Weintraub - Public Private - Preface

8/2/2019 Weintraub - Public Private - Preface

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Ittr Weintraub (y Krishan Kumareditorstr

PuBLrc AND PntvATEI.N THoUGHT AND PnAcTIcE

Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomyf

he University of Chicago PresChicago (r London

( tr17)T

P REFACE

This book brings together a set of original essays, both theoretical and empiri-cal, that focus on the public/private drstinction in social life and socialthought, exploring different dimensions of, and approaches to, this grand di-chotorny. The aim of the coilection is to bring out the significance of thisoverarching rheme for a wide range of issues and debates and, at the sametime, to confront directly the complexity and ambiguiry of the public/privatedistinction itself, both theoretically and sociohistorically.

Drawing the lines benveen public and private-both practic"lly and theo-retically-has been a central preoccupation of Western thought since classicalantiquiV; and "public" and "private" have long served as key organizing cate-gories in social and political analysis, in legal practice and jurisprudence, andin moral and political debates. Ve encounter this distinction in contexts thatrun from the most abstract theorizing to the most practical and immediatearenas of everyd"y life. In recent decades, different versions of the public/private distinction have become even rnore salient in a striking range of disci-plines and a.reas of inquiry, from "p*blic choice" economics to socid historyand ferninist scholarship. \fhile the reladonship bemeen the "public sector"and "privatization" has become a prominent issue of economic policy andpolitical debate, there has also been an intensified interest in the history andtransformations of "private life"-rneaning, in this case, not corporations orentrepreneurship but changing modes of intimacy, sexualiry, family, andfriendship.An expanding "public choice" literature, rooted in neoclassical eco-nornics, coexists with a wave of concern for the "public sphere" of discussionand political action delineated by Ji.irgen Habermas or Hannah fuendt andfor the "public life" of sociabiliry charted by Philippe Ariis, Jane Jacobs, orRichard Sennett. \rtrhile some wonder whether the social impact of new com-munications technologies is shifting (and perhaps eroding) the boundaries be-fween "publicity" and "privacy" in fundamental ways, "privacy" has becomea central concept in the controversy over abordon rights. In these and many


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PRernceother areas, the public/private distinction is more than ever a lively, even aburning, subject.

However, much of this discussion is weakened by rwo iuterconnected limi-tations: The enormous bodies of discourse that use "public" and "private" asorganning categories are not always informed by " careful consideration ofthe meanings and implications of the concepts themselves. And, even whenthe discussions are more conceptually self-reflective, those who draw on oneor another version of the public/private distinction often do so without sys-tematic attention to, or even clear awareness of, the wider range of alternativeframeworks within which it is employed. Aside from fragmenting the differentfields of discussion, the result is that people operating within these differentperspectives are often not fully aware of the undercurrents of assumption andimplication bound up in their own conceptual vocabularies. People not onlytalk past each other, or operate in mutual isolation, but confuse themselvesas well. Therefore, the prevailing situation is too often one of conceptual con-fusion rarher than fruitful cross-fertilization and reasoned contestation. Bycontrasr, the present collection builds on the recognition that the public/private distinction is not unitary, but protean. It comprises, not a single pairedopposirion, but a complex family of them, neither mutually reducible norwholly unrelated.This is especially the thrust of the first essay by Jeff 'Weintraub, whichoffers a critical overview of the major uses of the notions of "public" and"privare," seekirg to elucidate their theoretical and sociohistorical roots andto bring some intelligible order to the confusing multipliciry of ways that theyare employed. \Teintraub delineates, in particular, four broad fields of dis-course in which different notions of "public" and "private" currently playimportant roles: ( 1) the liberal-economistic rnodel, dominant in most "publicpolicy" analysis and in a great deal of everyd"y legal and political debate,which sees the public/private distinction primarily in terms of the distinctionberween state administration and the market economy; (2) the civic perspec-rive, which sees the "public" realrn (ot "public sphere") in terms of politicalcommuniry and citizenship, analytically distinct from both the market and theadminisrrarive state; (3) the approach, exemplified in different ways by thework of Aribs and Jane Jacobs (and other figures in social history and anthro-pology), which sees the "public" realm as a sphere of fluid and polymorphoussociabiliry, distinct from both the structures of formal organization and the"private" domains of intimacy and domesticiry; and (4) those tendencies infeminist scholarship (*d related areas) that conceive of the distinction be-rween "privare" and "public" in terms of the distinction berween the familyand fie larger economic and political order-with the market economy often

P n rracebecoming the paradigmatic "public" realm. A central theme of Veintraub'sdiscussion is the inadequacy of any single or dichotomous model of the public/private distinction to capture the institutional and cultural complexiqy of mod-ern societies" By mapping out and explicating the different forms, varianrs,and dimensions of the public/private distinction, his essay also arremprs roprovide an orienting conceptual frarnework for the issues addressed in theremainder of the voluffre.

