IttrWintraub & Krishan Kumareditors

tr

PuBLlc AND PntvATE

Perspectives on

ONE

The Theory and Politics

of the PubliclPrivate Distinction

IttrWeintraub

Binary distinctions are an analytic procedure, but their usefulness does

not guarantee that existence divides like that. 'S7'e should look with sus-

picion on anyone who declared that there are two kinds of people, ortwo kinds of reality or process.

-M"ry Douglas, 'Judgemenrs on James Frazier" I

THE DISTINCTIoN BETwEEN "public" and "private" has been a central andcharacteristic preoccupation of Western thought since classical antiquiry, andhas long served as a point of entry into many of the k.y issues of social

and political analysis, of moral and political debate, and of the ordering ofeveryday life. In Norberto Bobbio's useful phrase, the public/private distinc-tion stands out as one of the "grand dichotomies" ofVestern thought, in thesense of a binary opposition that is used to subsume a wide range of otherimportant distinctions and that attempts (rnore or less successfully) to dichoro-mize the social universe in a comprehensive and sharply demarcated way.2 Inrecent decades, different versions of this distinction have attained new or re,newed prominence in a wide range of disciplines and areas of inquiry, from"public choice" economics to social history and feminist scholarship.

However, the use of the conceptual vocabulary of "public" and "privare"

often generates as much confusion as illumination, not least because differentsets of people who employ these concepts mean yery different things by

This essay took its first written form as a paper presented at the 1990 annual meetingof the American Politicd Science Association for a session organized by J.* Cohen, andits prehistory goes back to an invited lecture for a course offered by Paul Srarr, so I owethem thanks for helping provoke me to focus my thoughts on this subject. During theessay's gestation I have benefitted from discussions on relevant issues with more people thanI can acknowledge here, including Philip Kasinitz, ffiI co-editor lfuishan Kumar, and theother contributors to this volume.

l. Daedalus L07, no.4 (fall 1978): 161. I am indebted for this quotation roJos6 Casa-

nova's Public Religions in the Modcrn World (L994),which in turn draws in valuable ways onthe argument of the present essay: see in particular chapter 2, "Privare and Public Religions."

2. Norberto Bobbio, "The Great Dichotomy: Public/Private," in Democrary and Dicta-torship.

IN TTTOUGHT AND PNACTICE

a Grand Dichotomy

f

U,niversity of Chicago PressChicago & London

( rrr?)

The

J err WeTNTRAUB

*1srn-and sometimes, without quite realizing it, mean several things at once.

The expanditg literature on the problem of "public goods," which takes its

lead from neoclassical economics, is addressing quite a different subject fromthe "public sphere" of discussion and polidcal action delineated by JiirgenHabermas or Hannah Arendt, not to mention the "public life" of sociabilirycharted by Philippe Aribs or Richard Sennett. \flhat do the current debates

over "privatization," largely concerning whether governmental functionsshould be taken over by corporations, have to do with the world explored byAriis and Duby's multivolume History { Priuate Life3-families, sexualiry,

modes of intimary and obligation-or with the way that "privacy" has

emerged as a central concept in the controversy over abortion rights?

Unfortunately, the widespread invocation of "public" and "private" as or-ganizing categories is not usually informed by a careful consideration of the

meaning and irnplications of the concepts themselves. And, even where there

is sensitiviry to these issues, those who draw on one or another version of the

public/private distinction are rarely attentive to, or even clearly aware of, the

wider range of alternative frameworks within which it is employed. For exam-

ple, many discussions take for granted that distinguishing "public" frorn "pri-vate" is equivalent to establishing *re boundary of the politicala-rhough,even here, it makes a considerable diflbrence whether the political is conceived

in terms of the administrative state or of the "public sphere." But the public/private distinction is also used as a conceptual framework for demarcatingother important boundaries: between the "private" worlds of intimacy and

the family and the "public" worlds of sociabiliry or the rnarket economy;

between the inner priv acy of the individual self and the "interaction order"of Ervitg Goffrnan's Relations in Public; and so on in rich (and overlapping)profusion.

The public/private distinction, in short, is not unitary, but protean. Itcomprises, not a single paired opposition, but a complex family of them, nei-ther mutually reducible nor wholly unrelated. These different usages do notsimply point to different phenomena; often they rest on differenr underlyingimages of the social world, are driven by different concerns, generate differentproblematics, and raise very different issues. It is all too common for these

3. Philippe fuiEs and Georges Duby et *1., eds., ,4 History of Priaate Life, 5 vols.(1987 -9 I ).

4. This assumption is built right into the title of a valuable collecdon edited by CharlesMaier, Changing Boundaries of the Political: Essays on the Euoluing Baknce between tbe State

and Society,Tubtic and Friuate in Europe (1987); however, a number of the essays in *rebook make it clear, in various ways, that the picture is actually more complicated.

THr Pualrc/Pnlvnrr DrsrtNCTIoN

different fields of discoutse to operate in mutual isolation, or to generare con-fusion (ot absurdiqf) when their categories are casually or unreflectivelyblended. If the phenomena evoked by these different usages, and the issues

they raise, were entirely disconnected, then it might not be terribly difficultto sort them out; but matters are not as simple as that, either. Rather, these

discourses of public and private cover a variery of subjects that are analyticallydistinct and, at the same time, subtly-ofren confusingly-overlapping andinternryined,

These different publiclprivate distinctions emerge, to put it another way,from different (often implicit or only partly conscious) theoretical languages

or universes of discourse, each with its own complex historical cargo of as,

sumptions and connotations. While the analysis of public and private can

usefully be informed by a number of these approaches, the result is mosr likelyto be fruitful cross-fertilization and reasoned contestation opposed to theprevaili.g conceptual confusion-if we start with a clear grasp of the differ-ences benveen them. Not only is this essential to avoid missing the point ofarguments that employ the categories of public and private; it can also help

us reflect with conceptual self-awareness about how far the concerns of these

different perspectives can or should be synthesized. Some of these differencessimply involve variations in terminology, and could be cleared up (or recon-

ciled) conceptually without requiring any very agonized choices. But to a con-siderable degree they also reflect deeper differences in both theoretical and

ideological commitments, in sociological assumptions, and/or in sociohistori-

cal context. Partly for these reasons, debates about how to cur up rhe social

world between public and private are rarely innocent analytical exercises, since

they often carry powerful normative implications-but quite disparare norma-tive implications, depending on context and perspective. In shorr, any discus-

sion of public and private should begin by recognizing, and trying to clarify,the multiple and ambiguous character of its subject matter. To bring some

intelligible order into the discussion, its complexity needs to be acknowledged,and the roots of this complexiqF need to be elucidated.

This essay will undertake an initial venture in clarification by delineatingwhat I see as four major organi zing types of public/private distinction thatoperate under the surface of current discussion (political as well as scholarly)and by attempting to elucidate the theoretical imageries and presuppositionsthat inform them. This is not the only possible or useful starting point forsuch an exarnination; and, if one wished to minimize the conceptual messiness

of the discussion, good cases could be made for pursuing either a rnore sysrem-

aticallv historical analysis or a more purely analytical one. However, I think

Jerr WEtNTRAUB

this approach has advantages for helping to clarift the ways that people cus-

,o*"ii[y talk pasr each 6*1ss-and confuse themselves-on these issues and

for bringing on, the potentially useful and problematic elements in each of

fiese perspectives.s

PuBLtc AND PntvATE: SoME Bestc OnlENTATloNs'Wp

cAN BEGrN By reminding ourselves that any notion of "public" or "pri-

vare" makes sense only as one element in a paired opposition-whether the

conrrasr is being used as an analytical device to address a specific problem or

being advanced as a comprehensive model of social structure. To understand

*h"i either "public" or "private" means within a given framework, we need

to know with what it is being contrasted (explicitly or implicitly) and on what

basis the contrast is being drawn.

One reason the criteria involved are irreducibly heterogeneous is that, at

the deepesr and mosr general level, lying behind the different forms of public/

private distinction are (at least) two fundamental, and analytically quite dis-

,irr.r, kinds of imagery in terms of which "private" can be contrasted with

"public":

5. It is worth noting another fairly recent effort along these lines, probably the most

sysrematic and comprehensive I know of. The excellent collection edited by S. I. Benn and

G. F. Gaus on Public and Priuate in Social Ltft (1983) is one of the best boola on this

topic currenrly available-and one of the surprisingly few that atternPt to elucidate these

concepts in addition to using them. In particular, the editors' rwo introductory essays-

"The public and the Privatei Concepts and Action" and "The Liberd Conception of the

public and the Priv21s"-add up ro a very useful and intelligent attemPt to "map" the

various permutarions of the public/private distinction and to analyze their conceptual un-

derpinnings.

\fithout entering into an exrensive comparison berween their rypology and mine, I

would like to offer nvo brief remarks. First, although they specift the analytical elements

involved in more detait and profusion than I will undertake here, in the end the range of

concrere approaches to the public/private distinction that they effectively address is narrower

than those with which tlis essay will deal. Second, I would say that their analysis is weakened

by the fact that ,h.y employ rhe category of "liberal" in an unacceptably broad and unselec-

tive way, so rhat it gradually subsumes (and homogenizes) a whole spectrum of divergent

and even conficting tendencies in \Testern social and political thought. In fact, in their

discussion "liberalism" appears to be more or less equivalent to "moderttiry." \flhen "the

liberal conceprion of the public and the private" is taken to include Rousseau, Hegel, and

fuendt-all engaged, in one way or another, in fundamental critiques of liberali5m-*1gn

it strikes rne ,ft1 s6me important distinctions are being blurred. (People who have had

occasion to read both rhis essay and the discussion by Benn and Gaus can decide whether

these comments seem fair.)

Tnr PueLrc/ PRIvATE D tsrlNcrtoN

1. \ilhat is hidden or withdrawn versus what is open, revealed, or accessible.

2. tWhat is individual, or pertains only to an individual, versus what is collec-

rive, or affects the interests of a collectiviry of individuals. This individual/

collective distinction can, by extension, take the form of a distinction be-

tween part and whole (of some social collectiviry).6\ilZe might refer to these two underlying criteria as "visibiliry" (audibility

being one component) and "collectivity." The two may blur into each other

in specific cases, and can also be combined in various ways, but the difference

in principle is clear enough. \fhen an individual is described as pursuing his

or her private interest rather than the public interest-or a group is described

as pursuing a "special interest" rather than the public interest-the implica-

tion is not necessarily that they are doing it in secret. The criterion involved

is the second one: the private is the particular. One especially pure application

of this criterion is perhaps the way in which economists use the term "public

good" ro mean an indivisible collective benefit-that is, one which is essentially

collective; the question of "visibility" is irrelevant here. Likewise, the basis for

using the rerm "public" to describe the actions and agents of the state (to

that public/private - state/nonstate) lies in the state's claim to be responsible

for the general interests and affairs of a politically organtzed collectiviry (ot,

at least, the srate's abiliry to monopolize them) as opposed to "privats"-1hx1

is, merely particular-interests. Treating the state as the locus of the "public"

ma! be combined with arguments for the openness or "publiciry" of state

actions; but it has been at least equally common to claim that, in order to

advance the public interest, rulers must maintain "state secrets" and have re-

course to the arcnna imperii. If market exchange is considered a "private"

acr-on the grounds of being, in principle, self-interested, nongov€rnmental,

and unconcerned with collective outcomes-then it does not cease to be pri-

vare when it is carried out "in public." And, correspondingly, voting in an

election does not necessarily cease to be a "public" act if it is carried out "in

private" by secret ballot.i

6. I was reminded of this refinement by Paul Starr. Starr makes use of some of the

ideas I am presenting here in his perceptive essay on "The Meaning of Privatization," in

the edited volume by Sheila B. Kamerman and Alfred J. Kah n, Priuatization and the Welfare

State (1989).

