politics, and international relations. For Kant, arguing against government
secrecy about treaties in his famous essay on “Perpetual Peace,” a lack of
transparency could potentially worsen the effects of international anarchy and
(O’Neill 2006; Bennington 2011). For Rousseau,
contribute to war
transparency was primarily a way to increase the visibility of public
servants, making it more difﬁcult for them to defraud the state; he called for
measures that would make it impossible for government ofﬁcials to “move
about incognito, so that the marks of a man’s rank or position shall
accompany him wherever he goes” (Rousseau 1985: p. 72 cited in Hood
2006). Bentham’s even more extreme ideals about publicity and visibility, as
best exempliﬁed by his infamous “panopticon,” seem to have been fundamentally
rooted in pessimistic expectations about human fallibility and the corrupting
inﬂuence of power (Gaonkar and McCarthy 1994). Bentham is often identiﬁed
Social_Media_and_Democracy