The next three essays, while pursuing their own specific agendas, also ad-dress the historical emergence of k.y dimensions of the public/private distinc-tion as it has come to be understood and institgtionalized in modern societies.One distinctive aspect of tWestern moderniry, and especially of liberal thoughtand practice, has been its emphasis on demarcating the "public" domain ofstate power from the "private" domain of the market and civil sociery. Butmodern sociery has also been marked by an increasingly sharp polarizationbetween a "private" domain of "personal life," understood as the special pre-serve of intimacf , affection, trust, and elective affiniry, and the larger worldof impersonal and instrumental relations epitomized by the market and themodern state. Allan Silver's essay addresses this second division. As he pointsout, in modern sensibiliqy the domain of personal relations-of friendship,the family, romantic love, and so on-is often understood as a precarioushistorical survival in tension with, and indeed threatened by, the abstract andimpersonal structures of modern sociery. However, Silver argues, this realmof anti-instrumental private life is in fact a distinctive creation of moderniry;and its existence requires the very impersonaliry of the new "public" world ofbureaucratic administration, contractualism, and monetized exchange againstwhich it is culturally distinguished. Sympathetically reconstructing the analysisdeveloped by the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth cenrury, whichforms the basis for his own argument, Silver contends that it conrinues rooffer a powerful theoretical contribution to addressing conremporary con-ce rns.Craig Calhoun's essay addresses a diffcrent dimension of the ways that thepublic/private distinction has figured in the historical sociolo gy of moderniry.Calhoun analyzes the changing historical meanings of "public," "narion," and"people" as different modes of conceiving of an inclusive communiry, andlinks these notions to the emergence of the modern state and of new formsof large-scale social integration. The discourse of nationalism-in complexinterplay with currents of liberalism, republicanism, and religion-has fur-nished one answer to the problem of forming and recogni zLngmodern politicalcommunities, and for this reason has played a significant role in the hisroryof democracy. Yet it also has dangerous implications because of its tendency


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Pne rncero conceive of the public realrn in a monolithic and undifferentiated way.Drawing on a critical appropriation of Habermas's treatment of the "publicsphere," Calhoun argues that one of the crucial questions of the modern erais to understand the conditions under which meaningful and efficacious publicdiscourse, involving neither fragmenration nor repression of difference, canbe achieved.

Daniela Gobetri's essay reconsrrucrs and examines some key aspects of thehistorical elaboration of the liberal distinction berween private and public.Her starting point is the pervasiy-e influence of the classical model, later embed-ded in Ro-"r law, for whi.fljSirtinction berween private and public corre-sponded to a division berw..r the domains of the household and the bodypolitic. This was gradually displaced by " model for which the "private" corre-sponded to the individual, or ro civil society centered on market relations.Feminist thinkers have argued that, where women are concerned, liberalthought and practice superimposed this newer model on the older one, main-taining the famllythousehold as a "natural" realm of subordination whileexcluding women from full participation in both civil sociery and the bodypolitic. Gobetti argues that such readings, while illuminating, have been in-cornplete and thus porenti"lly misleadirg. Rather, early modern natural lawtheoris$-fssm Pufendorf to Locke and Hutcheson-were led to revise thedominanr models of both the household and the political domain in profoundways, and in the process to plant the seeds for a more universalist egalitarianismthan they themselves were willing to accept. fu the same time, they helpedlay the groundwork for continuing problems in our understandings of politicaljudgment.All these essays link their historical analysis to current theoretical and prac-tical concerns. Such concerns are the central focus of the next set of essays.Once the pubtic/private distinction has been shown to be ambiguous andsociohistorically variable rather than "natural" or straightforward, one re-sponse may be that we should simply dispense with it as misleading or ideolog-ically oppressive. In different ways, the essays by Jean Cohen, Jean Elshtain,and Alan Wolfe all argue against such a move. Jean Cohen, taking as hersrarting point the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to base a woman's right tochoose abortion on a constitutionally protected right to privacy, defends thediscourse of privacy and privacy rights against criticisms by both feminist legalscholars and "comm,unitarians." Undert"kitg to "redescribe the good thatprivacy protecrs" in nonatomistic and nonpatriarchal terms, Cohen arguesthat a legally safeguarded right to privacy-the protection of the "territoriesof the self:"-is essential to any serious modern conception of freedom. JeanElshtain, in a parallel argument, warns against the dangers of current forms of

