Foundations of Social and Behavioral Sciences Theory

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Volume 7, Issue 2, Spring 1997

The Responsive Community

UP FRONT

4 Cloning: Taking Ethics Seriously — Peter Steinfels Can Multiculturalism Unite Us? — Paul Jerome Croce Giving Teachers Authority — Albert Shanker

ESSAYS

13 Public/Private: The Limitations of a Grand Dichotomy Jeff Weintraub

While notions of “public” and “private” are crucial to our understandings of democracy and community, their meanings are far from well-understood.

25 Can Design Make Community? Philip Langdon

Relationships and values are the defining elements of commu- nity. But a new breed of architects are showing that by paying attention to the physical layout of a neighborhood, bonds, shared understandings, and other elements of community can be fostered.

38 Social Security and the Dividing of the American Community Jeff Madrick

In revamping the Social Security system, we must respond to two questions: What is the extent of the problem, and what impact will different solutions have on our national commit- ment to the common good?

ESSAYS

Public/Private: The Limitations of a Grand Dichotomy

Jeff Weintraub

In Norberto Bobbio’s useful phrase, the public/private distinction stands out as one of the “grand dichotomies” of Western thought. It is a binary opposition that is used to subsume a wide range of other important distinctions and that attempts to dichotomize the social universe in a comprehensive and sharply demarcated way. It is also, when used incautiously, a major source of confusion. Part of the attraction of this dichotomy no doubt lies in its apparent clarity and simplicity; but this is deceptive. In fact, different sets of people who employ the concepts of “public” and “private” mean very different things by them—and often, without quite realizing it, mean several things at once. The expanding literature on “public goods,” which takes its lead from neoclassical economics, is addressing quite a different subject from the “public sphere” of discussion and political action delineated by Jürgen Habermas or Hannah Arendt, not to mention the “public life” of sociability charted in different ways by Philippe Ariès, Jane Jacobs, or Richard Sennett. The current debates over “privatization” largely concern whether governmental functions should be taken over by corporations. What does this have to do with the world of “private life”—intimacy, sexuality, family, and friend- ship—explored by social historians, cultural critics, and TV talk shows?

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Or with the notion of “privacy” that figures in the abortion contro- versy?

The public/private distinction, in short, is not unitary, but pro- tean. It comprises not a single paired opposition, but a complex family of them, neither mutually reducible nor wholly unrelated. And these multiple (but also overlapping) discourses of public and private do not simply point to different phenomena; often they rest on different underlying images of the social world, are driven by different con- cerns, and raise very different issues. When we forget this, we not only talk past each other, but confuse ourselves as well.

Furthermore, while many of these versions of the public/private distinction can be illuminating if used for carefully defined purposes, attempts to use any of them as a comprehensive dichotomous model of society will always be profoundly misleading and can often be practically disastrous. Either the procrustean dualism of their catego- ries blanks out crucial mediating phenomena—including those that should be of special interest to people concerned with questions of community, democracy, or moral order—or else one pole of this dichotomy is specified concretely while the other expands into a vague and overly broad residual category, in which case significant distinc- tions are lost.

Consider, as just one example, the common tendency to equate the public/private dichotomy with the contrast between “the state” and “the individual.” This perspective may be appropriate as, say, a mode of framing certain very specific legal issues. But if we take it seriously (or naively) as a basis for broader social and political discussion, then it yields a peculiar and misleading picture of the social landscape, since what is missing from it is, precisely, society. That is, it leaves out (among other things) the institutional and cultural structures of the social order and the crucial mediating practices of everyday sociability and of civic engagement, which are neither “public” nor “private” in terms of this framework, and which have their own distinctive dynam- ics and requirements.

Matters are not improved if “private” is treated (explicitly or in effect) as a residual category meaning “nonstate,” since that lumps together such very different realms of social life as the market economy,

the family, and the fabric of local or neighborhood community. This kind of conflation is not inconsequential, since unleashing the first realm can often have massively disruptive effects on the other two. Using “private” as a catch-all residual category for “nonstate” also obscures, for example, the possible tensions between the “private” rights and interests of individuals and the “private” life of the family, the latter being a domain of “private” life that disintegrates unless there are some limits on extreme individualism, and which is cultur- ally valued precisely as a refuge against the competitive individualism of the market (where “private interests” reign). And so on.

