Public and Private
| Author | Peter J. Steinberger |
| Published date | 01 June 1999 |
| Date | 01 June 1999 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00201 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Public and Private
PETER J. STEINBERGER
Reed College, Portland, Oregon
The problem of public and private is often thought to be a boundary problem.
`Public' and `private' are said to denote separate areas of human endeavour ± distinct
`realms', `spheres', or `spaces'. The task of formulating clear boundaries, however,
has proven to be enormously complex. It seems that every attempt at conceptualizing
a purely private area of activity runs into a particular kind of diculty, namely, many
of the activities characteristic of the private sphere turn out to be activities toward
which no responsible public authority could possibly remain indierent: abuse within
the family, collusion in the business world, criminal conspiracy among friends.
It may be, however, that the problem of public and private, conceived as a
boundary problem, is thereby misconceived. It would perhaps be better to think of
public and private as denoting not primarily ± perhaps not at all ± separate realms of
endeavour but dierent ways of being in the world, dierent `manners of acting'. To
act in a private manner is simply dierent in character from acting in a public
manner. Such a formulation, if pursued with care, would allow us to accept fully the
arguments of those who would question the very idea of a private realm, while still
permitting us to retain a vigorous and compelling public/private distinction.
The problem of public and private is often thought to be a boundary problem.
`Public' and `private' are said to denote separate areas of human activity ±
distinct `realms', `spheres', or `spaces'. The integrity of each is assured by
maintaining its separation from the other, and this requires the construction, in
thought and in fact, of barriers that provide clear lines of demarcation and that
make boundary violations dicult or impossible. The result is a kind of
dualism: render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, but exclude
Caesar from all of those places in which individuals live their private lives.1
1 A standard formulation of this view was provided by S. Warren and L. Brandeis, `The right to
privacy', Harvard Law Review, 4 (1890), 193±220, for whom privacy is largely a matter of being left
alone. For later versions, see M. Weinstein, `The Uses of Privacy in the Good Life', in J. R. Pennock
and J. Chapman (eds), Nomos XIII: Privacy (New York, Atherton, 1971), p. 88 and R. Posner, The
Economics of Justice (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 272. The recent philosophical
literature focuses largely on just what it means to be left alone. For some, privacy is essentially a
matter of restricted access to information about a particular person. The standard work here is A.
Westin, Privacy and Freedom (New York, Atheneum, 1967); but see also E. Beardsley, `Privacy:
Autonomy and Self-disclosure', in Nomos XIII: Privacy; R. Wasserstrom, `Privacy: Some
Arguments and Assumptions', in R. Bronaugh (ed.), Philosophical Law (Westport CT, Greenwood,
1978); and W. Parent `Recent work on the concept of privacy', American Philosophical Quarterly, 20
(1983), 341±54. Others agree in emphasizing restricted access, but conceive it to include more than
information. See J. Rachels, `Why is privacy important?', Philosophy and Public Aairs, 4 (1975);
J. Kupfer, `Privacy, autonomy and self-concept', American Philosophical Quarterly, 24 (1987), 81±8;
and A. Allen, Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society (Totowa, NJ, Rowman and
Little®eld, 1988). For still others, restricted access of whatever kind is itself less important than the
actual control that a person has over certain kinds of decisions, especially intimate ones. See
# Political Studies Association 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
PETER J. STEINBERGER
293
The task of formulating clear boundaries, however, has proven to be enorm-
ously complex. It seems that attempts at conceptualizing a purely private area of
activity often run into a particular kind of diculty, namely, many of the
activities characteristic of the private sphere turn out to be activities toward
which no responsible public authority could possibly remain indierent: abuse
within the family, manipulative collusion within the business world, criminal
conspiracy among friends.2 In the face of this problem, of course, one might
simply seek to redraw the boundaries. To my knowledge, however, no such
eort has succeeded in preventing a recurrence of the same basic diculty, for
the very good reason that civil authorities can always claim ± and with much
plausibility ± that the public good is materially aected by almost any type of
conjoint human endeavour. Alternatively, principles might be adduced that
would permit selective intrusions into private life. But such intrusions are likely
to result in a messy and ill-de®ned intermingling of public and private that
mocks the very idea of separate spheres, distinct and inviolable.3
As a theoretical matter, these diculties are exacerbated by the fact that the
language of public and private is used in such a variety of quite dierent ways.
