The Value of Privacy E-Book

Beate Roessler

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 717

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

This new book by Beate Rössler is a work of real quality and originality on an extremely topical issue: the issue of privacy and the relations between the private and the public.

Rössler investigates the reasons why we value privacy and why we ought to value it. In the context of modern, liberal societies, Rössler develops a theory of the private which links privacy and autonomy in a constitutive way: privacy is a necessary condition to lead an autonomous life. The book develops a theory of freedom and autonomy which sees the ability to pose the “practical question” of how one wants to live, of what a person strives to be, at the centre of the modern idea of autonomy.

The question of privacy is emerging as an increasingly important topic in social and political theory and is central to many current debates in law, the media and politics. The Value of Privacy will be widely recognised to be a classic contribution to the subject.

Leseprobe

Contents

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

1 Discourses on privacy

2 Privacy: conceptual clarifications

3 The framework of liberal democracy

4 Cultural differences: autonomy and authenticity

5 A comment on the method

6 Privacy and autonomy: the line of argument

2 Equal Freedom, Equal Privacy: On the Critique of the Liberal Tradition

1 Head or heart: contradictions in the liberal concept of privacy

2 The feminist critique

3 Three classics of liberal thought: Locke, Mill and Rawls

4 Equality and difference between the sexes Parenthesis: On the debate over equality and difference

5 Equal freedom, equal privacy

3 Freedom, Privacy and Autonomy

1 Introduction

2 A general concept of freedom

3 Freedom and autonomy

4 Why do we value privacy?

5 Privacy and autonomy

THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF PRIVACY

4 Decisional Privacy: Scope for Action and Decisions

1 Private matters and freedom for decisions

2 Decisional privacy and autonomy (1): the communitarian critique

3 Decisional privacy and autonomy (2): the feminist critique

4 What sort of freedom is protected by privacy?

5 Informational Privacy: Limits to Knowledge

1 Expectations: what do other people know about me?

2 Informational privacy and unspecified others: the panopticon

3 Informational privacy and specified others: collusions, friendships and intimate relations

4 Expectations, knowledge, autonomy

6 Local Privacy: The Private Home

1 The refuge of privacy

2 A room of one’s own: self-invention, self-presentation and autonomy

3 Privacy and the family: love and justice

7 Interfaces: Public and Private

1 Interfaces and ambivalences

2 Exposure: the staging of privacy in the public realm

3 Concealment: the protection of the public realm from private matters

4 The private and the public person: dissonant identities

Notes

References

Index

For Rebecca, even though it’s a book without pictures

Der Wert des Privaten © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2001 English edition ©Polity Press 2005

The right of Beate Rössler to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publication of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press.350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN 0 7456 3110 XISBN 0 7456 3111 8 (paperback)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.75 on 11 pt Times New Roman by TechBooks, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

Acknowledgements

For critical discussions and other support I thank Stefan Gosepath, Marcus Otto, Walter Pfannkuche, Holmer Steinfath and Bernhard Thöle: our Berlin colloquium made the beginning of this book significantly easier for me. The completion of the book was greatly helped by the supportive and stimulating atmosphere in Amsterdam, both in the Faculty of Philosophy and in the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis: for this I thank in particular Veit Bader, Govert den Hartogh and Hent de Vries.

Along this at times rather arduous path other friends too have helped me with advice, criticism and discussions: for this many thanks go to Martina Herrmann, Dunja Jaber, Christoph Menke and Herlinde Pauer-Studer. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Martin Löw-Beer, who at the end commented on the manuscript in its entirety and in the process pointed out a series of problems to me, and to Stefan Gosepath, who time and again read the various versions of the manuscript and made friendly and critical comments on it.

A conference on privacies in Amsterdam helped me enormously to put my thoughts together: I am very grateful to the participants, above all to Anita Allen, Moira Gatens, Axel Honneth and Nicola Lacey, for their contributions and discussions.

Bernhard Peters argued with me always with patience even though without always managing to convince me. I am deeply grateful to him for his support and advice and, above all, for his encouragement at the right time.

Finally, I should like to thank Rupert Glasgow for his meticulous and sympathetic translation and for his interest in really getting the meaning right, and the Wissenschaftskolleg at Berlin for providing perfect working conditions while I read my way through the translation of the book.

Beate Rössler

1Introduction

The question of whom I live with is a private affair, and so is what I think about my colleagues at work. My diary is private, as is part of my correspondence. It is a private matter how I dress, which church I go to, and what profession I choose. My house and home is my private sphere, in other words my dwelling too. The question of where I send my child to school is a private one, and when I’m sitting with a friend in a cafe, though this may be a public place, it is a private affair.