In short, any treatment of public and private should begin by recognizing, and trying to clarify, the multiple and ambiguous charac- ter of its subject matter. Substantively, reflection on these issues suggests two interconnected conclusions. The first is the inadequacy of any single or dichotomous model of the public/private distinction to capture the institutional and cultural logic of modern societies. The second is that, while we should certainly not give up the effort to draw empirical and normative distinctions between public and private, we should not expect the public/private distinction to provide us with easy or straightforward solutions to our social, political, and moral dilemmas.

Public and Private: Some Basic Orientations

Any notion of “public” or “private” makes sense only as one element in a paired opposition (explicit or implicit). Let me first note that, at the deepest and most general level, behind the different forms of the public/private distinction are (at least) two fundamental, and analytically quite distinct, kinds of imagery in terms of which “pri- vate” can be contrasted with “public”:

• What is hidden or withdrawn vs. what is open, revealed, or accessible.

• What is individual, or pertains only to an individual, vs. what is collective, or affects the interests of a collectivity of individuals. This individual/collective distinction can, by extension, take the form of a distinction between part and whole (of some social collectivity).

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We might refer to these two underlying criteria as “visibility” 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 important. When an individual is described as pursuing a private interest—or a group is described as pursuing a “special interest”— rather than the public interest, the implication is not necessarily that they are doing it in secret. The criterion involved is the second one: the private is the particular. Likewise, the basis for using the term “public” to describe the actions and agents of the state (so that public/private = state/nonstate) lies in the state’s claim to be responsible for the general interests and affairs of a politically organized collectivity, as opposed to “private”—that is, merely particular—interests. Treating the state as the locus of the “public” may be combined with arguments for the openness or “publicity” of state actions; but it has been at least as common to claim that, in order to advance the public interest, rulers must maintain “state secrets” and have recourse to the arcana imperii. I will forego providing examples where the criterion of “visibility” is decisive, except to note that 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.

There are a number of ways that these underlying criteria can be conceived and combined to produce the various concrete versions of the public/private distinction. Among the broad fields of discourse within which different notions of “public” and “private” currently play important roles, I think the following are the most significant (though this list is not meant to be comprehensive):

I. The liberal-economistic model, dominant in most “public policy” analysis and in a great deal of everyday legal and political debate, which sees the public/private distinction primarily in terms of the distinction between state administration and the market economy.

II. The civic perspective, which sees the “public” realm (or “public sphere”) in terms of political community and citizenship, analyti- cally distinct from both the market and the administrative state.

III. The approach, exemplified in different ways by the work of Philippe Ariès and Jane Jacobs (and other figures in urban criti-

cism, social history, and anthropology), which sees the “public” realm as a sphere of fluid and polymorphous sociability, distinct from both the structures of formal organization and the “private” domains of intimacy and domesticity.

IV. Those tendencies in feminist scholarship (and related areas) that conceive of the distinction between “private” and “public” in terms of the distinction between the family and the larger eco- nomic and political order—with the market economy often be- coming the paradigmatic “public” realm.

In the space available, unfortunately, I can address only the first three, especially since feminist treatments of the public/private dis- tinction have become too rich and diverse to characterize adequately in a brief discussion. And even the first three perspectives will have to be sketched very briefly.