PRerncr"identiry politics" that attempt, in efFect, to eclipse altogether the distinctionberween public and private by collapsing the personal into the political. AndAlan Volfc argues that, while some forms oi th. public/private distinctionare necessary for both understanding and improving mod.rn societies, a uni-tary and dichotomous public/private framework is inadequare to address keyissues in both social theory and political practice. All three of these conrribu-tors argue, in effect, that the proper response is not simplification but complex-ification.The essays of Cohen and Wolfe both point ro a critical ambiguiry of the"private" as comprising either the individual or the family. Firishan Kumarturns his attention to this second face of the "privare sphere": rhe one thatidentifies it with the social space and the intimate life of the home . Drawingon the thinking of Philippe Arils and Hannah Arendt, he argues that conrem-porary celebrations of the home and family are often misg"ia.a appeals ro asphere that has already been severely weakened over th. p"-rr cenru{y, and onethat is dangerously vulnerable to the incursions of politics, cornmerce, andindividualism. In a comPlementary vein, David Brain, charting the transfor-mations in the theory and practice of architecture and urban design in theUnited States frorn the hey d^y of "modernism" to the "postrnodernist', reac-tion against the modernist project, quesrions the extenr ro which the ',newurbanism" and the "planned communities" of the 1980s and 1990s have over-come the tendencies toward alienation, isolation, and the degradation of "p,rb-lic space" attributed to the practices of modernist archite.r,.rr.. Rather thana revitalization of public space, cornmunity, and urban sociabiliry, the resultsare more often to foster consumerism, the hardening of social boundaries, anda combination of pseudocommuniry and privatizarion. Furthermore, criticaldiscussions of these issues tend to be handicapped by inadequare and mis-leading understandings both of the social dynami., of public space and of theprocesses by which the public/private distinction is given concrere form in

the built environmenr.Karen Hansen, in a historical study ofworking-class lifc in antebellum NewEngland based on the analysis of personal narraii'rr.r, questions the prevailinghistorical understanding of social life in nineteenth-cenrury America as sharplydichotomized benveen public and private spheres, with women largely con-fined to the latter. Her findings undermine both the assumption of a rigidseparation ber'ween these rwo domains and the related pi.iure of gender-segtegated lifeworlds based on the nineteenth-cenrury doctrine of "ip"r"t.spheres" for men and women. The larger implications of this analysis poirrr rothe problematic character_of the publiclpriu.t. dichotomy itself ,, .rrlrr"l^icfrarnework in history and the social sciences. Vhen used as a binary *od.t


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Pnerncrof social structure, Hansen argues, the public/private dichotomy obscures thedepth, breadth, and import"r.. of informal sociabiliry in everyday life as adistinctive field of pracligss-with a cultural logic not reducible to those ofthe market, the state, or the domesric sphere-that can help to sustain com-munities and weave these different realms together.The last rwo essays, by Marc Garcelon and Oleg Kharkhordin, providea different kind of historical and comparative perspective by examining thedistinctive configurarions of public and private as they developed in Soviet-rype societies, p"rti.,rlarly th. So,riet Union itself. As both of them note, theRussian language has no satisfactory equivalents for "public" and "private" asthese terms "pp."r in wesrern European languages, nor had Russian thoughtgenerated a ,odirion of theoretical reflection centering on this pair of concepts'In some ways, these linguistic and conceptual "translation problems" poseinterpretive difficulties, b,.rt th.y also open up some useful possibilities' since*"ri of the concepts that are fused together in the public/private dichotomyare captured by distinct terms in Russian. Garcelon's essay, which is groundedin a systematic conrrast of the historical experiences of Western and Soviet-rype societies, makes it clear that such notions as "public," "private," "public,'pl.r.," and "civil sociery"-y7[ich are complex enough in a \Testern con-rext-cannor simply be applied to Communist and post-Communist societieswithout careful refine*."i and specification. Communism sPawned a hyper-trophied public realm in the sense of state sovereignry and officialdom, but"r, lrrophied public realm in the sense of republican citizenship and politicalsociery. And, on the other hand, Soviet-rype societies experienced a generaltendency toward "privatization," but this involved neither the "civil particu-larism" of the market nor an individualized private realm based on recognizedprivacy and elective affinities. Instiad., it took the form of a Pervasive web ofp",rorr-client ties and other instrumental-personal relationships, and a dis-torted form of familial privatism in the domestic sphere. Kharkhordin exam-ines, in a more focused w2/, the paradoxical outcome of the Bolshevik projectof creating a new, morally redeemed individual, through a radical transforma-tion of everyd"y life that simukaneously dernanded a new "personal life" basedon internalized commitment and rejected privacy and private interests as ille-gitimate. The ultimate result was neither saintly zeal' nor legitimate priYacy,but a sociery marked by pervasive and cynical dissimulation, with a hiddenunderside of carefully guarded secrecy'A persistent challenge in assembling edited collections is to combinebreadth and variery with a reasonable degree of thematic and conceptud coher-ence. Ve did not select contributors with an eye to pushing a single perspec-rive, nor ,Cid we rry ro impose a particular framework on their discussions'