7. It is true that John Stuart Mill, while recognizing the force of arguments in favor

of the secret ballot, was uneasy about it because it might encourage the voter to think of his

or her yote as an expression of purely "privx1s"-that is, individual-interest, preference, or

whim (roughly the way it is treated by most social scientific voting studies), divorced from

any recognition of civic responsibiliry or concern for "the public good" that should inform

participation in the exercise of collective power (see chapter 10 of Mill's Representatiue Gou-

ernment [1861]). But, or the other hand, a key justification for the secret ballot has been

Jrnr WetNTRAUB

As for the first criterion, "visibiliry," its basic thrust is too evident to require

much explication. Its specific instances, however, can be sociologic"lly quite

subtle and even paradoxical.s The use of the term "privacy" usually signals

the invocation of this criterion, since it generally concerns things that we are

able and/or entitled to keep hidden, sheltered, or withdrawn from others.e

(There may also be things that we are required to keep hidden from others,

such as our "private parts," so that having sex or urinating "in public" is

frowned on in many cultures.ro)

There are a number of ways in which each of these underlying criteria can

be conceived, and a number of ways in which they can be combined, to pro-duce the various concrete versions of the public/private distinction. The range

of permutations is sufficiently formidable that I will not attempt even to begin

to list all the ways in which "public" and "private" are used and contrasted

in current discourse. But it may be worth reemphasizing the cautionary pointthat there is no necessaqy connection benveen the notions of "public" and"political"; while this should be obvious (as I hope the discussion this far has

made clear), it is often overlooked that there are many varieties of publiclprivate distinction which have little or nothing to do-directly, at all events-with politics. For example: when Clifford Geertz insists, as he does frequently,

precisely that it enables the voter to perform this "public function" (as Mill terms it) by

protecting him or her.from "private" pressure, intimidation, or retaliation by employers,

landlords, and other powerful individuals or even by neighbors and relatives.

8. Take, for example, the sociologically fascinating notion of acting "discreetly"-4t",is, acting in a way that is not really hidden but also not faunted, so that it is known but

not officially "visible"-which every culture develops in its own unique way.

9. Privacy is a rich and complex subject in itself-which, unfortunately, I can address

only tangentially in this essay. Several of the other essays in this volume attack various facets

of it in a more sustained way, including those byJean Cohen, Jean Elshtain, Marc Garcelon,

Oleg Kharkhordin, Krishan Kumar, and Alan \7olfe. One excellent collection of essays on

the subject, deriving mostly-though not quite entirely-from the borderland between

(Anglo-Saxon) philosophy and (American) jurisprudence, is Ferdinand David Schoeman's

edited collection, Philosophical Dimensions af Priuaty (1984). Barrington Moorc, Priuacy:

Studies in Social and Cuhural History (1984), provides a somewhat diffuse but importantand often insightful comparative study.

10. In the work of Erving Goffman, practically all activity carried out in the presence

of others constitutes "behavior in public pl"..r" or "the field of public life"; the domainof the private is restricted to the "backstage" where we prepare to enact our roles in social

interaction. "Visibiliry"-1n its many degrees and modulations-is the defining criterionhere. For some illustrations, see Erving Goffrnann, Behauior in Public Pkces: Notes an the

Social Organization of Gatherings (1963), and Rehtions in Public: Micrastudia of the Public

THr Puelrc/PRrvarr DrsrrNcrroN

"that hurnan thought is both social and public," rr he is using the language

of post-Vittgensteinian analytical philosophy to express the idea that thoughtis essentially intersubjective rather than somethitg that happens entirely in

the individual head, that it relies on collectively elaborated media such as lan-

guage and cultural symbolism.l2 This quite significant conception of "public"

applies to politics no more than to any other human activiry.

I will not pursue this particular example any further, since in one respect

it leads away from the main thrust of my discussion. The kind of argument

being made here by Geertz is that all human action necessarily has an element

that is, in a certain sense, "public." More ofren, however, "public" and "pti-

vate" are used, descriptively and/ or normatively, to distinguish different

kinds of human action-and, beyond that, the different realms of social life,

or the different physical and social spaces, in which they occur; and these are

the sorts of arguments on which I want to focus. The following are, I think,

the four major ways in which these distinctions are currently drawn in social

and political analysis (I remind the reader that this list is not meant to be

exhaustive):

I. The liberal-economistic model, dominant in most "public policy" analy-

sis and in a great deal of everyd*y legal and political debate, which sees

the public/private distinction primarily in terms of the distinction be-

rween state administration and the market economy.

II. The republican-virtue (and classical) approach, which sees the "public"

realm in terms of political communiry and citizenship, analytically dis-

tinct from both the market and the administrative state.

ilI. The approach, exemplified for instance by the work of Arils (and other

figures in social history and anthropology), which sees the "public" realm

as a sphere of fluid and polymorphous sociabiliry, and seeks to analyze the

cultural and dramatic conventions that make it possible. (This approach

might almost be called dramaturgic, if that term were not so ambiguous.)

IV. A tendency, which has become important in many branches of feminist

analysis, to conceive of the distinction between "private" and "public" interms of the distinction berween the family and the larger economic and

political ordel-ryi1h the market economy often becoming the paradig-

matic "public" realm.

Now let me elaborate.

11. "The Impactof the Concept of Culrure on the Concept of Man," in The Interpreta-

tion of Cuhures (1973), p. 45.

12. Terminology aside, this is of course a crucid Durkheimian insight, partly reinvented

by \Tittgenstein-as Ernest Gellner was fond of pointing out.Order (197l). ,)

J e rr WTTNTRAUB

l. LIgERALIsM: THr MaRKET AND THE SrnrrTHls Is rHE FRAME\r.oRK into which such terms as "public secror" and "pti-

vate sector" usually fit, and which structures the great bulk of what is called"public policy" debate. The assumptions of neoclassical economics tend rodominate,t3 which is to say-putting the matter into a grander theorericalperspeslivs-1hs assumptions of udlitarian liberalism.la They are embodiedin a characteristic, if not always explicit, image of social realiry (which, likemost such images, has both descriptive and normative dimensions): that whatexists in sociery are individuals pursuing their self-interest more or less effi-ciently (that is, "rationally," in the peculiar sense in which this term is usedin utilitarian liberalism); volun tary (particularly contractual) relations berweenindividuals; and the state. Thus, in practice the distinction berween publicand private-berween the "public sector" and the "private sector" usuallymeans the distinction berween "governmental" and "nongovernmental," withthe implication that this distinction should be as clearly and sharply dichoto-mous as possible. The field of the nongovernmental is conceived essenri"llyin terms of the market. It is therefore not surprising that the use of the public/private distinction within this framework has characteristically involved a pre-occuPation with questions ofTurisdiction, and especially with demarcating thesphere of the "public" authoriry of the state frorn the sphere of formally volun-tary relations between "private" individuals. These questions of jurisdictiontend predominantly to boil down to disputes about whether parricular activi-ties or services should be left to the market or be subject to governmenr "inrer-vention," usually conceived in terms of administrative regulation backed bycoercive force

To put it another way, this orientation defines public/private issues as hav-itg to do with striking the balance ben^reen individuals and conrractually cre-ated organizations, orr the one hand, and state action, on the other. The factthat these disputes may often be quite bitter should nor conceal the fact thatboth sides are operating within a common universe of discourse, drawing dif-ferent conclusions from the same premises. They are simply replicating thet\lro classic answers to the problem of social order as posed by utilitarian liberal-

13. This fact and some of its implications are brought out well by Robert Bell in TheCuhure of Policy Deliberarions (19S5).

14. "Liberalism" is another contested and ambiguous term; any usage is potentiallycontroversial, and r}is is not the place for a lengthy justification of the one employed here.Let me just note that I have specified "utilitarian liberalism" to make it clear th"t I arn noraddressing the Kantian strain in liberalism, whose approach to the public/private distinctionis somewhat different-in ways that would merit a separate discussiort.

, ,,,

Txe PueLrclP RtvArE DrsrlNcrtoN

ism.15 Locke and Adam Smith on the one hand, Hobbes and Bentham onthe other, might be taken as the most distinguished representatives of the nvopoles within this universe of discourse: the side that leans toward a "narural"harmonization of selfish interests, whose grand theoretical achievemenr is thetheory of the market; and the more technocratic, social-engineering side,

which posits the need for a coercive agency standing above sociery (epitomized

by Hobbes's Leuiathan) that maintains order by manipulating the sffucrureof rewards and punishments within which individuals pursue their "rarional"

interests. Given the underlying assumptions, the "invisible hand" of the mar-ket and what Alfred Chandler calls the "visible hand" of administrative regula-

tionr6 recur as the ftvo k.y solutions. The pervasiveness of this dichotomousmodel is brought out by the way it is replicated when the second pole is

represented, not by the state, but by the "private government" of the business

firm; again, the alternatives, as captured in the title of an influential book byOliver Villiamson, are seen as Markets and Hierarchies.t7

This theoretical tendency is of course highly imperialistic, and its infuenceextends well beyond its core stronghold in neoclassical economics. Imporranrexamples of affempts to generalize this perspective range from AnthonyDowns's Eca nomic Theory of Democraq/ to the work of Gary Becker and the"exchange theory" of Peter Blau; and its inroads throughout the social sciences

are registered by the alarming vogue of what is currently termed "rarional

choice theory.)' 18 (Along the same lines, a good deal of "analytical Marxism"is essentially a branch of utilitarian liberalism, even where the "Marxisr" parrof the package has not gradually disintegrated-the intellecrual trajectory ofJot Elster being instructive here.) Its limitations are broughr our, from the

15. I am drawing here on the well-known argument of Elie Haldvy in The Growth ofPhilosophic Radicalism [l 928], along lines suggested by Parsons in The Structure of SocialAction U9371. Decades of criticism and historiographic revisionism-especially work on theScottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century-have made clear the need for extensiverefinements in the Hal6vy/Parsons argument; but they have not, I think, refuted this crucialinsight.

16. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Reuolution inAmericanBusiness (1977).

17. Oliver 'Sfilliamson, Markets and Hierarchies (197r.

18. For examples, see Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957); Peter

Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Lift (1964); G"ry Becker, The Econornic Approach toHuman Behauior (1976); and, most recently, James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory(1990). For an overview of both the multidisciplir"ry influence of this perspective and some

important lines of criticism, see the useful collection edited by Jane Mansbridge, Beyond

Self-Interest (1990).

J rrr WTTNTRAUB

inside, by mo currently influential writers: the first does it unintentionally,the other quite self-consciously.

The first is Mancur Olson, whose core argument was set out in The Logicaf Collectiue Action.le Olson argues that "rational" actors will never engage

in collective z6dsn-due to the "free-rider" problem-unless subjected rocoercion and o'selective incentives." Vorkers, for example, submit to coercionby unions for the sarne reason that Hobbes's individuals in the state of naruresubmit to the sovereign: it is the only way they can pursue or prorecr theiregoistic interests, which they are incapable of pursuing cooperativ.ly.Actually,what Olson shows is that these premises render many forms of collective ac-

lisn-and particularly collective self-determination-incomprehensible. Thepremises are too narrow, and the dichotomous framework is too restricted.2o

A writer who starts within this framework and deliberately works throughto its limits is Albert Hirschman, particularly in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.zt"Exit"-which exercises an indirect pressure on the operation of "firms, orga-nizations, and states"-is the only option of the "rational" individual of liberaltheory. But that is inadequate as a mechanism to keep the world going. Thereis also a role for "voice," which means participation in making (ot, ar leasr,

influencing) decisions about matters of common concern. And for "voice" towork requires some degree of "loyalry." Vithin the framework from whichHirschman begins, "voice" is an imported category, and "loyalry" an essen-

tially residual one; thus, both are only thinly feshed out. But they point theway to the problematic of the next perspective, which focuses on the problernof citrzenship.