I. The Liberal-Economistic Model: The Market and the State

This is the framework into which such terms as “public sector” and “private sector” usually fit, and which structures the great bulk of what is called “public policy” debate. The assumptions of neoclassical economics tend to dominate—which is to say, putting the matter into a grander theoretical perspective, the assumptions of utilitarian liber- alism (nowadays often called “rational choice theory”). They are embedded in a characteristic, if not always explicit, image of social reality which, like most such images, has both descriptive and norma- tive dimensions. What exists in society are: individuals pursuing their self-interest more or less efficiently (i.e., “rationally,” in the peculiar sense in which this term is used in utilitarian liberalism); voluntary (particularly contractual) relations between individuals; and the state. Thus, in practice the distinction between public and private—between the “public sector” and the “private sector”—usually means the distinction between “governmental” and “nongovernmental,” with the implication that this distinction should be as clearly and sharply dichotomous as possible. The field of the nongovernmental is con- ceived essentially in terms of the market. It is therefore not surprising that the use of the public/private distinction within this framework has characteristically involved a preoccupation with questions of jurisdiction, and especially with demarcating the sphere of the “pub-

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lic” authority of the state from the sphere of formally voluntary relations between “private” individuals. These questions of jurisdic- tion tend to predominantly boil down to disputes about whether particular activities or services should be left to the market or be subject to government “intervention,” usually conceived in terms of administrative regulation backed by coercive force.

The fact that these disputes may often be quite bitter should not conceal the fact that both sides are operating within a common universe of discourse, drawing different conclusions from the same premises. They are simply replicating the two classic answers to the problem of order as posed by utilitarian liberalism. Locke and Adam Smith on one hand, Hobbes and Bentham on the other, might be taken as the most distinguished representatives of the two poles within this universe of discourse: the side that leans toward a “natural” harmoni- zation of selfish interests, whose grand theoretical achievement is the theory of the market; and the more technocratic, social-engineering side, which posits the need for a coercive agency standing above society (epitomized by Hobbes’s Leviathan) that maintains order by manipulating the structure of rewards and punishments within which individuals pursue their “rational” interests. Given the underlying assumptions, the “invisible hand” of the market and what Alfred Chandler calls the “visible hand” of administrative regulation recur as the two key solutions.

What is missing from this picture? One writer who starts within this framework and deliberately brings out its limitations is Albert Hirschman, particularly in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. “Exit”—which exercises an indirect pressure on the operation of “firms, organiza- tions, and states”—is the only option of the “rational” individual of liberal theory. But that is inadequate as a mechanism to keep the world going. There is also a role for “voice,” which means participation in making (or, at least, influencing) decisions about matters of common concern. And for “voice” to work requires some degree of “loyalty.” Within the perspective from which Hirschman begins, “voice” is an imported category, and “loyalty” an essentially residual one; thus, both are only thinly fleshed out. But they point the way to the next perspective, which focuses on the problem of citizenship.

II. Citizenship: From the Polis to the “Public Sphere”

Here the “public” realm is the realm of political community based on citizenship. At the heart of “public” life is a process of active participation in collective decision making and collective action, car- ried out within a framework of fundamental solidarity and equality. This whole realm of activity, and the problematic it generates, are essentially invisible within the framework of the first perspective.

In a sense, “public” means “political” in both perspectives I and II. But these are very different meanings of “political.” For I, “political” or “public” authority means the administrative state. For II, “politics” means a world of discussion, debate, deliberation, collective decision making, and action in concert. What separates the problematic of citizenship, in any strong sense of the term, from the conceptual framework of liberal social theory is that the practice of citizenship is inseparable from active participation in a certain type of decision- making community maintained by solidarity and by the exercise of what used to be called republican virtue (or public spirit). In this context, it makes sense to speak, not only of “public” jurisdiction and “public interest,” but also of “public life.”

Both of these notions of “public” as “political” derive, ultimately, from classical antiquity, embedded in two basic models of the “public” realm. The first model comes from the self-governing polis or republic (res publica, literally “public thing”), from which we inherit a notion of politics as citizenship. The second model comes from the Roman empire, from which we get the notion of sovereignty: a centralized, uni- fied, and omnipotent apparatus of rule which stands above the society and governs it through the enactment and administration of laws. The “public” power of the sovereign rules over, and in principle on behalf of, a society of “private” and politically passive individuals who are bearers of rights granted to them and guaranteed by the sovereign.

