From public to private: the development of the concept of the "private" - Part I: Public/Private The Distinction

Social Research, Spring, 2002 by Joe Bailey

THE distinction between the "private" and the "public" is one of the most fundamental and constitutive ordering principles in social life, and one of the most unstable. In everyday life it operates as a common sense and basic reference point. In analytical social thought it has been one of the touchstones both for the description of social change and for the valuation and judgment of that change. The recent increase in interest in the private/public distinction, and the mounting anxiety about the possible meanings of both realms and the relationship between them, are simply the most current of a long series of attempts to decipher an essential human quality for each, and thus also for the distinction between them. The current experience of rapid social change has dramatized issues of the relationship between the private and the public, of what the private is, or should be, and of what should be shielded from all but the individual's gaze.

But there is no essential "private" or intrinsic "public," no obvious psychological or anthropological constant underlying these concepts. Significant historical and sociological evidence illustrates the mutability of the private and of its socially relative character (for example, Aries et al., 1987-1991; Elias 1982). It is the distinction itself that is pervasive, durable, persistent, and deeply rooted. Within this repeatedly returned to and relied upon categorization, what we mean by the private and the public regularly changes. The two terms construct each other and discursively shift and slide in use. But, to repeat, it is the contrast between them, the need to distinguish one from the other, the necessity of making the distinction in any particular social and political situation, that endures. In other words, if we are interested in the history and the development of the idea of the "private," we must look at how the "public" has changed as well, how the changing forms of the private are concurrent with altered publics, and how private and public discourses are always locked in the same dance. The history of the private is the history of the public.

The contemporary vantage point we now occupy in charting the development of the concept of privacy is one where, certainly in the West at least, the high ground is now given to the private. The modern sensibility undoubtedly accords a very high value to what it takes to be the moral qualities of the private that can be connoted as "intimacy affection, generosity and trust" (Silver, 1997: 45), and friendship and love. It sees the private as historically and ontologically prior to the public in some way (quite wrongly, in my view), and that the private is a shield and protector or refuge from a public world of danger. The private functions as an irreducible arena for "the mutual, reciprocal relinquishments of the self" (Smith, 1976), where personal autonomy is constructed (Heinen, 1997: 580) and moral value itself is generated and developed. This growing preoccupation with the private is relatively recent. It has occurred concurrently with notable shifts in the scale and speed of social change--globalization, reflexive modernization, de-traditionalization. It is both a part of these changes (in the form of market-driven individualization and personal consumption), and also a reaction to anxieties about them. This, then, is the position from which I wish to reconstruct one version of the history of the concept of the private.

The History of the (Public and) the Private

Let us put to one side for the moment issues of whether we see a shape to histories of the private--a progress or an evolution, an oscillation or a cycle--and simply plot a sequence, an abbreviated chronicle of some of the main transitions in the meaning of the public and the private. The most important feature of this sequence has been the movement from a privileged public realm to an increasingly foregrounded private one. While this is a remarkable feature of the Western European tradition, it is less clear whether it is also a useful background for understanding developments in Central and Eastern European societies.

Hannah Arendt (1958) locates ancient Greece as the most fateful source of the private/public distinction and one that has continued to resonate in our time. Its distinction between the private sphere of the household (the family, the home and its domestic life and economy) and the public sphere of the polis is one that is articulated by all the major theorists of the public/private distinction, who treat the historical account as a record of regrettable and dangerous loss of the public realm. It has been the public that has been of prime interest to these theorists. The private household was concerned with the maintenance of life itself, its natural functions--childbirth, labor to provide food--and its needs and wants. The public polis was the place for the exercise of freedom and decision, rather than necessity and constraint. This is the fundamental social categorization, and is prior, for Arendt, to the "social" and the social realm that occurs later and threatens to supersede both private and public. Roman imperial and republican conceptions of the private and public shift the latter away from a sphere of shared deliberation to one of absolute sovereignty. The private becomes "that which pertains to the interests of single individuals" (from Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis of 534, quoted in Weintraub, 1997: 11-12). This Roman conception of the public--and its residual view of the private--dominated the period of centralized absolutist monarchies and the long era of centralized sovereignties across Europe up to the eighteenth century and beyond.