I l. C rr )zENsHlp: F nom rHE PollsTo THE .. PUBLIc SpgERE''

HpnE THE "puBLIC" REALv is the realm of political comrnunity based oncitizenship: at the heart of "public" life is a process of active participation incollective decision making, carried out within a framework of fundamentalsolidarity and equaliry, The k.y point is that this whole realm of activiry, andthe problernatic it generates, are essentially invisible within the framework ofthe first perspective.

19. Mancur Olson, The Logic 0f Collectiue Action (1971; lst ed., 1965).

20. For an instructive concrete illustration of this point, see Robert D. Putnam, MakingDemocracy Work: Ciuic Trad.itions in Modern hob (1993), especially chapter 6.

21. See Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalry: Responses to Decline in Firms,Organizations, and States (1970); some of the issues raised by this andysis are exploredfirrther, with rnore explicit reference to the terminology of public and private, in Hirsch-man's Shtfring Inuoluements: Priuate Interest and Public Action (1982)

THr Pusr-lc/ Pnrvnrr DlsrrNcrtoN

In a sense, "public" means "politi cal" in both perspecrives I and II. Butthese are very different meanings of "political." For I, "political" or "public"authority means the administrative state. For II, "polidcs" means a worldof discussion, debate, deliberation, collective decision making, and acdon inconcert. This understanding of the political is captured, for example, in Han-nah Arendt's powerful conception of "public space" (or the "public realm":

ffintliche Raum) as a distinctive field of action that can emerge wheneverhuman beings act and deliberate in concer t.22 In this contexr, it makes sense

to speak, not only of "public" jurisdiction and "public interest," bur also of"public life."

These two notions of "public" as "politi cal" become clearer if we grasptheir historical roots and the social contexts from which they emerge d.23 Bothderive originally frorn classical antiquiry. The words "public" and "privare"are originally Roman, the concepts Greco-Roman. Their dual register srems

in part from the fateful circumstance that the Roman empire took over muchof the political language of the Roman republic (including such rerms as "pub-lic" and even "citizen") but shaded their meanings rarher differendy. A greatdeal of the conceptual vocabul^ry of \Testern social, political, and moral dis-course has thus been shaped by rwo interconnected but distinctive legacies,

those of ancient republicanism and of the Roman empire-the latter beingconveyed, above all, by the massive influence of Roman law, nor only onjurisprudence but on the categories of more than a thousand years of \Wesrern

social and political philosophy.The result is that there are two basic models of the "public" realm drawn

from antiquiry:1. The self-governing polis or republic (res publica, literally "public thing"),

from which we inherit a notion of politics as citizenship, in which individu-als, in their capacity as citizens, participate in an ongoing process of con-scious collective self-determination.

2" The Roman empire, from which we get the notion of souereignty: of a

central tzed, unified, and omnipotent apparatus of rule which stands abovethe soci.ty and governs it through the enactment and administration oflaws" The "public" power of the sovereign rules over, and in principle onbehalf of, a society of "private" and politically passive individuals who are

bearers of rights granted to them and guaranteed by the sovereign. This

22. Her most systematic discussion of these concepts is in The Human Condition( 1 e58)

23. I have developed the argument which follows more fully rn Freedom and Commu-nity: The Republican Virtue Tradition and the Sociologt af Liberty (fonhcoming), particularlychapter 3.

tlt0

Jerr WeINTRAUB

conception of the public/private distinction permeates, for example, Ro-man (imperial) law.ta

Many of the ambiguities in our thinking about politics stem from the factthat both of these underlying images have a significant presence in modernthought. As compared to the main patterns of political thought developed inother civilizations, both are distinctive in the sharpness of the line they drawbetween "public" and "private." fn many other respects, however, their pre-suppositions and implications are profoundly different.

If we examine the origins of systematic political reflection in other civiliza-tions, and in other periods of '$Testern history as well, the mosr commonpattern is for political thought to take one or another form of monarchy as

its main point of reference; and the notion of politics centered on the modelof sovereignqy accords with this general tendency. In such a conrexr, the keyissues for discourse and sophlsticated theorizing about politics center on rheproblem of rulership or, to use the more Roman term, domination-i15 nx-ture, its modes, its justifications, its limits. This kind of theo rizing takes forgranted, in its underlying premises, the separation benveen rulers and ruled(whether it takes the side of the rulers or of the ruled). Classical moral andpolitical philosophy, however, was profoundly marked by the fact that it tookas its point of departure a fundamentally different, and considerably rnoreexceptional, model of politics, one based on a process of collective decisionmaking by a body of citizens united in a community (albeit, of course, a

restricted and exclusive communiry). Thus, the central image of "political"action as we find it in Aristotle is not domination and compliance (or resis-

tance) but participation in collective self-determination; Aristotle's classic

definition of the citizen is one who is capable both of ruling and of beingruled. The appropriate sphere for domination is within the private realm ofthe household, which is structured by relationships of "narural" inequaliry:between master and slave, parent and child, husband and wife.

'S7hat separates the problematic of citizenship, in any strong sense of theterm, from the conceptual framework of liberal social theory is that the praciceof citizenship is inseparable frorn active participation-direc or mediated-in a decision-maki ng community maintained by solidariry and the exercise of(what used to be called) republican virtue. But, since liberalism is roo often

24. It is distilled in a crucial formulation which appears, identically worded, in the firstchapter of each of the two sections of the Corpus Juris Ciailis, dre great compilation ofRoman law issued in the name of the Emperor Justinian in 533-34: "Public law is thatwhich regards the condition of the Roman commonwealth, private, thar which pertains tothe interests of single individuals." ("Publicum jus est, quod ad statum rei Romanae spectat,

priuatum, quod ad singulorum utilitatem pertinet": my translation.)

Tur Pusr-rc/ PnrvnrE DrsrrNcrtoN

counterposed nowadays to an undifferentiated "communitarianism," it is also

important to emphasize that membership in community does not necessarily

constitute citizenship. Citizenship entails participation in a particular kind ofcommuniry (which I have elsewhere called "willed communiqy" zs): one

marked by, among other things, fundamental equaliry and the considerationand resolution of public issues through conscious collective decision making.

Both the notion of citizenship and the notion of sovereignry went intoeclipse in the Middle Ages, for reasons which are understandable. For one

thing, neither of them is compatible with the feudal system of rule, based on

a web of personal dependent ties and the absence of any significant distinctionberween "public" and "private" authority. The same can be said of the cus-

tomary communities of medieval gemeinschaft. As has frequently been

stressed, a soci.ry of this sort really does not have a differentiated public or

private realm, in either of the senses I have been discussirg. In such a conrexr,

the distinction does not make sense.

A significant elernent in the shaping of moderniry has involved the gradualrediscovery of these notions and the aftempt to realtze and institutionalizethem-and sometimes, in a move that might have puzzled the ancienrs, ro

combine them. Behind this process lie three grand historical transformarions,

whose complex interconnections need not trouble us here:

1. The development of modern civil society, which is the seedbed of liberal-ism. "Civil sociery" is, of course, another historically complex and multiva-lent term; but I do not want to enter into the relevant controversies at this

point, so I will simply state my own position. Following Hegel's guide, Iwill use "civil society" to refer to the social world of self-interested individu-alism, competition, impersonaliqy, and contractual relationships-centeredon the market-which, as thinkers in the early modern Vest slowly came

to reco gnize, seemed somehow able to run itself. Liberalism is the philoso-phy of civil sociery and, frequently, its apology. Its tendency is to reduce

sociery to civil sociery (in the case of "rational choice theory," for example,

to collapse both politics and communiry into the market).2. The recovery of the notion of sovereignry, to complement the norion of the

atomistic liberal individual. The rediscovery of sovereignty was obviouslyconnected in its initial stages with the gradud reassertion of royal power,with the multifaceted "recovery" of Roman law which often accompaniedit, and partieularly with the era of absolutism.26 To restate a point empha-

25. See Freedom and Communiry,particularly chapters I and 2.

26. On this subject, see, for example, Gianfranco Poggi, The Deuelopment of the ModernState (1978), and Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieual Origins of the Modern State (1970).

On the "recovery" or "reception" of Roman law and its significance, the commanding

t2 t3

J e rr WTTNTRAUB

sized earlier, the liberal conception of the public lprivate disdncrion rurnsfundarnentally on the separation berween the administrative srare and civilsociery-one dichotomy being mapped onto the other. It has difficulrydealing with other aspecs of social life.

3. The recove ry of the notion of citizenship. This followed a differenr rourefrorn the rediscovery of sovereignty, beginning with the reemergence ofthe self-governing ciry in the later Middle Ages and the rebirth of civicconsciousness which this made possible. From this perspecrive, rhe "pub-lic" redm is above all a realm of participatory self-determination, delibera-tion, and conscious cooperation among equals, the logic of which is distinctfrom those of both civil socieqy and the administrarive srare.

The distinctive character of the "public" or "political" realrn, understoodin this way as the terrain of active citizenship, is captured especially sharplyin a passage from The Old Regime and the French Reuolutionwhere Tocquevillesuggests why Roman law was useful for the centralizing projects of early mod-ern absolutist monarchies:

The Roman [imperial] law carried. civil sociery to perfection, but itinvariably degraded political sociery, because it was the work of a

highly civilized and thoroughly enslaved people. Kings narurally em-braced it with enthusiasm, and established it wherever they couldthroughout Eu rope.z7

Tocqueville's conception of "political socieqy," Arendt's conception of the"public realrn," and Habermas's conception of the "public sphere" represenr

treatment is still to be found in the work of Ono Gierke; see, for example, the portion ofDas Deutsche Genossenschafisrecht [1881] translated by F. \7. Maitland as Political Theoriesof the Middle Agt.

To avoid *y ambiguiry on this point: fie word "sovereign" does nor come ro us fromantiquiry. It is of later origin, and its different varianl5-*1s Old French souuerein, theSpanish soberano, and so on-appear to be derived from the medieval Latin superanus (atleast, this is the tentative suggestion of the Oxford English Dictionary), But rhe concept ischaracteristically Roman, and the increasing importance of this rerminology, from the laterMiddle Ages onward, is part of the process which Gierke describes as "rhe resuscitation apdfurther development of the classical idea of Sovereignry" (Political Theories of the MiddkAg4 P.92). To employ one of Gierke's favorite formulations, sovereignry is a quintessentially"ancient-modern" concept, as opposed to a "properly mediaeval" one.

27- See Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Reuohrtion t1S56l, end-note 1, p. 223. Tocqueville's most extensive analyses of the dynamics of polirical socieqyand their significance for the vitaliry of political liberry (or "public liberry") are of coursedeveloped throughout Democracy in America [1835, 1840].

THe Puelrc/ PRrvnrr D rsrrNCTroN

some of the more significant efforts to characterrze and theorize this sphere

of social life.28 Without minim rzing the significant differences berween theiranalyses, it is worth emphasizing one larger implication that emerges from all

three: attempts to use the public/private distinction as a dichotomous model

to capture the overall paffern of social life in a sociery opposed to using

one or another version for specific and carefully defined purposes-are always

likely to be inherently misleading, because the procrustean dualism of theircategories will tend to blank out important phenomena. Thus, just as the"public" realm (and politics) cannot be reduced to the state, the realm ofsocial life outside the state (and its control) cannot simply be identified as

"privat e." 2e The conceptual limitations of the public/private dichotomy inthis connection are emphasized by Habermas's deliberately paradoxical formu-lation that "the bourgeois public sphere rnay be conceived above all as the

sphere of private people [who have] come together as a public" (outside

and even against the state) to discuss and debate mafiers of common

concern.30 Similarly, the fact that "political society," though it coexists

with both civil sociery and the state, is not reducible to either lies behind anJ

28. For the arguments behind these remarks, see my discussions in "Democracy and

the Market: A Marriage of Inconvenience," in Margaret Nugent's From Leninism to Freedom:

The Challenges of Deruocratization (1992), and chapters 7 and B of Freedom and Communiry.