This is an incomplete list of the things we describe using the complex predicate ‘private’. Yet ‘private’ is not only a complex predicate, but also one which, depending on the context in which it is used, may have a directly evaluative or prescriptive character. This comes to light not only when we rebuff someone with the remark that something is none of their business or is a private matter, but also in complaints to the effect that privacy is under threat from the new information technologies, from the latest possibilities for eavesdropping on people, watching them, filming them, etc. Privacy is here typically referred to as something worth protecting that should be normatively respected. Even complaints about the ‘blurring of boundaries’ between the public and private spheres through the ‘privatization’ of the public appeal to an implicit evaluation not only of the public sphere but also of privacy as a realm worthy of protection.

What interests me in this book are the fundamental questions: why do we value privacy? And why should we value privacy? What I try to show is that we value privacy for the sake of our autonomy. In liberal societies, privacy has the function of permitting and protecting an autonomous life.

When I speak of privacy and the protection of privacy, etc., in what follows, what I mean by this is the protection of the privacy of individual persons. I am concerned, in other words, with a theory of individual privacy. What is private and what is worth protecting about the privacy of private enterprise or the privacy of institutions (such as the Catholic Church) will here at most play only a marginal role. And when I talk of privacy in what follows, I am not simultaneously referring to the public sphere. I shall be treating the other side of this ‘great dichotomy’ as a ‘residual category’ without any more precise structure, though where necessary I shall go into the interplay and interaction of the private and the public.1

This introductory chapter is intended to provide an overview of the subject, its background, and some of the questions involved. By the end of this introduction it should be clear what the ensuing path looks like and where it will be leading.

1 Discourses on privacy

Theories of privacy – theories of the change it has undergone, the threat it faces, the function it fulfils – are to be found in widely differing and often wholly separate discourses, each approaching the problem from a different angle, referring to different histories of privacy, and focusing on different aspects of the term’s meaning. Here I intend to give only a brief sketch of these discourses. One way or another, they will come up in greater detail in the course of the following chapters.

Privacy is a prominent topic in sociological and philosophical theories of ‘the public sphere. It is here understood both as the realm of intimacy and the sphere traditionally assigned to the family household.2 This approach also includes such theories as the one set forth by Richard Sennett, since with his concept of the ‘tyranny of intimacy’ he is more interested in a theory of public life and its decline (through the incursion of intimacy) than in a normative theory of privacy3 In such theories of the public sphere, privacy is by and large thought of merely as a residual category – designated ‘the private home’ or the ‘realm of intimacy’ and not further differentiated – since the focus is on the development and modernization of the public realm and its present-day structures and functions. Privacy is also made a theme in this way in theories of civilization, such as the work of Norbert Elias, where civilizing processes affect the privatization of what were formerly public social practices and where these processes come to bear upon the regulation of private life itself.4 In this first discourse, the spotlight is thus above all on changes in the boundary between the private and the public and transformations in the public or domestic realm, on civilizing processes as processes of privatization, and modernizing processes as processes of de-privatization.5 Also included are the sorts of diagnostic approaches (not all of them sociological in orientation) that are concerned in general with a diagnosis of the present in terms of the private sphere (most often its decline) and identify the loss of clear dividing lines, the blurring of boundaries between private and public, as a pathology of late modern societies. Here too, however, there is in the main no direct interest in a normative theory of privacy, which is instead taken as a starting-point for cultural criticism of a more general nature.6

Likewise primarily sociological in orientation, a further sort of discourse focuses on privacy on its own account, and in particular the realm of the ‘private family’. This type of discourse is interested in the changes undergone by the family as the traditional stronghold of private life.7 Privacy is here considered in its classic sense as the realm of domestic life, of the family and of intimacy, a realm that in spite of its modifications, functional shifts, spatial reconfigurations, and the recasting of roles, has been preserved in its fundamental significance from antiquity to the present day.8

These thematic treatments of privacy have been greatly influenced by a form of discourse that, though also historical or diagnostic in orientation, is predominantly critical, that is the discourse of feminist theory.9 This theoretical current has influenced the interpretations and conceptualizations of privacy in contemporary social debates more than any other. A political and philosophical discussion of the problematic nature of the public and the private has been going on in feminist theory ever since the 1960s, and it is here, much more than in the other discourses I have mentioned, that the the two realms or spheres have been reflected upon. The diverse and heterogeneous feminist critique of the traditional distinction between private and public spheres has become interesting and influential in particular because it highlights deep-rooted ambivalences in the differentiation between the public and the private realm, as well as the repressive nature of this split. The history of private life is here told in a different way from the discourses referred to above, namely as the history of the banishment of certain persons and certain themes to the realm of privacy, as the history of an unjust social system and as the history of the emancipation from this.