(Re)thinking culture thickly: The public realm from Hannah Arendt’s <i>The Human Condition</i> to the Bennett Institute report

Terms such as ‘public’, ‘public good’, ‘public value’ and ‘public domain’ occur frequently in policy documents. Without a sense of what ‘public’ means, however, not just in everyday language, but as a ‘thick concept’ that has acquired resonance over time, there can little point deploying the terms in policymaking. The dilemma is especially acute for those trying rethink the relationship between economics and its conventional hierarchy of concepts and culture as a public good (‘the foundations’). This includes both heterodox economic approaches and policymakers working pragmatically to add legitimacy to their terms, by expanding how they are classified and operate. This article examines the concept of ‘the public realm’ as found in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) and as it might be taken up by cultural policymaking today. The first section examines innovation economist Mariana Mazzucato’s arguments for revising the concept of ‘the common good’. The second section tackles the parts of The Human Condition dealing with ‘the public realm’ directly. The broad argument is that the histories, interdisciplinary existences and patterns of use of thick concepts are crucial to their meaning and sense as policymaking terms. I argue that Arendt’s ‘thinking thickly’ is instructive for those aiming to engage questions around the public value of culture and to repurpose state action in the cultural sector. The conclusion examines the UK Bennett Institute’s Working Paper, ‘Measurement of Social and Cultural Infrastructure’ (Bennett Institute for Public Policy, 2024) asking whether its use of key term is adequate to its policy object. What challenges do policymakers face now as they try to tack away from neoliberalism’s impasses but with no obvious alternative pathway on offer?