In particular, I spe[[ out why I find the usual statelcivil sociery division-in which "civilsociery" tends to serye as an undifferentiated residual category-*1s61etically inadequate,

and why a step in the right direction is the tripartite disdnction which Tocqueville (I argue)

draws bennreen the state, civil sociery, and political sociery. (The next step required is todistinguish more carefully and systematically than Tocqueville does berween civil sociery

and the ruly "private" realm of the family and intimate relationships. More on this below.)

29. The need to move beyond such dichotomous models of modern societies is also a

central theme of Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato's ambitious exploration of Ciuil Society

and Political Theory 0992). (While their conceptual specification of both "civil sociery"

and "political sociery" differs in various ways from the approach I have sketched out here,

I would say that there is considerable accord on the substantive implications.) A recognition

of the inadequacy of a dichotomous public/private perspective has also-explicitly or im-

plicitly-informed arguments by neoconseryatives (among others) emphasizingthe impor-tance of "mediating structures": one instructive example is Peter Berger and Richard Neu-haus, To Empou)er People: The Role of Mediating Stractures in Public Policy (1977).

30. Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiryinto a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989) , p.26.(This was

originally published tn L962 as Strukturwand.et drr }ffentlichkeit, but only recently translated

into English. A condensed version of the argument can be found in Habermas's 1 964 ency-

clopedia article on "The Public Sphere," reprinted in New German Critique 1, no. 3 [f"ll19741: 49-55).Habermas's approach here is infuenced by Arendt's explicidy tripartitemodel of modern sociery, which I will discuss below.

t4 t5

Jerr WeTNTRAUB

equally paradoxical observation of Tocqueville's which is really central rohis argument in The OId Regime.: that, precisely as the ..rriral ized, andbureau cratized French state achieved its apotheosis, politicat life was smorh-ered and suppressed.3r

In short, these f\4/o notions of the "public"-and the two versions of thepublic/private distinction in which they are embedded-resr on crucially dif-ferent images of politics and society, and a good deal of modern thoughtreflects the tension benveen them. However, they far from exhaust the ,ignifi-cant discussion of public and private. For example, although they intersectwith it intermittently, they largely bypass the enormous fielJ explored, fromdifferent directions, by cultural anthropology and by the sociology of ErvingGoffman: the symbolic demarcation of interactional space as a k"ylorstitutivefeature of social realiry. And, mgre specific ally, neither of them caprures thealternative vision of public life that links it, neither to the srare nor to citizen-ship, but to sociabiliry.

I I l. t'PuBLlc" LtFE As SoctABlLlryFon A PRELIMINARY sense of the contrasts involved, consider the messages con-veyed by these r$/o declarations:

The bemer constituted the state, the more public affairs ourweigh pri-vate ones in the minds of citizens. . In a well-conducted ciry, ..,r.ry-one rushes to the assemblies. Under a bad government, no one caresto take even a steP to attend them: no one takes an interest in what is

31. This theme is pervasive in Tocqueville's work, but one especially compact formula-tion appears in the concluding chapter of The Otd Regime, on pp. 204-5. Tocqueville'sinsight is.further confirmed by the historical experience of ,r"r.-rocialist regimes, where thehypertrophy oi the state (based on "public" control of the econo-y) *",

-"..ompanied by

the atrophyof public life in the sense of citizenship and participatiorrl. Irorrically, theJacobinapProach to citizenship, carried on and intensified by Leninism, which aims at having thepublic entirely submerge the private through the continuous mobilization of civic virtue,ultimately yields the same privatizing result (as Tocqueville also understood). Maoism at-tempted the most hyper-Jacobin intensification of participation and public virtu€:2ndwbund up, perh"pr, *ost thoroughly burning them out. In general, the attempr by theseregimes to "poli ticize" everyriing in sociery has led, in the long or shorr run, to massivedepoliticization and a retreat to the privacy of personal relations i*h.n these are nor them-selves under direct assault, as in periods of "high" toralitarianism like the 1930s in theSoviet L)nion, the Cultural Revolution in China, or Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge).(At the sarne dme, the forms of "privatization" characteristic of state-socialist societies havebeen both complex and distinctive: for explorations of this phenomenon, see the essays byMarc Garcelon and oleg Kharkhordin in this volume.)

THE PuBLrc/PnrvArE DtsrtNCTroN

done there, since it is predictable that the general will won't prevail,and so finally domestic concerns absorb everythi^g.

-Rousseau. The Social Contract3z

uThe tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors-differ-ences that often go far deeper than differences in color-which are

possible and normal in intensely urban life, but which are so foreign

to suburbs and pseudosuburbs, are possible and normal only when

streets of great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers todwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignified and re-

served terms. Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear,

sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a ciry's wealth ofpublic life rnay grow.

-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Citief3

BorH oF THEsr, striking passages are quoted often, but rarely, I think, inthe same places. This is a piry, because when taken in juxtaposition they have

the advantage of capruring nvo powerful, influential, yet curiously disparate

images of "public life" and of the public space in which it can thrive. Rous-

seau's is a characteristically extreme formulation of the conception that ties"public" life to the practice of citizenship. The citizens who "rush" to the

public space of the assembly do so to engage in self-conscious collective action,

deliberation, and decision concerning common-that is, "public"-aflairs.'$7hen we venture into Jane Jacobs's public space, on the other hand, w€ enter

what Roger Scruton has aptly termed "a sphere of broad and largely unplanned

encounter," 34 of fluid sociabiliry among strangers and near-strangers. The"wealth" of the "public life" to which it contributes lies, not in self-determina-

tion or collective action, but in the multistranded liveliness and spontaneiry

arising from the ongoing intercourse of heterogeneous individuals and groups

that can maintain a civilized coexistence. Its function is not so much to express

or generate solidariry as, ideally, to "make diversiqy agreeable" 35-or, at least,

32. Jean-Jacllues Rousseau, On the Social Contract 11762l (New York St. Marrin's,1978), book 3, chapter 5, p. 102 (translation slightly emended).

33. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), p.72.34. Roger Scruton, "Public Space and the Classical Vernacular," in Nathan Glazer and

Mark Lilla's edited volume, The Public Face ofArchitecture: Ciuic Culture and Public Spaces

(t987), p. 13.

3r. To borrow another phrase, slightly out of context, from Scruton, "Public Space,"

p. 23.A remark by Philippe Arils (in his introduction to volume 3 of A History of Priuate

Life) brings out the same implication of this particular meaning of "public": "l am here

l6 l7

J rrr W eTNTRAUB

manageable. It may be that both these forms, or aspects, of public life are

valuable and ought to be encouraged; and some might argue that, in the rightcircurnstances, they can even be complemenary. But it is clear that they differin their defining characteristics, requirements, and implications.

The second nodon of "public" is the one we have in mind if we speak ofMediterranean (but not usually American) cities having a rich public life. Itis what Philippe AriEs means when he says that, in the sociery of the oldregime, "life was lived in public," and the intense privatizatron of thefamily and intimate relations, with their sharp separation from an impersonal"public" realm, had not yet occurred. The essential point is that "public" inthis sense has nothing to do, necessarily, with collective decision making (letalone the state). The k.y to it is not solidarity or obligation, but sociabiliry.

The work of Arils, beginning with Centuries of Childhood,s6 forms an our-standing starting point for the exploration of this world. The significance ofAriAs's analysis in this respect is often missed because of the misimpressionthat he is recounting simply an isolated history of the family. Instead, he isdeveloping-admittedly in a discursive and far from analyrically rigorousway-a sweeping interpretation of the transformations in the texrure of Vest-ern society from the old regime to the modern era. In this connecrion, theemergence of the modern family can be understood only in the conrexr ofthe changing relationship benveen the family and the broader web of commu-nal ties and sociabiliry" The heart of the story, therefore, really lies in AriEs'sreconstruction of the public life of the soci.ry of the old regime and its gradualdecay. The decay of the older public world and the emergence of the modernfamily (along with other relationships committed to creating islands of priv acyand intense intimacy) form a mutually reinforcing process. The result is adrastic transformation of the relationship berween the "public" and "privare"realms, and of dre character of each. For Arils (to put words in his mouth),modern civil sociery represents not the "private" realm but the new "public"realm; the "private" realm is the realm of personal life, above all of domesriciry."The progress of the concept of the family followed the progress of privatelife, of domesticiry." 37 And this "privare" realm of domesticiry is nor, one

using the word 'public' as it is used in 'public park' or 'public place,' ro denote a placewhere people who do not know each other can meet and enjoy each orher's company"(p, e).

35. A slightly misleading translation of his title, which is more literally "The Child andFamily Life in the Old R6gime": Philippe Ariis , Centuries of Childhood: A Social History ofFamily Life, first published in 1960 as L'Enfant et k uie familiale sous lAncien Rigime. Thequotation in t}e previous paragraph is from p. 405.

37. Centuries of Chitdhood, p. 375.

THr Puelrc/Pnlvnrr DtsrtNcrtoN

should nore, a realm of isolated individuals-nor of individualisffi, in most

senses of that slippery term. On the contrary, the family is (to a greater or

lesser exrent) a collective unit, constituted by particularistic ties of attachment,

affection, and obligation; and the modern family has characteristic"lly been

understood-and idealized-precisely as a refuge against the self-interested

individualism and impersonaliry of civil society.

This norion of the "public" realm, then, sees it as a realm of sociabiliry,

mediated by conventions that allow diversiry and social distance to be main-

tained despite physical proximiqF. \7hat emerges from Arils's historical recon-

srrucrion is a picture of a world more disorderly and yet in some ways more

stable, less intimate but also less impersonal, than our own (if we happen to

be middle-class North Americans and Northwest Europeans). Huizinga is try-

ing to caprure some of the same phenomena, but striking a more somber note,

when he observes in The Waning of the Middle Ages that "all things in lifewere of a proud and cruel publicity." 38 The great and the small, the rich and

the poor, were jumbled together more casually and promiscuously than today;

both osrenration and wretchedness were less embarrassed. Arils's brilliant,

though unsysrematic, depiction of this world is probably aided by the fact

that he was something of a conservative with a real sympathy for the soci.ry

of the old regime. But the insights to be derived from this conceptual frame-

work do not depend on ideological attitude. For example, Lawrence Stone's

book on The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England., I 5A0- 1800 draws very

powerfully on Aribs despite the fact that Stone, unlike Aribs, believes in "ptog-

ress" (a little excessively for my taste) and is firmly convinced of the relative

wretchedness of the past.3e

I have chosen fuils as a touchstone for identi$ting this version of the

public/private distinction,4O but the project of delineating the "public" world

38. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ago ll924l (Garden Ciry, NY: Double-

d"y, 1954), p. 9 (" een pronkende en gruwelijhe..openbaarheid," or, in the very close German

translation, " einer prunkenden und grausdmen Offentlichkeif': translation here slightly altered

to make it more literal).

39. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1979); see

also Barbara Laslett, "The Family as a Public and Private Institution: An Historical Perspec-

tive," Journal of Marriage and the Famib 35, no. 3 (1973): 480-92.4A. Quite late in his life, in his introduction to volume 3 of A History of Priuate Life,

Ariis obseryed with charming nonchalance that, until he entered on that collaborative proj-

ect and discovered with surprise that his colleagues all associated the distinction public/

private with the distinction state/nonstate, the idea had barely occurred to him-not for

any deeply considered reasons, but because he was profoundly uninterested in "political

history" (p. 9). This was one of those fruitful oversights that sometimes help a scholar

develop a distinctive vision. (fuils concedes that his colleagues helped him "to realize that

t8 t9

Jrrr WeTNTRAUB

of sociabiliry and tracing its transformations is nor, of course, peculiar ro Arils.It now informs an enormous range of scholarship in the social history andhistorical sociology of the family-some of it inspired by Arils, some of itrunning parallel to, or intersecting with, his work. And many of the issues he isdealing with would be immediately recognizable to readers of anthropologicalinvestigations in many non-\Testern (or even Mediterranean) cultures. Thus,it is not surprising that, if one looks for them, one finds many of the samethemes in the work of the befter social historians influenced by interpretiveanthropology-the treatment of everyday ritual and popular culture by Nata-lie Davis and Robert Darnton are good examples-as well as those Annaleshistorians who have returned to the reconsrruction of mentalitis,

However, it has to be said that people not concerned with these parricularlines of historiographic investigation, even if they are aware of these bodiesof work, have often failed to address the more general theoretical challengesthey raise for social and political analysis. It might help to point our-.t l."rt,this is what I would argus-*lnt Arils, Norbert Elias, and Foucault were all,in different ways, exploring the same broad historico-theoretical terrain: thetriumph of privacy and discipline in the modern West. The composite pictureof the historical transformation of Western societies that has emerged fromthese different lines of research emphasizes, albeit in very differenr ways, thebreakdown of the older "public" realm of polymorphous sociabiliry and, withit, the sharpening polarization of social life berween an increasingly impersonal"public" realm (of the market, the modern state, and bureaucratic otgan1za-tion) and a "private" realm of increasingly intense intim acy and emotitnaliqy(the modern family, romantic love, and so forth). As Elias puts it: "In otherwords, with the advance of civilization the lives of human beings are increas-ingly split between an intimate and a public sphere, benveen secret and publicbehavior- And this split is taken so much for granred, becomes so .o*p,rlsivea habit, that it is hardly perceived in consciousness." 4r

In short, one of the most salient forms (or versions, or variants) of thepublic/private distinction in modern culture (in both thought and practice)is that which demarcates the "private" realm of "personal life;' from the "p,rb-lic" realm of gesellschafr (as we have come to call it since Tonnies), epitomizedby the market and bureaucratically administered formal organization. Thecontrast bernreen the "personal," emotionally intense, and intimate domainof family, friendship, and the primary group and the impersonal, severely in-

,h. P-bl.* -"*tot as monolithic as I had imagined," and his discussion in the introductionmakes a stab at integrating the nvo approaches; but it would be more accurare ro say thathe shuttles back and forth between them.)

4l- Norbert Elias, The ciuilizing Process lrg3gl l:190.

Tue Puelrcl Pnrvnrr D rsTtNcrtoN

srrumental domain of the market and formal institutions is in fact widely

experienced-one need only think about the evidence of popular culture-as one of the great divides of modern life.az But historically these rwo poles

emerge rogether, to a great extent in dialectical tension with each other; and

the sharpness of the split benrreen them is one of the defining characteristics

of moderniry. This perspective can help us to make sense of the emergence

of a whole range of different forms of "private" relationship that are distinctive

ro modern sociery and that are simultaneously defined in opposition to the

logic of gesellschaft: for example, the modern notion of anti-instrumental

friendship based exclusively on sympathy and affection; or the ideal of roman-

tic marriage and the emotionally bonded child-centered family with its cult

of the economically useless but emotionally "priceless child." 43 Aribs sums up

his view of this process with this striking remark: "It is not individualism

which has triumphed, but the family. But this family has advanced in propor-

tion as sociabiliry has retreated. It is as if the modern family had sought to

take the place of the old social relationships (as these gradually defaulted) in

order ro preserve mankind from an unbearable moral solitud e." 44 A similar

vision is expressed, in more general terms, in these formulations by Peter

Berger and his coauthors in The Homeless Mind:a'

All the major public institutions of modern soci.ry have become"absrrac" tp. 183]. . There are also discontents specifically de-

rived from the pluralization of social life-worlds. Generally, these

discontents can be subsumed under the heading of "homelessness"

tp. 1 84]. . Modern sociery's "solution" to these discontents has

been, as we have seen, the creation of the private sphere as a distinctive

and largely segregated sector of socid life, along with the dichotomiza-

tion of the individual's societal involvements between the private and

the public spheres. The private sphere has served as a kind of balancing

mechanism providing meanings and meaningful activities to compen-

:Xf 3:,:$ i;;:l,te;:'#?,"th'about bv the rarge structures of mod-

42. I have borrowed the last phrase from Allan Silver's useful and insightful essay,

" 'Two Different Sorts of Com6s16s'-Friendship and Strangership in Civil Society," in

this volume.

43. To borrow the expression of Viviana Zelizer in Pricing the Priceless Child (1985).

' '44. Centuries of Chitdhood, p. 406.45. Peter Berger, Brigine Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modern-

ization and Consciousness (I97 4) .

46. To be precise, among the perspectives that explore this distinctively modern polar-

ization of "privare" and "public" life along personal/impersonal lines, there are really twlbroad theoretical currents. One, which might be termed a more "eighteenth-century" ap-

7l20

J err W ErNrRAu B

This is not necessarily a happy or secure solution. One implication of this

process-and here Arils's reflections converge in an interesting way with the

concerns of Philip Slater, the brilliant outlaw Parsonian sociologisl+z-i5 d1s

possibility that the emotional "overloading" of the domain of intimate rela-

tions will develop in tandem with the increasitg emotional ernptiness and

isolation of an inhospitable "public" domain. Not that many of us would want

to abandon the satisfactions of intimate life or the advantages of impersonal

institutions: they are, at least potentially, among the benefits of moderniry.

But if they confront us as sharply dichotomized and exclusive alternatives,

they add up ro an unsatisfact ory prospect. Once again, part of the solution,

both theoretical and practical, may lie in complexification-a k.y element ofwhich would be the existence and vitaliry of a sphere of public life, in the

sense of sociabiliqy, that can mediate berween the particularistic intimacies of"privare" lifc and the extreme impersonaliry and instrumentalism of gesell-

schaft.

It has often been claimed that this "wealth of public life" is one of the

characteristic achievements, at its best, of the successful cosmopolitan .iry.nt

The analysis of sociabiliry thus ought to be a central concern in thinking about

proach (drawing especially on the Scottish Enlightenment and Georg Simmel), emphasizes

the ways in which the impersonal structures of gesellschaft, paradoxically, create a space for

and enable the emergence of this new realm of anti-instrumental "private" life (for example,

by reducing the need to seek vital resources and physical protection through one's personal

ties). This is the position sympathetically reconstructed by Silver in his essay for this volume.

Then there is a more "nineteenth-century" approach that emphasizes the ways in which

these new forms of personal relations emerge, at least in part, in reaction againrlthe world ofgesellschaft. This perspective has taken on a range of forms ("Ieft" and "right," conservative,

marxisant, romanric, and so forth); contemporary examples would include not only Aribs

and Peter Berger but also Christopher Lasch, Richard Sennem, Philip Slater, and Eli Zarer.-

sky. (For Zaretsky, see Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Lift 11976, 1986]; fot Lasch,

see Hauen in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged 11979).) Though the spirit and implica-

tions of the rwo approaches are in many ways quite different, they are probably more com-

plementary than incompatible.

47. See especially The Glory of Hera: Greek Mytholog and the Greek Family (1968), and

The Pursuit af Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (1970). Slater synthesized

Parsons with Freud (a Freud closer to the version of the British "object-relations" psychoana-

lysts than the one Parsons had already ingested) to produce a radical critique of modern

sociery. He is a powerful infuence behind the work of Nancy Chodorow and-I assume

independently-behind Hannah Pitkin's feminist reading of Machiavelli in Fortune Is a

Voman (19S4), so he can s€rve to illusffate some of the bridges which connect the concerns

of Aribs and Elias with those of feminist scholars I will discuss in the next section.

48. For a range of historical and contemporary explorations of this theme, including

my own essay on "Varieties and Vicissitudes of Public Space," see Philip Kasinitz's edited

collection, Metropolis: Center and Symbol of Our Times (1995).

Tur Pust-lc/ Pntvnrr DtsrlNcrloN

ciqF life; and, as Jane Jacobs brought home powerfully in her account of the

"inrricate baller" of the streers, this form of public life has its own distinctive

conditions of vitaliry and fragiliry. Of the types we have examined so far, it

is probably the most closely and essentialty tied to the spatial arganlaation of

,o.i"l life. Its domain lies, afrer all, in the public sPace of street, park, and

plaza-_but also of neighborhood, bar, and caf6. Its character and possibilities

are infuenced by the ways that the configurations of physical space facilitate,

channel, and block the flow of everyday movement and activiry. This aspect

of Jacobs's legacy is especially well represented by William H- V/hyte's long-

term project io irr,r.stigare the ways that the shape of urban space can enhance

the vitaliry of public life.ae On the other hand, it is also clear that the require-

ments of successful public space are never only physical. Two of the most

influential and evocative ethnographic accounts of urban sociabiliry, \flilliam

Foote Whyte's Steet Corner Society and Herbert Gans's The Urban Villagers,

dealt with ethnic enclaves whose sense of "neighborhood" was culturally as

well as physic"lly based. The context of ethnic communiry helped to main-

lain-though by itself it can never guarantee-the background conditions of

basic trusr, securiry, predictabiliry, and a sense of shared conventions against

which the spontaneiry of public life can develop-

These background conditions are even more important if public space is

to do its rnore ambitious work of allowing more diverse individuals and grouPs

"ro dwell in peace togerher on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved

terms." The characteristic virtue of this form of public space, which it both

requires and reinforces, is civiliryto-which is a matter of codes and conven-

rions, no less important for being largely implicit. Once established as a paffern

(and it comes in a variery of sociohistorical forms) civiliqy can be resilient; but

it can also begin ro unravel if pur under excessive strain. Or, if different grouPs

srarr our *ith enough mutual fear, hostiliry, or incomprehension, it is unlikely

ro emerge in the first place.tl And this leaves out of account the fact that

successful public space relies on a range of political and economic resources-

includirrg such mundane mamers as policing, trash collection, and street clean-

ing-*hich it does nor itself provide. Even in its most physically situated

foi*, the public space of sociabiliry emerges from a complex interplay of spa-

tial and social arrangements.

4g. See,The Social Life of Smatl (Jrban Spaces (1980), and City: Rediscoueringthe Center

(1e88).

50. Not that far removed, either etymologically or conceptually, from urbanity.

51 . For a powerful and sobering analysis of the ways that a viable public life can fail

to establish itself-or can disinregrare-under these conditions, see Elijah Anderso n's Street'

wise: Race, Class, and Change in an [Jrban Community (1990)'

22 23

Jrrr WeTNTRAUB

All these qualifications point to a larger reservation. The face-to-face inter-action of the neighborhood-where Jacobs's vision is at its strongesr and mosrilluminating-is not sufficient by itself to tie a ciry together, ro manage therelations berween its different groups and interests, and to make it work. But

Jacobs and much of the work she has inspired have found it difficult to dealwith the processes that connect the world of neighborhood sociabiliry to these

larger arenas-which have profound effects on the character and viabiliry ofthe small-scale arenas themselves. Nor is this only a question of scale. Thesuccess or failure of cities-and societies-requires a range of decisions, ac-

tions, and policies that cannot emerge from the flow of every d^y sociabiliryalone. Their terrain is a different sort of public space, that of the political. Ifthis public space cannot generate and maintain a political communiry capable

of collective decision and collective action, then the crucial tasks will have robe addressed by authoriry and administration frorn above-or they may notget done at all. An analysis of public life that cannot effectively deal with thepolitical is necessarily truncated.