PnrrncrWhat we did ask was that, whatever the substantive focus of their essays, theyshould also be consciously attentive to the complex, contested, and multivalentcharacter of the concepts themselves. An early version of \X/eintraub's essaywas rnade available to the other contributors, and they were invited to drawfrom, modifir, or react against its conceptual framework if that seemed useful.A number of the contributors have done so, to a greater or lesser extent, andsome of them have drawn on essays by other contributors as well. Partly forthese reasons, it seems to us that the volurne as a whole hangs together fairlycoherently, and that the arguments of these essays interconneff in a nurnberof significant and illuminating ways, for all their differerlces in outlook andsubject matter. Taken together, they add up to a sustained reflection on oneof the central organizing principles of social thought and social life, particularly(but not exclusively) in \Western societies.

Several of the contributors deserve thanks for more than their essays-which would have been quite enough. Allan Silver provided extremely valuableadvice, both intellectual and practical, from an early stage of this project. W'eshould also like to thank Alan tWolfe, as the editor of the series in which thisbook appears, for his assistance and encouragement. \7e are indebted to theencouragement, enthusiasm, and good judgment of Doug Mitchell, our editorat the Universiry of Chicago Press, a genuine intellectual with whom it isalways a pleasure to work. Kathryn Kraynik, our manuscript editor, shep-herded the book through its final stages with a mixture of skilled professional-ism and unfailing good humor that was sometimes tested and much appreci-ated. And we are also grateful to Doug and to some of the contributors fortheir patience in the face of what proved to be this book's unexpectedly longperiod of gestation. \fle hope they feel it was worth the wait.


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CoNTENTS

About the Contributors viiPreface xi

I ltff Weintraub The Theory and Politics of thePublic/ Private Distinction

2 Allan Siluer "Two Different Sorts of Commspss"-Friendship and Strangershipin Civil Society 43

3 Craig Calhoun Nationalism and the Public Sphere 754 Daniela Gobeni Humankind as a System: Private and

Public Agency at the Originsof Modern Liberalism 103

5 Jean L. Cohen Rethinking Privacy: Autonomy, ldentity,and the Abortion Controversy 1336 Jean Bethke Elshtain The Displacement of Politics 166

7 Alan Wolft Public and Private in The ory and Practice:Some lmplications of an UncertainBoundary 182

8 Krishan Kumar Home: The Promise and Predicamentof Private Life at the End of theTwentieth Century 204


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9 Dauid Brain

l0 Karen V. Hansen

| | Marc Garcelon

12 OltS Kharkhord.in

C oNrENTsFrom Public Housing to PrivateCommunities: The Discipline of Designand the Materialization of thePublic/Private Distinction in theBuilt EnvironmentRediscovering the Social: Visiting Practicesin Antebellum New England and theLimits of the Public/Private DichotomyThe Shadow of the Leviathan: Public andPrivate in Comrnunist and Post-Communist SocietyReveal and Dissimulate: A Genealogy ofPrivate Life in Soviet Russialndex

237

268

3A3

333365

CoNTRIBUToRs

J err WEtNTRAUe (editor) is a social and political theorist who has taught at Harvard.,the University of California at San Diego, and \Tilliams College; during l99l -92he was aJean Monnet Fellow at the European Universiqy Institute in Florence.Publications include the forthcomin g Freedom and CommunirV: The RepublicanVirtue Tradition and the Sociologr ofLiberry,which arrempt, botli a reinterpretationof the social-philosophical roots of modern social theory and a reassessment of thenature and conditions of democratic citizenship. He is at work on an explorationof the interplay berween citizenship, nationalism, and revolution in the modernera, from 1776 and 1789 through l9B9 (and beyond).KntsHAN Kumnn (editor) is professor of sociology at the Universiry of Virginia andwas previously professor of social and political thought at the Universiry of Kentat Canterbury. He has also been a producer of talks and documentaries for theBBC; a visiting scholar in the Sociology Departmenr ar Harvard Universiry; avisiting professor of sociology at the Universiry of Colorado ar Boulder; and, morerecendy, a visiting professor at the Central European Universiry in Prague. Hisbooks include Prophecy and Progrus: The Sociologt of Indusnial and Port-Indus*ialSociety (1975); Utopia andAnti-Unpia in Modern Times (1987); The Rise ofModernSociety (1988); Utopianism (1991); and From Post-Indusnial to Post-Modrlrn Socien(1ee5)Dnvto BRAIN is a sociologist who currenrly teaches ar New College of the Universiryof South Florida. He has published articles dealing with .ultur., of production