Many of the ambiguities in our thinking about politics stem from the fact that both of these underlying images have a significant presence in modern thought. An approach based on the model of sovereignty takes for granted, in its underlying premises, the separa- tion between rulers and ruled (whether it takes the side of the rulers or of the ruled). Classical moral and political philosophy, however, took as its point of departure a fundamentally different, and considerably

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more exceptional, model of politics, one based on a process of collec- tive decision making by a body of citizens united in a community (albeit, of course, a restricted and exclusive community). Thus, the central image of “political” action as we find it in Aristotle is not domination and compliance (or resistance), but participation in collec- tive self-determination. Aristotle’s classic definition of the citizen is one who is capable both of ruling and of being ruled. The appropriate sphere for domination is within the private realm of the household, which is structured by relationships of “natural” inequality: between master and slave, parent and child, husband and wife.

Both the notion of citizenship and the notion of sovereignty went, understandably, into eclipse in the middle ages. A significant element in the shaping of modernity has involved the gradual rediscovery of these notions and the attempt to realize and institutionalize them. Behind this process lie three grand historical transformations:

First, there is the development of modern civil society, which is the seedbed of liberalism. “Civil society” is another historically complex and multivalent term. Nowadays it is often used loosely to cover all desirable social arrangements, which is not the sense in which I am using it here. Following Hegel, I will use “civil society” to refer to the social world of self-interested individualism, competition, imperson- ality, and contractual relationships—centered on the market—which, as thinkers in the early modern West slowly came to recognize, seemed somehow capable of running itself.

The second transformation involves the recovery of the notion of sovereignty, to complement the notion of the atomistic liberal individu- al. To restate a point emphasized earlier, the liberal conception of the public/private distinction turns fundamentally on the separation between the administrative state and civil society—one dichotomy being mapped onto the other.

Third, there is the recovery of the notion of citizenship. From this perspective, the “public” realm is above all a realm of participatory self-determination, deliberation, and conscious cooperation among equals, the logic of which is distinct from those of both civil society and the administrative state. Arendt’s conception of the “public realm,” Habermas’s conception of the “public sphere,” and Tocqueville’s

conception of “political society” represent some of the more signifi- cant efforts to capture the distinctive character of this “public” realm, understood as the terrain of active citizenship. While their analyses differ in various ways, all of them bring home the need to go beyond dichotomous models of modern society. Thus, just as the “public” realm (and politics) cannot be reduced to the state, the realm of social life outside the state (and its control) cannot simply be identified as “private.” In this respect, the historical experience of state-socialist regimes has confirmed the insight behind one of Tocqueville’s charac- teristically paradoxical arguments in The Old Regime and the French Revolution: that, precisely as the centralized and bureaucratized French state achieved its apotheosis, political life was smothered and sup- pressed.

In short, these two notions of the “public”—and the two versions of the public/private distinction in which they are embedded—rest on crucially different images of politics and society, and a good deal of modern thought reflects the tension between them. However, they far from exhaust the significant discussion of public and private. For example, neither of them addresses the alternative vision of public life that links it, neither to the state nor to citizenship, but to sociability.

III. “Public” Life as Sociability

Consider this passage by Jane Jacobs from The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

The tolerance, the room for great differences among neigh- bors—differences 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 to dwell in peace to- gether on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved terms. Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow.

This conveys a rather different vision of “public life,” and of the public space in which it can thrive, from those at the heart of the civic perspective. The “wealth” of the “public life” celebrated here lies not in self-determination or collective action, but in the multi-stranded liveliness and spontaneity arising from the ongoing intercourse of

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heterogeneous individuals and groups that can maintain a civilized coexistence. Without it, cities become increasingly unworkable, dan- gerous, and unlivable. Both of these forms, or aspects, of public life are valuable and ought to be encouraged; indeed, in the right circum- stances they can even be complementary. But it is clear that they differ in their defining characteristics, requirements, and implications.