Nevertheless, Jacobs's work helps to make it clear why a notion of the"public" sphere of sociabiliqF, conceived broadly along the lines developed byArids and Elias, is not only of historical interest, but ought to be employedin the analysis of contempo rary societies. Doing so would require that thisconception of the "public" sphere be more explicitly elaborated and theoreti-cally refined so as to increase its analytical flexibiliry, and so that its interplaywith other forms of public life can be systematic"lly explored. Probably themost ambitious and comprehensive effort along these lines has been that ofRichard Sennett, most notably in The Fall of Public Man.52 Sennett insists(though not in precisely this terminolory) on the need ro link the study ofthe great cosmopolitan ciry to a theoretically informed analysis of sociability-one that addresses the interplay berween the spatial organization of cities andlong-term sociohistorical processes-and further attemprs ro link the analysisof sociabiliry to a vision of the political. Whether or not the success of Sennerr'sproject has fully matched its ambition, it underlines the need for further effortsto theorize this notion of public space more fully, and ro integrate it rnoresystematigally into the comprehensive analysis of modern societies.

Sennett, like Arits, sees in the decay of sociabiliry a threatening dialecticberween "dead public space" and a pathological overinvesrment in intimatelife-with the additional side effect that comrnunity comes to be disastrouslymisconceived as intimacy writ large, which renders it both exclusivistic and

52. The Falt of Public Man: On the Social Psychologr of Capitalism (1978);these themesare elaborated somewhat unsystematically in Richard Sennett , The Conscience of the E1,e:

The Design and Social Life of Cities (1990).

InE PuBLrc/ PnlvArr DtsrtNcrloN

ultimately unworkable. Here is the way that Ariis sums up some of the k.ythemes we have been considering:53

." #;:,:i liH: Jil HTJi:"jffi:,f: ff: :f :# ffiilexpanded like a hypertrophied cell 1p.227]. . . . Thus, the separation

of space into work areas and living areas corresponds to the division

of life into a public sector and private sector. The family falls withinthe private sector. [p. 2301

[The family and the caf6] were the only rwo exceptions to the

modern system of surveillance and order which came to include all

social behavior. [p. 232)

In the so-called post-industrid age of the mid rwentieth centuv,

the public secror of the nineteenth century collapsed and people

thought they could fill the void by extending the private, family, sec-

ror. They thus demanded that the family see to all their needs.

Although people today often claim that the family is undergoing a

crisis, this is not, properly speaking, an accurate description of what

is happening. Rather, we are witnessing the inabiliry of the family to

fulfill all the many functions with which it has been invested, no doubt

temporarily, during the past half-century. [pp. 234-35]

If, as Aribs suggests, the realm of "personal life" cannot fully bear this weight

of emotional expectation, then at least part of the answer must lie in a revital-

ization of the public world-including the complex and subtly textured world

of sociabiliw.

The Two Cities

BEporu, LEAVTNG THE problem of sociabiliry and its sociohistorical transfor-

mations, I would like to dwell for a moment on its larger theoretical signifi-

cance. As I emphasized earlier, one important feature of this version of the

public/private distinction is that it entails a very different conception of "pub-

lic space " from that of the civic perspective (II). (The rwo ma! be combinable,

both in pracrice and in theory, but they are analytically distinct.) This is a

space of heterogeneous coexistence, not of inclusive solidariry or of conscious

collective action; a space of symbolic display, of the complex blending of prac-

tical morives with interaction ritual and personal ties, of physical proximiry

coexistirg with social distance-and nnt aspace (to use a Habermasian formu-

lation) of discourse oriented to achieving rational consensus by communicative

53. From "The Family and the Ciry," in the edited volume by Alice S. Rossi et al.,

The Famih t1977).

2524

Jerr WeTNTRAUB

means to address common concerns. It is worth noting some implications ofthese differences, which go well beyond issues of face-to -face interaction.

One of the slippery features of discussing the public space of cities, as Ihave done in this section, is that the city is both an object of theoretical analysisand, simultaneously, the metaphorical source of many of the key concepts of\Testern social and political theory. So let me turn this difficulry to advantageby drawi^g on the dual character of the ciry as both social fact and evocarivesymbol- If we compare the notions of "the public" of, for example, HannahArendt in The Human Condition and Philippe AriAs in the passages justquoted, I think one could say that a certain image of the ciqy lies in the back-ground of each. But they are velF different cities. Arendt's ciry is, of course,the polis; it is a self-governitg political communiqy whose common affairs arein the hands of its citizens, which both allows and requires that they act ro-gether and deliberate explicitly about collective ourcomes. (fu the Romanswould have Put it, her ciry is not just urbs, which means a ciry as physicalagglomeration, but ciuitas.) But the Greeks of Aristode's time were alreadyfamiliar with an alternative image of the city, and it was "Babylon": rhe world-ciry defined by the interconnected facts that it was enormous, heterogeneous,and unfree (that is, not self-governing). Size is not necessarily the essendalpoint. The central point about "Babylon" was that it was not a political com-muniry; and, since its heterogeneous multitudes were nor called upon ro becitizens, they could remain in apolitical coexistence, and each could do as hewished without the occasion to deliberate with his neighbors. In shorr, thisis the city, not as polis, but as cosmopolis-I mean "cosmopolis" not in theStoic or Kantian sense of the ideal uniry of mankind, but in the sense ofHaroun al-Rashid's Baghdad or of "Paris, the capital of the nineteenrh cen-tvry." 54

Now, cosmopolis is not the only alternative to the polis as an image ofcity life, but by its extreme opposition it highlights some of the k.y issues.Cosmopolis has often been decried, but it has also exercised a certain charm.Its charms are those of diversiry, of openness, of "street life," and of the tolera-ble (though ofren not h"ppy) coexistence of groups that mingle without join-ing; but they are not necessarily-are not usually-the charms of active citi-zenship- Can modern societies combine the advantages of polis and

54. To borrow the phrase, though not the whole argument, from Walter Benjamin'schapter on "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" in Reflections. One of the discon-certing sectets of the history of great cosmopolitan cities, which is broughr our nicely byBonnie Menes Kahn's charming and stimulating boolc-lengdr essay on Cosmopolitan Cuhure,is that ve{F often ,h.y flourish most successfully in a political context of (reiatively) benigpdespotism-Vienna being, perhaps, zrr especially poignant example.

Tns Puelrc/PRtvATE DrsrrNCTroN

cosmopolis? Perhaps, but the route to answering that question must lie

through developing ways to understand both of the rypes of "public space"

they represent.

lV. FrmrNrsm: PnrvATElPuBLrcAs FaMTLY/Crvrr- SoclETY

The dichotomy benveen the private and the public is central to alrnost

rwo centuries of feminist writing and political struggle; it is, ulti-matelv. what the feminist movement is about.

J'

-Carole Pateman, "Feminist Critiques

of the Public/Private Dichotomy" 55

tff/urlE Nor ALL FEMINISTS would agree with such an emphatic formularion,

the split berween public and private life has been a central organizing theme

in feminist scholarship-as well as semischolarly debates-for the last several

decades.56 As one might expect, the concerns driving this scholarship have led

to sorne sharp reformulations of the terms in which the publiclprivate distinc-tion is considered. This is by now too rich and diverse a field of discourse tocharacterize in a short space. Rather than attempt anything like a comprehen-

sive overyiew of feminist treatments of the publiclprivate distinction, there-

fore, I will focus on delineating a few of the distinctive themes they have

introduced to the discussion and their implications for some issues we have

already encountered.

Broadly speakirg, the characteristic tendency in most branches of feminist

scholarship is to treat the family as the paradigmatic "private" realm, so thatthe formulation "domestic/public" is often used almost interchangeably with"private/public." To that extent, a number of feminist approaches have some-

thing in common with the perspective just discussed, and often shade into itin practice, but-and here one has to speak cautiously because of the range

of positions in feminist argumsnl-*rs implications tend to be different.Vhile the "private" sphere tends to be that of the family (sometimes also ofintimacy), as with perspective III, the conception of the "public" sphere is

55. In Patenlan, The Disorder of Women: Democrd,e/, Feminism and Political Theory,

p. 119. (This essay originally appeared in 1983 in Benn and Gaus's edited volume, Publicand Priuate in Social flft.)

56. For a number of key formulations, see trv\io of the landmark essay collections of the

1970s: Michell e Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere's \Yoman, Cuhure, and Society

(197 4), and Rayna R. Reite r's Toward an Anthropolog of'Women (197 5). For one illustrationof the continuing centraliry of this themg-and of both continuities and elaborations inthe ways it is now approached-see the essays in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell'sedited collection, Feminism as Critique (1987).

76 27

Jerr WeTNTRAUB

often quite different. The ideological and normative concerns driving the anal-

ysis also tend to be different-though they are themselves far from uniform.One further general point is worth making. I think it is fair to say that,

for perspectives I and II, the main conceptual interest is usually in definingthe "public" and its boundaries, with the "private" often becomirg, to some

extent, a residual category. Here, however, the conceptual starting point is the"private" sphere, conceived as the family, and if anything it is the "public"which is often treated as a residual category. In this respect, perspective III is

intermediate benrreen I and II, on the one hand, and most feminist approaches,

on the other.The domestic/public framework was first elaborated by a set of writers in

the overlapping categories of feminist anthropology and Marxist (ot, morebroadly, socialist) feminism. One of the earliest influential formulations alongthese lines appears to have been that of the anthropologist Michelle ZimbalistRosaldo.5T Her orienting framework, which opposes the "private" or "domes-

tic" sphere to the "public" sphere of extrafamilial economic and political activ-ity, recurs with remarkable frequency in subsequent work. The central pointis that in all known societies (some would say "most") this social division is

asymmetric in gender terms-in varying degrees, of course-and the "domes-

tic" sphere is disproportionately (to use a nineteenth-century Americanphrase) "woman's sphere." Vhile the arguments discussed in the previous

section of the essay tend to focus on the ways that many of the characteristicallyrnodern forms of publiclprivate division cut through the lives of both menand wornen, feminists have emphasized the ways that these public/privatedivisions are gender-linked in terms of both social structure and ideology.

Feminists have tended to make (at leait) three overlapping, but not pre-

cisely identical, points. One is that the conceptual orientations of much social

and political theory have ignored the domestic sphere or treated it as trivial.tsThe second is that the public/private distinction itself is often deeply gen-

dered, and in almost uniformly invidious ways. It very often plays a role inideologies that purport to assign men and women to different spheres of social

life on the basis of their "natural" characteristics, and thus to confine women

57 . Michell e Zimbalist Rosaldo, "Woman, Culture, and Socieqy: A Theoretical Over-view," in Rosaldo and Lamphere's edited volume, Woman, Cubure, and Society.

58. The directions in which this complaint is developed are diverse. In *ris respecr,

current feminist discussions tend increasingly to waver between those that rarger the familyas a site of isolation, emotional claustrophobia, and patriarchal oppression and those thatapproach it as the field of certain disdncdve values and virtus5-sf emotional depth, mutualconcern, and concrete attachments-that are harmfully devalued by the larger society. At-tempts to combine these themes add to the complexiry.

Tue Pueucl PnrvRre DtsrlNcrtoN

to positions of inferioriry. The third is that, by classifting institutions like the

family as "privats"-sys11 when this is done in ostensibly gender-neutral

ways-the public/private distinction often serves to shield abuse and dornina-

tion within these relationships from political scrutiny or legal redress.

This version of the public/private distinction took a wide range of feminist

scholarship by storm, since it appeared to speak to a dimension of gender

relations that was at once deeply consequential, apparently universal, and

highly nuanced. A good many feminist writers treated the public/private dis-

tinction as an essential k.y to understanding women's oppression, and in some

cases tended to forget that there were important versions of the public/privatedistinction that could not be mapped directly onto a female/male opposition.5e

A nurnber of reconsiderations beginning in the 1980s have brought a more

troubled and ambivalent attitude toward this use of the public/private distinc-

tion as a conceptual tool. Some have argued that to accept that women have

indeed always been confined to the "private" realm is to repeat ideologies ofmale domination rather than crtticizing them, and that the realiry has almost

always been more complex.60 There has also been an increasing recognition ofthe complexiry of the public/private distinction itself, as well as an increasing

diversiry in the ways it is approached.

