In the history of concepts and ideas, the notion of the public is closely associated with the emergence of bourgeois society. Like publicity, publication, publicist, and publicize, the term public belongs to a lexical field that goes back (with variants in different national languages) to the Latin adjective publicus (public) and its nominalized form publicum. From these roots, the modern concept of the public (German das Publikum, French le public) occupies three semantic levels: that of the state, that of society, and that of openness (i.e. not secret) [7] (Arcana imperii)…