondence between our modern theoretical model and ancient lived experience. Indeed, the evidence that we do have indicates quite unequivocally that our model’s various master categories would have made no sense at all to the classical Athenians as self-evidently real phenomena.

This concluding chapter takes a look back at the lessons that were discussed in the previous chapters. It stresses that the book explores the different contradictions that were forced on all citizens by the nuclear endgames of the Cold War, the sacrifices these citizens made, and the ever-present threat of the Janus-faced force. It emphasises the victimizing structures of the ideological control systems of the Cold War, as well as its movement in the public realm. The chapter also warns that the Cold War is not truly over, and that it still exists through nuclear trauma and phobia.

The fortunes of the provincial spinster Susanna Beever took an interesting turn late in life when Ruskin moved into Brantwood across the lake from her home, the Thwaite. They became close friends and correspondents. In 1874, at Ruskin’s insistence, Beever edited a volume of selections from Modern Painters. The book became an unexpected bestseller. Beever’s selections wove together Ruskin’s study of landscape with his radical understanding of ethical consumption. Beever was in fact one among several women editors involved in making Ruskin’s writings accessible to a broader audience. This was hardly a coincidence; Ruskin’s strong emphasis on the moral authority of “Queens” encouraged women to take on new roles in the public realm. Ruskin called Beever the leading representative of “the Ruskin school of the Lake Country.” At a time when Ruskin was increasingly troubled by modern science, he found much comfort in Beever’s celebration of the natural world and the pleasures of sufficiency. But her resilient outlook was hard won. She was keenly aware of Ruskin’s dark forebodings about climate change and environmental degradation.

The case study highlights the role of urban space design and planning for streetlife and liveability, especially as promoted by Jan Gehl; noting particularly the city’s commitment to the co-creation of shared public spaces. It outlines the value of shared public spaces such as Superkilen park for political participation and interculturalism. It notes the effective autonomy of Christiania and its experiments in participatory governance. It highlights the emergence of modern co-housing in Copenhagen and the city’s exceptional efforts to support cycling with shared cycles, infrastructure and facilities.

This chapter looks at the spaces, places and assets that are used in common by communities and need to be protected for the effective functioning of those communities. These include: public parks, public spaces in urban areas and community assets such as halls, pubs and post offices. Community based schemes to provide and maintain such assets are discussed as well as community management and planning of outside land and spaces. Links are made to the literature on local commons.

The idea of civil society resurrected in the 1970s has been one of the most important concepts guiding reflection on political transformations of contemporary societies. This chapter discusses various understandings of the concept and the asserted role civil society has in shaping political and economic outcomes. It points to established consensus on the beneficial role of civil society as a political project and a set of normative principles, but it emphasizes disagreements about how civil society is defined and measured, how it evolves over time, what dimensions of politics and public policy it shapes, and what are the mechanisms through which it affects the quality of democracy and resistance to authoritarianism. It also explores the idea of the civil society strategy as a distinct mode of political transformations as opposed to the revolutionary strategy. Finally, it suggests that civil society can be construed as a discrete analytical optics for analysing political change.