One way or another, one of the significant contributions of feminist treat-

ments of the public/private distinction has been to greatly extend the range

of people who are aware of the insights to be gained by linking the "private"

ro the family-rather than, s?/: to the market or to the isolated individual.

In a sense, however, it is odd that this perspective had to be recovered, since

it is, so to speak, the one with which Vestern social and political theory began.

In Aristode, for example, the distinction between "private" and "public" is

fundamentally that between the household (th e oikos) and the political com-

muniry-with the household seen as a realm of both particularistic ties and"natural" inequaliry. The "public" space of the polis, on the other hand, is

a sphere of wider engagement and fundamental equaliry in the practice of

59. Both these characteristics are exemplified by an otherwise quite useful collection ofessays by feminist sociologists, edited by Eva Gamarnikow et al. , The Public and the Priuate

( 1 e83).60. One important recent collection that focuses on these themes is Dorothy O. Helly

and Susan M. Reverby's edited collectio n, Gend.ered Domains: Rethinking Public and Priuate

in Women\ History 0992); also see Karen Hansen's "Rediscovering the Social," in this

volume. (Itr 1980 Michelle Rosaldo wrote a reflective essay reconsidering her original argu-

menr, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural

Understanding." In the end, however, she essentially restates the original domestic/public

distinction, while acknowledging the complexiry and diversiry of the ways it is socially insti-tutionalized.)

28 29

J e nr We INTRAUB

citizenship. Men (ot, at least, citizens) have the abiliry to move berween thesetwo realms; and one of the bases of the citizen's public, civic personaliry is

his private Person"liry as a head of household. Vomen (like children andslaves), however, belong "naturally," and exclusively, in private life. Variationson this model have remained influential in political theory for the subsequent2,50A years.6' In the last several centuries, however, it has been overlaid andoften displaced by the alternative frameworks this essay has been examinirg.

The road back to family as the "private" realm seems to have had a dualroute: one, as noted, from feminist anthropology, the other from "the un,h"ppy marriage of Marxism and feminism." 62 Since many feminisr wrirersand activists had to grapple with Marxism at some point in their intellectualformation, one k.y question was how to deal with the fact that mosr formula-tions of the all-important "mode of production" relegated the household (andthe women in it) to a minor role. The formulation of the "domestic/public"framework helped provide a theoretical emancipation from the more rigidMarxist frameworks.63 On the other hand, in relation to the alternative formsof publiclprivate distinction I have been outlining so far, this move also leadsback to-and highlights-the analytical difficulties surrounding the rreat-ment of civil society in all these discussions. Once one adopts the standpointof the family and looks out, it seems very peculiar to treat civil sociery as rhe"private" sphere; and this recognition ought to raise questions about the wholenotion of a dichotornous model of public and private.

Since at first there was not much traffic berween feminist writing and"mainstream" political theory (let alone "public choice" economics!), it tooksome time for this problem to be faced explicitly and sysrem atrcally. One ofthe first people to do so was Paternan (who might be said to have had a foot

61. As one of the first prominent figures in post- 1960s feminism whose starting pointincluded an active engagement with classical political thought, Jean Elshtain was one of thefirst to address this legacy and its problematic in Public Man, Priuate Woman (1981).

62- Heidi Hartmann, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Femilism: Towardsa More Progressive Union," in Lydia Sargent's Women and Reuolution: A Discussion of theUnhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (l9Bl).

63. A second extremely important step in this direction was Gayle Rubin's formulationof the notion of the "sex/gender system" in "The Traffic in'Women: Notes on the 'PoliticalEconomy' of Sex" (in Reiter, ed., Toward an Antbropologt of Women). A third influentialstatement of this sort was Sherry Ortner's "ls Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?"(in Rosaldo and Lamphere, eds.,Woman, Cuhure, Andsociety); unfortunately, despite raisingsome thought-provoking questions, Ortner's formulation is considerably more problematicthan the other rwo (since the universal and cross-cultural answer ro her central question isnot unrformly yes).

THE Pueucl Pnlvnrr DrsrlNcrtoN

in each camp). Since "domestic life is . paradigmatically private for femi-nists," she notes, it is civil sociery that is the "public" realm. The historicliberal forrnulation of the public/private distinction in rerms of the divisionberween state and civil society has the effect of mystifting cerrain crucid facts

about social life. "Precisely because liberdism conceptualizes civil society inabstraction from ascriptive domestic life, the latter remains 'forgotren' in theo-retical discussions. The separation between private and public is thus re-

established as a division within civtl sociery itself, within the world of men." 64

That is, the supposedly "private" realm of civil sociery as well as the "public"realm of politics are populated largely by male heads of household (as withLocke) or male wage workers (as with much Marxism), and so on. The trulyprivatized realm of the family is hidden behind them. Thus, women "disap-

pear" theoretically along with the domestic sphere. This is nor, however, a

benign neglect. Its result is to exclude women (on the basis of their "natur.lly"private character) from both of the spheres in which men have increasinglyclaimed equaliqf and agency in the modern world, as independent actors incivil socieqy and as citizens in the political communiry. On the other hand,the "private" realm of domesticiry to which this ideology confines womencontinugs in practice to be regarded (as Aristode regarded ir) as appropriatelya realm of male authoriry and female subordination.

Breaking the taken-for-granted identification berween "civil sociery" and

the "private" side of the public/private dichotomy-indeed, recognizing thatlaw and ideology in modern societies contain " a double separarion of theprivate and public," 65 not a single dichotomy-is therefore a key requiremenrfor a feminist rethinking of a wide range of social and political theory. Andovercoming the gendered and invidious separation ber'ween the "privare"

sphere of the family and the rest of social life is a key pracrical task for women'semancipation. One of the strengths of Pateman's analysis is that it confronrsdirectly the essential ambiguiry of the public/private distinction itself-andthe importance of this ambiguiry. In this respect, however, it remains relativelyunusual, despite the broad appeal of Pateman's recenr writings. It is striking

64. Pateman, "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichoroffr/," pp. l2l-22. Forsome further elaborations and applications of this argument by Pateman, see "The FraternalSocial Contract" and "The Patriarchal Velfare State" (also included in The Disorder ofWomen).

65. Pateman, "The Patriarchd Welfare State," p. 183. In this passage Pateman is com-menting on Hegel's picture of modern socieqy; but her larger point is that Hegel's theoryremains a mor€ illuminating guide to these questions than much of contemporary politicaltheory.

3l30

Jerr WTTNTRAUB

that most feminist writing (there are important exceptions) continues ro trearthe public/private dichotomy as a binary opposili6n-or, rarher, as a shifringcluster of binary oppositions.

Once the social world has been split along domestic/public lines, the nexrquestion is how the "public" realm is defined. To this question there is nouniform answer; and most of the time, as I noted earlier, the "public" sideof the division tends to be an undifferentiated or grab-bag residual category.66

One move to give the "public" realm a more concrete content involved theconvergence, via the influence of Engels's book on The Family, Priuate Prop-erry, and the State,67 of the "domestic/public" framework with a Marxist,feminist discussion stressing the articulation berween the "mode of produc-tion" and the "mode of reproduction." This approach also suggested a wayof understanding the historical specificity of the public/private split as it has

developed in modern societies. One effect of the triumph of capitalist com-modiry production (as people from a number of theoretical perspectives have

pointed out) is to sharpen, in many respects, the institutiond separation be-tween "work" and home. Only the production of exchange-value (dispropor-tionately by men) in the rnarket economy is considered real "work," as op-posed to the production of use-values and emotional managemenr(disproportionately by women) in the home. In the process, both of theserealms are transformed-and the domestic realm, it could be argued, is simul-taneously feminized and socially marginalized. Eli Zaretsky's synthesizing ar-gument in Capitalism, the Fa*ib, and Personal Lift played a pivoral role inbringing these threads together6s; but, once this paradigm had crystallized, itwas elaborated and applied by

" remarkably wide arcay of writers, in contexrs

ranging from political controversy to academic historiography-among oth-ers.6e One distinctive feature of this model is worth noting: while in the discus-

66. One nice illustrative example would be Rayna Reiter's (perceptive but analyticallydiffuse) essay on "Men and \fomen in the South of France: Public and Private Domains"(in Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropologt of Women). The "privare" domain is defined bythe household and kinship relationships; the "public" domain comprehends the economy,politics, open (versus enclosed) physical spaces-and so on. It would be easy to multiplyfurther examples.

67. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Priuate Proper4t, and the State tlB84].68. This first appeared as a series of articles in Socialist Reuolutinn> nos.13-1! (January-

June 1973), before being published as a book in 1976. The influence of this work on theemerging ferninist scholarship of the 1970s was rnore significant and pervasive than explicitcitations alone would lead one ro believe.

69. For a brief (*d critical) overview of this perspective and its influence, especiallyin the fields of social history and historicd sociology, see Karen Hansen's "Rediscoveringthe Social," in this volume, particularly pp.27l-73; some of the argumenrs emerging fromthis approach are also discussed in Krishan Kumar's essay for this volume, "Home: The

TsE Pusr-rcl PRrvnrr DrsrrNcrroN

sion of preindustrial societies the "public realm" often remains an undifferen-tiated residual categ oA, in terms of mod.ern sociery the effective conceptionof the "public" realm is essentidly the market economy. A rypical example(of many) would be Karen Sacks's distinction (following Engels) benrreen the"private domesticlabor of women" and "public or wage labor." 70 At this pointthe attentive reader will have noticed that, as our discussion of the public/private distinction has moved from the liberal-economistic formulation to the

Marxist-feminist formulation, the market economy has migrated from the

heart of the "private sector" to the heart of the "public realm."

I have picked out this particular approach, not because it is in any way

predominant (nor even as pervasively influential as it once was), but because

it constituted the most sharply defined solution within feminism to the prob-

lem of formulating a binary public/private dichotomy that included a concrete

picture of both poles. However, while this is a solution, it is not an entirely

adequate one. Aside from flattenirg out the complexiry of past and present

societies, it may be quite misleading as a guide to action. As Jean Elshtain,

for example, has pointed out in a series of sharp criticisms beginning in the

1970s, the way in which this literature formulates the publiciprivate distinc-

tion has dre effect of conf.ating "public" in the sense of the market economy

with "public" in the quite different sense of politics (in the form of citizen-

ship). Thus, while the family has been rescued from theoretical invisibiliry,the end result is that the civic "public realm" is blanked out as thoroughly

as in the utilitarian liberal perspective.

Elshtain has also argued that the same urge for simplification lies behind

potentially dangerous tendencies in some varieties of feminist argument to

call for eliminating any separation between "public" and "privat e." 71 (These

tendencies, which were once fueled by Maoist fantasies, are now more likelyto be informed by "postrnodern" deconstruction or by the rype of radical

feminism represented by Catharine MacKinnon.T2) Similar argurnents have

been made by other writers whose viewpoints are in other respects very differ-

Promise and Predicament of Private Life at the End of the Twentieth Centry," pp.2ll-t2.

70. Karen Sacks, "Engels Revisited:'W'omen, the Organization of Producdon, and Pri-vate Properry" (in Reiter's Toward an Anthropolog of Women, p. 232). For a key formulation

of this contrast by Engels, see pages I37 -38 of Origin,

71. See, for examp\e, Public Man, Priuate Woman, especially chapter 5. For a more

recent discussion, with new polemical targets, see Elshtain's "The Displacement of Politics,"

in this volume.

72. See, for example, Catharine A. MacKinnon, "Privacy v. Equaliry," in Feminism

Unmodifed (1987), and "Abortion: On Public and Private," rn Toward a Feminist Theory

of the State (1989).

