Privacy as a value is often regarded as an essentially modern development, emerging out of the liberalism of nineteenth-century writers like J.S.Mill (1971 [1874]). In the Classical world, the private was associated with withdrawal from the public sphere and hence with deprivation (privatus), while the public arena was defined by positive values and was the social space which embraced freedom. The process of modernization has reversed this moral evaluation, as the public domain is often regarded as artificial and constraining in contrast to the freedom of the domestic domain. The home is a private castle, behind which men enjoy rewards of their labour outside the family. This cultural contrast which equates the public sphere with necessity and the private world with freedom is, from a feminist perspective, characteristic only of men. The private had largely negative connotations, whereas in contemporary society the notion of private is typically associated with privilege (Williams 1976), as in ‘private property’ or ‘private club’. The existence of privacy as a moral criterion presupposes not only a clear institutional separation between the public and the private domain, but also a system of beliefs which emphasizes the importance of the private for the cultivation and protection of individuality. These two conditions developed in the nineteenth century with the separation of the family from the economy, allocating women and children to a space characterized by intimacy and seclusion, and with the articulation of the doctrine of individual liberties in opposition to the state. Like the doctrine of individualism, ‘privacy’ had a critical and oppositional role as a critique of standardization. While privacy and the private are firmly located in the nineteenth-century process of industrialization, they have many earlier precedents. For example, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, by emphasizing the importance of the private conscience in matters of doctrinal truth, isolated the individual from the authoritative institutions of the church. Alternatively, it can be argued (Hepworth and Turner 1982) that the revolution in private consciousness can be traced back through the institution of confession to the penitential handbooks of the thirteenth century. Another indication of the growth of privacy as a moral standard is the emergence of the autobiography as the dominant form of literary expression by 1800. An important turning-point in this development was the retirement of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne in 1570 from public office and the publication of his Essays de Montaigne, which exhibit a modern sense of the subtlety of the interior, private person (Weintraub 1978). From a sociological perspective, the evolution of privacy is part of the complex development of individualism, subjectivity and the reflexive self.
While the nineteenth-century evaluation of privacy has precursors, the liberal view of private life is distinctive in that privacy became a peculiar point of anxiety. The private world was suddenly threatened by powerful social agencies: the extension of state power, the threat of mass democracy, the surveillance of the individual in schools, factories and hospitals, the increasing documentation of the individual by bureaucracy, and the professionalization of the police and other custodial occupations. In the heyday of liberalism, Alexis de Tocqueville (1947) noted the danger to personal freedoms which was the unintended consequence of mass politics. In sociology, Max Weber (1930) saw capitalism as an iron cage, which, through ‘rationalization’, would subordinate people to a new system of public domination and reduce the individual to a mere cog in the machine. Michel Foucault (1977 [1975]) and Jacques Donzelot (1977) have conceptualized modern society as a network of ‘disciplines’ which police the individual from the cradle to the grave: society, in this view, is a system of surveillance. Within this analysis, modern society is fundamentally paradoxical. A capitalist system requires individualism because the consumption of commodities depends on private hedonism, suitably stimulated by commercial advertising. At the same time, it produces individuation, that is, the standardization of persons for purposes of taxation, registration and surveillance. In this contradiction between private individualism and public individuation, the individuality of the private person is progressively undermined within an administered society. The growth of computer technology and systems of information storage and retrieval reinforces the process by which the public domain invades and undermines the privacy of individual citizens.
From a different perspective, privacy is itself treated as an ideology of capitalist society, specifically John Locke’s theory of private property (Locke, 1960). The notion of the private individual is a fact of bourgeois ideology which legitimizes private property through the doctrine of individual rights. Privacy is seen as a primarily conservative belief—a necessary adjunct to private appropriation. The relationship between beliefs and social structure is, however, more complex than this view would suggest.
‘Civil privatism’ is partly undermined by the development of complex society, because urban life requires a social infrastructure (health, transportation, education, communication systems and leisure), much of which is provided by the state. In the language of Marxist urban sociology, there is a steady growth of collective consumption of urban facilities over private appropriation. The normative image of the private Robinson Crusoe becomes increasingly archaic with the development of capitalist society. However, in East European communism, privacy had been attacked by socialist governments as dangerous and subversive. Critics of state socialism and political centralisation often embraced the values of bourgeois privacy as an alternative to the collectivist values of the party system (Szelenyi 1988). Historical and sociological analysis of the relation between private and public spheres has been significantly influenced by J.Habermas’s (1989 [1962]) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, in which he argues that the expansion of the state has undermined the division of private and public. Genuine political debate in the polity has been corrupted by the public relations industry.
Bryan S.Turner
Deakin University
References
Donzelot, J. (1977) The Policing of Families, New York. (Original edn, La Police des families, Paris.)
Foucault, M. (1977 [1975]) Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, London. (Original edn, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison, Paris.)
Habermas, J. (1989 [1962]) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MA. (Original edn, Strukturwandel der offentlichkeit: Untersuchung zu einer Kategorie der burgerlichen Gessellschaft, Neuwied.)
Hepworth, M. and Turner, B.S. (1982) Confession: Studies in Deviance and Religion, London.
Locke, J. (1960[1690]) Two Treatises on Government, London.
Mill, J.S. (1971 [1874]) Autobiography, London.
Szelenyi, I. (1988) Socialist Entrepreneur: Embourgeoisemenl in Rural Hungary, Cambridge, UK.
Tocqueville, A.de (1947 [1835–40]) Democracy in America, London.
Weber, M. (1930[1903–4]) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London.
Weintraub, K. (1978) The Value of the Individual, Self and Circumstance in Autobiography, Chicago.
Williams, R. (1976) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London.
