Privacy

One of the earliest modern studies of privacy was by Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), who noted the blurring of the public and private realms after Roman times. Jürgen Habermas (1929–) systematized and developed her concept of social and public life since Greek and Roman times in Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit (1962), which became the chief source for discussion of public and private realms from the 1960s on (the English translation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, appeared in 1989). Habermas was primarily interested in the public realm but found its vitality dependent on an organization of private life that enabled and encouraged citizens to rise above private identities and concerns. Drawing on literary evidence as well as philosophers and political writers, Habermas focused on the development of the modern European polity. His distinction between mutually interpenetrating public and private spheres within a general private realm (i.e., as opposed to the state) has led to considerable confusion, but his main thesis, that modern society has undergone a transformation in which the expansion of the public sphere within the private realm has taken place at the expense of the private sphere, became a dominant theme in Western culture in the late 1960s and 1970s. To his more radical followers, the apparent triumph of the public sphere represented a post-Marxian liberation from the petty concerns of private life.

The rise of communitarianism in the late 1980s further complicated the public versus private debate, aligning the public interest with conservative values rather than political reform. The American sociologist Amitai Etzioni's The Limits of Privacy (1999) depicted privacy in the United States as a highly privileged state that needed to be modified for the sake of common interests in public safety and public health. Paradoxically, his evidence showed that intrusions on privacy came chiefly from the private sector and that the privacy of individuals was best protected by granting more powers to governments.

The interface of public and private realms in modern Western societies is most strikingly evident in debates concerning abortion, domestic violence, and the private lives of public officials. Contrary to popular belief, no serious academic study has been able to draw a strict line between public and private realms, for reasons related to methodology and terminology. It is inherently unreasonable, for example, to expect that hard and fast borders are possible in such complex matters of political and social relationships. Studies in English, in particular, are typically confused by an ambiguity that is not necessarily present in other European languages (i.e., meanings of the attributive "'private"' that do not carry over into the substantive "'privacy"'). Attempts in the United States to incorporate a defense of privacy into law in the 1980s highlighted problems of terminology and definition.