3332

J rnr We TNTRAUB

ent from Elshtain's; one important example is Nancy Fraser, who is one ofthe current feminist writers most perceptively sensitive to the complexities ofthe public/private distinction and to the need-both theoretical and practi-cal-for complexification rather than simplification.T3

These criticisms and reservations seem to me well taken. But the problemthey point to is not merely a problem of Marxist or radical feminism-nor,indeed, of feminism more generally. Rather, 2s I have already hinted morethan once, it reflects the sort of difficulry which any attempr at a dichoto-mous public lprivate model will eventu"lly encounter. \[hen used as compre-hensive models of social life, such binary frameworks will always prove inade-

quate-both theoretically and normatively-to the complexiry of modern so-

cieties.

THe GnEAT DrvrDE-AND lrs LrmlrsLrr us rAKE srocK. My primary purpose has been to establish the historical

and theoretical complexiry of the public/private distinction; to delineare some

of the more important of the multipliciry of ways in which this distinctionis employed; and to bring out some of the implications of this multipliciqy.I hope this task has been accomplished. As a quick reminder of the mainoutlines of the discussion, I offer below a somewhat simplified illustrativerestatement of examples from the four organ rzing models I have been examin-itg, reshuffled slightly to bring out some salient contrasts. Listed in column4 are the social forms which provide-explicitly or implicitly-each perspec-tive's k.y point of reference. As I have been trying to suggest, the "roots" ofthe different perspectives are sociohistorical as well as theoretical and ideolog-ical.

73. See, in particular, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critiqueof Actually Existing Democracy" (in Craig Calhoun's edited volume , Haberrnas and the

Public Sphere), and "What's Critical about Critical Theory?: The Case of Habermas andGender" (in Unruly Practica). Although Fraser's arguments along these lines are parricularlycogent, one could cite a growing feminist theoretical literature that is sensitive to these

complexities and their normative significance. To pick out just rwo examples that concen-trate on different sides of the public/private dichotomy: Seyla Benhabib, in a recenr essay,

delineates and conffasts three "Models of Public Space" (in Calhoun's Habermas and the

Public Sphere) associated, respectively, with Arendt, with neo-Kantian liberalism of a broadlyRawlsian variery, and with Habermas. However, it ought to be noted that all rhree of these

versions of "public space" fall within just one of the categories I have outlined in this essay

(namely, category II). For a vigorous antisimplificationist defense of the discourse ofprivacy and privacy rights against borl feminist and "communitarian" critiques, see JeanCohen's "Rethinkirg Privacy: Autonomy, Identity, and the Abordon ControVersf," in thisvolume.

Political communiry

Sociabiliry

Market economy

Government (that is,

administrative"intervention")

Polis

Old Regime

Capitalism

Capitalism

One sociohistorical factor deserves special mention, since it helps to explain

the ultimately irreducible complexiry of modern treatrnents of the public/private distinction: For Aristotle, the sphere of the oihos comprises both the

family and "economic" life, since he could regard the household as the main

institution regulating production and distribution. With the increasing cen-

traliry of the market economy, and the whole world of contractual social rela-

tions centered on the market, it becomes less plausible to combine family and"economy" in the same category of "private" life. And indeed the market

econom/r as a large-scale and impersonal system of interdependence, is "pri-

vate" only in a rather special and ambiguous sense-which explains why some

approaches can treat it as the "public" realm. \We have been encountering this

ambiguiry throughout the discussion.

Arendt, of course, faces this difficulry directly, and in response develops

an explicitly tripartite model of modern sociery, introducing the category of"the social" as a realm alternative to both "the private" and "the public," one

whose rise is distinctive to moderniry. Essentially-to sweep too quickly over

some complicated interpretive proble1115-"the social" is fuendt's character-

ization of modern civil sociery, in the sense that I have been using the termin this essay. In this way, despite some very important differences, her rypology

has a certain family resemblance to another influential tripartite model of mod-

ern socieqy, Hegel's framework of family, civil sociery, and the state. Both

examples illustrate the tendency for dichotomous models of modern sociery to

break down when they are thought through seriously and to begin generating

intermediate and residual categories, as well as underlining the specific diffi-culties involved in fitting modern civil sociery into any dichotomous public/private framework,Ta

74. By denying the attribution of "private" to civil sociery, transferring it to the domes-

tic sphere, yet continuing to recognize the need to distinguish berween civil sociery and

politics, Pateman also moves (not entirely explicitly) to a tripartite model. This parallel

benveen Pateman and Arendt is ironic, since Arendt can hardly be termed a feminist thinker,

and her ideal involves precisely the kind of rigid division between the "private" sphere ofrhe household and the "public" realm of political communiqy (along with a devaluation of

THr Puelrc/Pnrverr DrsrrNcrroN

Priuate Public

Sociohistorical

Point of Reference

fuistotle

AriEs

Marxist feminism

Mainstream economics

Househ old (oikos)

Domesticity

Family

Market economy

34 35

J e rr We TNTRAUB

These considerations help to explain why the reader should nor now expecrme to offer a new and comPrehensive typology that can resolve the ambiguitiesand loose ends I have outlined. However, as a more modest and partial srep,I do think it is possible to point to two major families of currenr approachesto the treatment of "public" and "private" and to suggest that they are rootedin attemPts to use the public/private distinction to caprure (at least) rwo kindsof institutional divisions that have become increasingly sharp and salient inmodern societies (in culture and experience as well as theory). I should empha-size that these broad charact erizations are offered as an interpretive supplemenrto the four central categories I have used in this essay, not as a replacemenrfor them.

On the one hand, a wide range of discussions and debates that draw onthe notions of "public" and "private" tend to assume (often implicitly andmore or less unreflectively) that the distinction public/private corresponds,one way or another, to the distinction political/nonpolitical. In mosr of thesediscussions, the predominant (even paradigmatic) irnage of the nonpolitical,"private" sphere is that of the market (and/or of the civil society based onthe market). The "private" sphere is thus characterized by the centraliry ofexplicit contract, rational exchaoge, impersonaliry, instrumenral calculation ofindividual advant a1e, and so forth.75 As I emphasized earlier, the characterof the "political" is deeply ambiguous in these discussions. If the politicalis conceived in terms of the administrative state, then the "public" realm isdistinguished by the use of legitimate coercion and the authoritative directionof collective outcomes, as opposed to formally voluntary conrract and sponra-neous order based on market exchan gr.'u Or, in certain more "civic" perspec-tives, the distinctiveness of the "public" realm (or "public sphere") m"y havemore to do with the significance of solidariqy, of "public spirit," of participa-tion in a Process of active citizenship and collective self-determination, andso on.77 But, in either case, the "public" realm is commonly defined, aboveall, in opposition to the "private" realm of the market and civil sociery. Theseconceptual mappings, and the problematics that go with rhem, are of coursetied up with historical emergence of the new "private" sphere of civil socieryand of distinctively modern forms of srare and poliry.

the former) which Pateman would like to overcorne. But this convergence brings out rhetheoretical difficulry to which both are responding.

7 5 - In other fields of discourse, these are all taken to be the characteristics of thelic" realm-which is precisely the point I am trying to emphasize here.

76. Thus, public/private : smrelsociery or srare/market.77 . In which case, as we have seen, the "public" realm is something d.istinct from rhe

administrative srare.

T n E Pu eL tc lP RlvATe D rsrrNCTIoN

Then, as we have seen, there rs anotlrer freld of discourse (or, rarher, several)in which the realm of "private life" is above all the world of personal relation-ships, particularly those bound up with intimacy, domesticiry, and "privacy."The "public" realm to which this version of the private is contrasted is eitherthat of sociabiliry or-especially in the context of rnoderniqF-the large-scaleorder of gesellschafr based on impersonality, formal institurions, instrumentalrelations, and so on. In sociohistorical terms, the new sphere of the privatebeing addressed here is exemplified by new types of personal relationships, a

k.y characteristic of which is that, to a great exte nt, they are defined in directopposition to the ethos of the (equally new) "public" realm of impersonalrelations and institutions, and are valued precisely for that reason. In thisconnection, a key task is to grasp the way in which the world of "personal"relations has become so essentially private-in this particular sense of "privare."That is, this version of the public/private distinction is not straightforwardlyuniversal in its applicabiliry-any more than the other versions-bur is socio-historically variable. In this framework, unlike the first one(s) I jusr ouflined,the market is often paradigrnaric of the public realm.

In nvo different forms then, what might have appeared as an institutionaland experiential continuum in other kinds of society has increasingly appearedas a great divide-which makes the invocation of the grand dichotomy ofpublic/private appear especially appropriate to capture it. However, this com-parison also brings out some of the limitations of the public/private dichotomyfor these purposes. First, although each of these pictures of polarization cap-tures pervasive and powerful rcndencies, they are tendencies rather than accom-plished outcomes. In neither case have the social mediations benrieen the rwopoles of the dichotomy actually disappeared, nor are they likely to. Second,it is clear that (at least) rwo different forms of public/private distinction are

involved, raising different sets of issues, which cannot usefully be amalgamatedinto a single grand dichotomy. Nor could this problem be solved by a quantita-tive scale of degrees of "publicness" or "privateness," 5in6s-25 I have justbeen trying to make clear-the (more or less implicit) defining criteria of"public" and "private" differ berween the two cases. It mighr appear, for exam-

Ple, that we can describe the market economy as more "public" than thenuclear family, while the state is more "public" still. But the basis for this scale

is far from self-evident. It seems straightforward to describe the jurisdictions ofboth ciry governments and national states as "public," bur what makes themmore "public" than the market? The comprehensive interdependencies of themarket routinely transcend the boundaries of these jurisdictions, and marketrelations can often be more "open" and "visible" than the activities of govern-ment bureaucracies. Part of what makes the market economy "private" is that

"pub-

3637

Jrrr WeTNTRAUB

it is seen as a legitimate field for competitive and self-interested individualism;but, as I noted earlier, a crucial element ofwhat culturally defines the "private

life" of friendship, home, and family is precisely that it is valued as a refuge

against the self-interested individualism of the market. And so on.

Nevertheless, while the public/private distinction is inherently problematicand often treacherous, frequently confusing and potentially misleadirg, it is

also a powerful instrurnent of social analysis and moral reflection if approached

with due caution and conceptual self-awareness. It is, at all events, an inescap-

able element of the theoretical vocabularies as well as the institutional and

cultural landscape of modern societies. Thus, it can neither be convenientlysimplified nor usefully avoided. The variabiliry, ambiguiry, and difficulry ofthe public/private distinction need to be recogn rzed and confronted-but also

the richness and apparent indispensabiliqF of this grand dichotomy.

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42

CorrENrsC oNrENTs

I Dh'A Btu;n From Public Housing to Pr:y.re

Communitiar: The Disciplin€ oI Derigrand $e Materialization of thePublidPriyate Dbtin.tion in theEuilt EnYironm€nt 237

l0 Kztn V Hansm Rediscoveriq the Social Visitint hdcticesin Antebellum New EnSland and theUmits oft,l€ Public,/Prirdt€ Dkhotorny 26A

| | Man Gzrcehn The Shadow od the Leviethan: Public and

Priyrte in Communist and P6r.About the conrributors "i communist society 30,Preface n

| 2 oLgKtc*bo k Reveal and Dissimulate A Genealoy ofI lfveintraut The Theory and Politics ot the Pri!'rte Life in Soviet Russia 333

hrblic/Private Distinction I Indo 365

2 Allan Siba "Two Ditrerert Sons of Comme.ce"-Friendship and Strangership

in CMI Society 13

3 CmigCahou Nationalism and the Public Sphere 75

1 Danieh Gobatti Humankind as a Sysrem: Privat€ mdPublic Atency at tle Oridns

of Modem Liberalism 103

5 Jean L. Cohen Rethinking Privacy: Autonomy, ldentity,

and the Abortion Controversy 133

6 Jean Bethke Elshtain The Displacement of Politics 166

7 Alan WoW Public and Private in Theoq/ and Practice:

Some lmplications of an Uncertain

Boundary l1z

8 Krishan Kumar Home: The Promise and Predicament

of Private Life at the End of the

Twentieth Century 2A4