The key to this alternative version of the “public” realm is not solidarity or obligation, but sociability. Nor does this notion apply only to the life of great cosmopolitan cities. It is also what the social historian Philippe Ariès has in mind when he says that, in the society of the old regime, “life...was lived in public,” and the intense privatization of the family and intimate relations, with their sharp separation from an impersonal “public” realm, had not yet occurred.

Ariès makes this remark in the context of a sweeping interpreta- tion of the transformations in the texture of Western society from the old regime to the modern era. At the heart of this picture—supported, in its essentials, by a wide range of other scholarship—is the decay of the older public realm of polymorphous sociability and, with it, the sharpening polarization of social life between an increasingly imper- sonal and severely instrumental “public” realm (of the market, the modern state, and bureaucratic organization) and a “private” realm increasingly devoted to creating islands of intense intimacy and emotionality (including the modern child-centered family; the mod- ern ideals of romantic marriage and anti-instrumental friendship; and so on). For Ariès (to put words in his mouth), modern civil society represents not the “private” realm but the new “public” realm; the “private” realm is the realm of personal life, above all of domesticity.

Indeed, one of the most salient forms of the public/private distinc- tion in modern culture (in both thought and practice) is that which demarcates the “private” realm of “personal life” from the “public” realm of gesellschaft, epitomized by the market and bureaucratically administered formal organization. This contrast is widely experi- enced as one of the great divides of modern life. But historically these two poles emerge together, to a great extent in dialectical tension with each other; and the sharpness of the split between them is one of the defining characteristics of modernity. In fact, many of these distinc- tively modern forms of “private” relationship take much of their

meaning from the fact that they are defined in opposition to the logic of gesellschaft. Ariès sums up his view of this process with this remark:

It is not individualism which has triumphed, but the family. But this family has advanced in proportion as sociability has retreated. It is as if the modern family had sought to take the place of the old social relationships (as these gradually de- faulted) in order to preserve mankind from an unbearable moral solitude.

This is not necessarily a happy or secure solution. It is more likely that the emotional “overloading” of the domain of intimate relations will develop in tandem with the increasing emotional emptiness and isolation of an inhospitable “public” domain. Not that many of us would want to abandon the satisfactions of intimate life or the advan- tages of impersonal institutions: they are, at least potentially, among the benefits of modernity. But if they confront us as sharply dichoto- mized and exclusive alternatives, they add up to an unsatisfactory prospect. Once again, part of the solution, both theoretical and prac- tical, lies in complexification—a key element of which would be the existence and vitality of a sphere of public life, in the sense of sociabil- ity, that can mediate between the particular intimacies of “private” life and the extreme impersonality and instrumentalism of gesellschaft.

The Great Divide—and Its Limits

I hope it is clear that this discussion has only scratched the surface of its subject. A number of crucial issues remain to be considered. For example, like Ariès, most feminist treatments of the public/private distinction have tended to treat the family as the paradigmatic “pri- vate” realm, in contrast to the “public” sphere of extra-familial eco- nomic and political activity. But, while the arguments discussed in section III focus on the ways that many of the characteristically modern forms of public/private division cut through the lives of both men and women, feminists have brought out important ways that these “domestic/public” divisions are gender-linked in terms of both social structure and ideology. Feminist scholars, among others, have also suggested how the impact of industrial capitalism, by sharpening the separation (in both reality and perception) between “home” life and “work” life, has helped to accentuate yet another dimension of the public/private distinction in modern societies. And so on.

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The public/private distinction is irreducibly multiple, inherently problematic, and often treacherous. But the proper response is not, I think, simply to abandon it as unworkable, hopelessly misleading, and/or ideologically oppressive. It can also be a powerful instrument of social analysis and moral reflection if it is approached with due caution and conceptual self-awareness. It is, in any event, an inescap- able element of the theoretical vocabularies as well as the institutional and cultural landscapes of modern societies. Thus, it can neither be conveniently simplified nor usefully avoided. The variability, ambi- guity, and complexity of the public/private distinction need to be recognized and confronted—but so do the richness and apparent indispensability of this grand dichotomy.