Public-Private Dichotomy Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The question of public and private is essentially a philosophical one, centered upon the proper scope of the activity of the state. Deter mining this scope entails studying whether some kinds of human endeavor, whether individual or collective, are private—that is, private in the sense that they are or ought to be protected from, or otherwise unaffected by, the regulations of the legitimate agents of public authority. Stated otherwise, this question examines whether there limits to the appropriate reach of the law and other instruments of state regulation and, if so, what those limits are and how they are justified.

Historical Background

Notions of public and private may have their theoretical roots in the ancient distinction between oikos, or household, and polis, or city. For example, Aristotle suggested that a certain degree of freedom from the concerns of the oikos was required to be a citizen effectively participating the affairs of the polis, and that this would rule out political participation by certain types or classes. The problem of public and private may also reflect theological issues in Christianity concerning the relationship between ecclesiastical and temporal powers, as first suggested in the gospel of Matthew and as pursued with special urgency during the Middle Ages. In a rather different vein, it may also reflect the implicit doctrine of the Magna Carta, a fundamentally medieval document that proposed a nascent conception of aristocratic rights; this immunized certain activities of the nobility from the scrutiny of the throne, and provided legal remedies designed to protect those immunities.

The problem of public and private is, nonetheless, a fundamentally modern problem closely connected to the development of liberalism. In his Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke is thought to have described a large and important realm of human and social life—the realm of religious belief and practice that government either cannot or should not regulate. In formulating such an argument, Locke appears to have outlined the basis for conceptualizing a truly private realm that is, or should be, free from state interference. In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke proposed a rather different formulation, according to which the government of a family, based on the highly particularized affections of the paternal authority for his offspring, is sharply distinguished from the government of civil society, which involves the application of general legal requirements to people from any kind of particularized identity. Taken together, these arguments seem to propose a strong dichotomy between a private world of belief and personal preference and a public world of order and generalized rules.

Modern Interpretations

Many or most modern political theorists accept some dichotomy of the public and private, hence argue or assume there is or ought to be a category of truly private endeavor that limits the activity of the state. However, the problem of how to characterize this category, and the related problem of where to draw the line between public and private, has proved to be immensely difficult. In part, the issue is terminological. Thus, for example, private is often thought denote anything that is not governmental, as in the private enterprise system, and yet much private property is in the form of financial securities that are publicly held and publicly traded. Yet, the larger problem is conceptual, rather than terminological. Specifically, many of the activities widely thought to be typical instances of the private category turn out to be activities toward which no responsible public authority could possibly remain indifferent. Examples of this are physical abuse within the family or fraudulent behavior within business. Scholars must then determine what kind of principle can justify state regulation of certain kinds of behavior within the family, such as preventing violence against children or ensuring children receive medical care, while leaving other kinds alone.

In addressing such questions, some theorists argue for a conception of natural or civil rights. Thus, for example, the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits warrantless searches of the “persons, houses, papers and effects” of citizens, seems to suggest a right to privacy, and some jurists and legal scholars use to defend, among other things, abortion rights. On the other hand, the Constitution does not explicitly enumerate a right to privacy, and the nature and range of the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment have long been a matter of intense discussion and dispute. Others theorists defend some version of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle that asserts the scope of public authority should be limited to circumstances in which one or more individuals are or may be harmed by someone else. Again, though, the questions of how to conceptualize harm and how to distinguish indirect harms from direct harms, prove difficult.

Contemporary discussions of public and private have been profoundly influenced by the writings of Hannah Arendt, who postulated a conception of the public realm as a sphere of truly free action, distinguished from the biologically driven activity of labor and the goal-oriented activity of craft or work. For Arendt, the triumph of the private, or the social, over the public—resulting in fewer opportunities for authentic political engagement—increasingly has characterized modernity. Jürgen Habermas’s discussion of a transformation of the public sphere—from an arena of rational discussion and debate to a system of managed, administered thought control—has been equally influential. In addition, the liberalism of John Rawls invokes a conception of a public reason that pursues practical terms of political accommodation and cooperation within complex, highly pluralistic societies. On the other hand, feminist theorists such as Susan Moller Okin insist that “the personal is political” and that the alleged distinction between the public and the domestic is misleading in itself, and harmful in its consequences. However, other theorists argue that if there is a category of private endeavor, this can be only at the sufferance of the authoritative judgment of the state itself.

Bibliography:

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. New York: Doubleday, 1958.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.
Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955.
Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Okin, Susan Moeller. Justice, Gender and the Family. New York: Basic Books, 1989.
Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

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