In some contexts, for example, private is virtually a synonym for the family or
the household, public for everything else. In others, private refers to anything
that is not governmental, as in the `private enterprise system'. Such uses may
once have coincided, as perhaps when the family was the main locus of
economic activity. But obviously this has long-since ceased to be the case, and
today the impossibly tangled boundary between public and private is nicely
illustrated by the fact that a great deal of `private property' is owned in the form
corporate stock that is `publicly held' and `publicly traded'.
It may be, however, that the problem of public and private, conceived as a
boundary problem, is thereby misconceived. It is true that our natural language
amply re¯ects the idea of separate spheres: private activities occur `behind
closed doors', `within the sanctity of home', `out of sight', whereas public
activities take place `in plain view', `out in the open', `under the glare of the
lights'. Such expressions, however, may just be manifestations of a long-
established habit of misconception. And indeed, linguistic practice also re¯ects
J. Reiman, `Privacy, intimacy, and personhood', Philosophy and Public Aairs, 6 (1976), 26±44;
T. Gerety, `Rede®ning privacy', Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Review, 12 (1977), 233±96; and
J. DeCew, `The scope of privacy in law and ethics', Law and Philosophy, 5 (1986), 145±73. Virtually
all of this literature takes the boundary theory for granted; it asks only about the nature of the
private realm, rather than whether or not privacy is best conceptualized in that way. Emblematic
here is Inness's claim that `privacy is the state of possessing control over a realm of intimate
decisions' (J. Inness, Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation (New York, Oxford University Press, 1992),
p. 140). Those philosophers who have recently questioned the idea of a private realm have
questioned the idea of privacy altogether: for example, J. Thomson, `The right to privacy',
Philosophy and Public Aairs, 4 (1975), 295±314; and H. J. McCloskey, `Privacy and the right to
privacy', Philosophy, 55 (1980), 37. More generally, the analytic literature tends to treat the question
of the private realm without looking systematically at its presumed counterpart, the public realm.
For explicit comparisons along these lines, one must look to a rather dierent kind of writing,
exempli®ed by the work of Hannah Arendt and discussed below in some detail.
2 Westin, Privacy and Freedom, pp. 21±63; Inness, Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation, pp. 3±19.
3 Consider, in this respect, the tangled history of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. For
example, see Justice Blackmun's majority opinion in California v. Acevedo (500 US 565 [1991]),
which provides a lengthy and detailed analysis of case law pertaining to the relative privacy of
personal luggage, on the one hand, and the trunk of an automobile, on the other.
# Political Studies Association, 1999
294
Public and Private
the rather dierent view that private activities, wherever they occur, have a
character quite unlike that of public activities. We say of certain private acts, for
example, that they are performed with `solicitude' or with `discretion' or with
`warmth', not qualities that would ordinarily be attributed to public acts.4
Private acts, but usually not public ones, can be undertaken `aectionately' or
`intimately' or `in con®dence'. Public acts, but usually not private ones, can be
`procedural', `legalistic', or `theoretical'. It is true that the language of publicity
is sometimes used to describe private acts and vice versa; but generally this is
done either for literary purposes or to identify a particular act as having been
performed inappropriately. To say `I'm crazy about you, in theory' is to make a
kind of joke, mixing public and private; and if we say `He spoke to his wife in a
legalistic tone of voice', we are suggesting that something was amiss. On the
other hand, to say `In theory, people have equal rights' is to speak plainly and in
a public manner, without dissonance; and if it is spoken legalistically, nothing
could be more natural than that.
I suspect that the adverbial language of activity re¯ects more accurately our
underlying intuitions...
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