Introduction

Harry Blatterer

Pauline Johnson

Maria R. Markus

pp. 1-6

in: Harry Blatterer, Pauline Johnson, Maria R. Markus (eds), Modern privacy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

The distinction of polis and oikos in Greek antiquity, and the assignment of men to the one and women and children (and slaves) to the other, is etched in the Western imagination as constitutive to the development of our shared history, and so has over time become the quasi-natural template for the differentiation of the private and the public spheres along lines of power. However, with the emergence of what Agnes Heller (1999) has called "the modern social arrangement" with its double-edged freedoms—freedoms that both allow and compel us to carve our individual destinies from highly contingent institutional and normative contexts—the lived contents of these spheres of action become contestable and contested. From then on, the contestability of privacy as an entitlement and desired good depended on the formation of public institutions which listened, gave voice to and advocated for individuals whose autonomy became the conceptual bedrock for liberal-democratic privacy (Habermas, 2002; Rössler, 2005). The development of modern privacy, then, is best understood in terms of its articulation with the public realm. In the more literal sense, that articulation has long included a defense against undue interference by the state, as well as pressures to open the private realm to scrutiny in order to expose and then curtail the violence of gendered power.

Cited authors

Heller Agnes

Habermas Jürgen