and the production of culture, and is finishing a book, The Disciptine of Design,on the formation of the architectural profession in the Unired States. His currenrresearch interests focus on the ways that patterns of social relations, especially formsof cultural authoriqy, are inscribed in material artifacts and built into the sparialorganization of social life.Cnnlc CALHoUN is professor of sociology and hisrory at the Universiry of NorthCarolina at Chapel Hill, where he is also direoor of the Universiry Celter forInternational Studies and of the Program in Social Theory and Cross-CulturalStudies. Calhoun has edited Habermas and the Public Sphere (Ig9Z) and SocialTheory and the Politics of ldentity (1994); his other books include The Question ofClass Snuggle: Popular Protest in Industrializing England (I9BZ), Neirher Gods Nor


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C o r.r r Rt BUTo RsEmperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (1994), and CriticalSocial Theory (1995).

J rnr.r L. CoHEtrt is associate professor of polidcal science at Columbia University andhas published extensively in the fields of conternporary political and social theory.She is the author of Class and Ciuil Society: The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory(1982) and coauthor of Ciuil Socie4t and Political Theory (with Andrew Arato,1992), and is now working on a book on gender and the law, focusing on privacyand privacy rights.

J rnN BTTHKE ElssrAtN is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social andPolitical Ethics at the Universiry of Chicago. Her books include Public Man, Pri-aAte Woman: Women in Social and Political Thoughr (198 l); Meditations on ModernPolitical Thought (1986); Women and War (1987); Power Trips and Orher JourneJls(1990); and Democracy on Trial (1995). She is editor of The Fantily in PoliticalThought (L952); co-editor of Women, Militarism, and War (1990); co-author ofButWas ItJust?; Reflections on tlte Morality of the Persian GulfWar (199D; and theauthor of some rrnro hundred articles and essays in scholarlyjournals and journals ofcivic opinion.

Mnnc GARcELoN is currently a lecturer in sociology at the Universiqy of Californiaat Berkeley and was previously a fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Rus-sian Studies in Washington, DC. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from theUniversity of California at Berkeley in 1995 and is revising for publication hisdissertation, "Democrats and Apparatchiks: The Democratic Russia Movementand the Specialist Rebellion in Moscow, 1989-199I."

DnrvtELA GoBETrt is a political theorist interested in problems of political partici-pation and changes in the use of the language of rights. Publications include Pri-uate and Public: Indiuiduals, Households, and Body Politic in Locke and Hutche-son (Routledg., 1992) and articles in Italian and English on seventeenth- andeighteenth-century Natural Law theorists.

Knnrru V. HnNSEN is associate professor of sociology at Brandeis Universiqy. She isthe auth or of A Vrry Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England(1994) and co-editor of Wonten, Class, and the Feminist Imagination (1990). Sheis co-editing (with Anita Garey) a forthcoming volume on Families, Kinship, andDomestic Politics in the United States: Critical Feminist Perspectiues.

Olec KHARKHoRDTN is a Russian scholar of diverse interests, whose recent articleshave appeared in such journals as EuropeAsia Studies and International Sociologt.He has been a lecturer in political theory at the European Universiry in St. Peters-burg, Russia, and is currently an Academy Scholar at the Center for InternationalAffairs at Harvard Universiry. He recently received his Ph.D. in political sciencefrom the Universiry of California at Berkeley, for which he wrote a dissertationon the historical formation of the individual and the collective in Soviet society.

AllaN SILVER is professor of sociology at Columbia Universiry. He has publishedstudies of British, American, and French politics; the political sociology of military

CorurRlBUToRsand police institutions; sociological theory; and, more recently, the historical sociol,ogy of friendship and rrusr.

AlnN WoLFE has interests in the sociology of moral issues, which he explores inboth the scholarly and quasi-scholarly press. His currenr position is UniversiryProfessor and professor of sociology at Boston Universiry, and his mosr recenrbooks are Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligatiln (1989), America atCentury's End (an edited volum e, 1991), and The Human Dffirenc: Animals, Com-puters, and the Necessitl, of Social Science (1993).

Weintraub - Public Private - Preface

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