Privacy, secrecy, idiocy - Part III: States and Boundaries

Social Research, Spring, 2002 by Mark Neocleous

ONE of the supposed virtues of liberal democracy is its protection of privacy. From its roots in the late-eighteenth-century "democratic revolutions" to its institutionalization in the various declarations on human rights now in existence, privacy is mooted as a principle that can be used to defend us from the state and protect our liberties. People who hold this view also argue that secrecy in politics is a bad thing: the higher the degree of secrecy with which the state operates, the less democratic it is. From this perspective, the defense of individual privacy goes hand in hand with an attack on state secrecy.

We have then two political issues--privacy and secrecy--that are brought together to form a fairly simple but well-established claim: that a democratic society is one with an entrenched defense of privacy (preferably in a codified constitution) and one in which the bare minimum of state affairs is carried out in secret. These issues have received a new lease on life in recent years with many liberal democracies aiming to further entrench the "right" to privacy and to move to more "open" (less secretive) forms of government--the Blair and Clinton regimes being the most obvious examples. These are moves that many on the Left have praised as progressive, radical, and modernizing. In this article I shall argue that despite their ostensibly radical appearance, demands for "privacy" and "open government" are in fact severely limited when used to challenge the various forms of power we may set ourselves against. These limitations result from demands that are both historically and politically naive. They are historically naive in the sense that they overlook the reasons states have since their inception been committed to secrecy; they are politically naive in the sense that they buy into an essentially liberal conceptual apparatus. I shall therefore be arguing that the apparent obviousness of the appeals to more privacy and less secrecy masks a deeper naivete that misreads the material nature of the state's commitment to secrecy and operates with a flawed conception of the two main forms of power: capital and the state. The outcome of this naivete is that it in some senses weakens rather than strengthens real opposition to state power.

After first briefly exploring the rise of the private and its connection with the attack on secrecy, I will consider the rationale for such secrecy, which, I shall argue, is embodied in the state as an autonomous entity committed to achieving "intelligence." It is this commitment that the state uses to legitimize infringements of privacy. This will allow me to conclude with a consideration of the political limitations of demands for privacy and, concomitantly, "open government."

Private Not Public; Public Not Secret

The idea that "privacy" is a political virtue came about with the rise of capitalism, the consolidation of the state, and the gradual emergence of liberal democracy. With the breakdown of feudalism the powers that had been the carriers of "publicness"--the Church, the prince, the nobility--disintegrated into private and public elements. "Private" came to imply exclusion from the sphere of the state apparatus and referred to an individual without public office or official position, while "public" came to refer to the state that had developed, under absolutism, into an entity with an objective existence (compared to the person of the ruler).

   The public (das Publikum, le public), was the "public authority"
   (offentliche Gewalt) in contrast to everything "private" (Privatwesen). The
   servants of the state were offentliche Personen, public persons, or
   personnes publiques; they were incumbent in some official position, their
   official business was "public" (offentliches Amt, service public), and
   government buildings and institutions were called "public". On the other
   hand, there were private individuals, private offices, private businesses,
   and private homes.... The authorities were contrasted with the subjects
   excluded from them; the former served, so it was said, the public welfare,
   while the latter pursued their private interests (Habermas, 1989: 11).

At the same time, "the public" also gradually came to refer to the collection of otherwise private individuals, understood as together forming a public; hence the term "public opinion." These two notions of public--official authority on the one hand and a collection of private individuals on the other--together gave rise to the notion of publicity. The public sphere was to be a sphere of reasoned argument--hence Kant's definition of enlightenment as "the public use of man's reason" (Kant, 1991a [1784]: 55). For the public to engage in reasoned debate about legislative and executive action, such action must be made under the widest publicity possible. Thus the principle of publicity could be used not just as part of the argument for rational debate, but could also be turned against the established authorities. The publicity involved in official deliberations ensured the connection between private citizens as voters and public officials as representatives. In other words, one effect of the public-private split was that publicity invaded the affairs of state.