THE THEORY AND POLITICS OF THE PUBLICLPRIVATE DISTINCTION

JEFF WEINTRAUB

1. In Norberto Bobbio's useful phrase, the public/private distinction stands out as one of the
"grand dichotomies" of Western thought, in the sense of a binary opposition that is used to
subsume a wide range of other important distinctions and that attempts (rnore or less
successfully) to dichoromize the social universe in a comprehensive and sharply demarcated way.

4. We cAN BEGiN By reminding ourselves that any notion of "public" or "private" makes sense only
as one element in a paired opposition-whether the contrast is being used as an analytical device to
address a specific problem or being advanced as a comprehensive model of social structure. To
understand what either "public" or "private" means within a given framework, we need to know
with what it is being contrasted (explicitly or implicitly) and on what basis the contrast is being
drawn.

4, 5. One reason the criteria involved are irreducibly heterogeneous is that, at the deepest and
most general level, lying behind the different forms of public/ private distinction are (at least)
two fundamental, and analytically quite distinct, kinds of imagery in terms of which "private"
can be contrasted with "public":

1. What is hidden or withdrawn versus what is open, revealed, or accessible. 2. What is

individual, or pertains only to an individual, versus 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). We might refer to these
two underlying criteria as "visibility" (audibility being one component) and "collectivity.

6. As for the first criterion, "visibility," its basic thrust is too evident to require much explication. Its
specific instances, however, can be sociologically quite subtle and even paradoxical. 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that we are able and/or entitled to keep hidden, sheltered, or withdrawn from others.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 may
also be things that we are required to keep hidden from others, such as our "private parts," so that
having sex or urinating "in public" is frowned on in many cultures.

There are a number of ways in which each of these underlying criteria can be conceived, and a
number of ways in which they can be combined, to produce the various concrete versions of the
public/private distinction.

7. I. The liberal-economistic model, dominant in most "public policy" analysis and in a great deal of
everyd*y legal and political debate, which sees the public/private distinction primarily in terms of
the distinction berween state administration and the market economy.

II. The republican-virtue (and classical) approach, which sees the "public" realm in terms of
political communiry and citizenship, analytically distinct from both the market and the
administrative state.
IlI. The approach, exemplified for instance by the work of Arils (and other figures in social history
and anthropology), which sees the "public" realm as a sphere of fluid and polymorphous
sociabiliry, and seeks to analyze the cultural and dramatic conventions that make it possible. (This
approach might almost be called dramaturgic, if that term were not so ambiguous.)

IV. A tendency, which has become important in many branches of feminist analysis, to conceive of
the distinction between "private" and "public" in terms of the distinction berween the family and
the larger economic and political ordel-ryi1h the market economy often becoming the
paradigmatic "public" realm.

11. In a sense, "public" means "politi cal" in both perspecrives 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. This understanding of the political is captured, for example, in Hannah Arendt's
powerful conception of "public space" (or the "public realm": ffintliche Raum) as a distinctive field
of action that can emerge whenever human beings act and deliberate in concer t.22 In this
context, it makes sense to speak, not only of "public" jurisdiction and "public interest," bur also of
"public life."

The result is that there are two basic models of the "public" realm drawn from antiquiry: 1. The
self-governing polis or republic (res publica, literally "public thing"), from which we inherit a
notion of politics as citizenship, in which individuals, in their capacity as citizens, participate in
an ongoing process of conscious collective self-determination.

2" The Roman empire, from which we get the notion of sovereignty: of a centralized, unified,
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.

12. 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. As compared to the main
patterns of political thought developed in other civilizations, both are distinctive in the
sharpness of the line they draw between "public" and "private." fn many other respects,
however, their presuppositions and implications

13. it is also important to emphasize that membership in community does not necessarily
constitute citizenship. Citizenship entails participation in a particular kind of community (which I
have elsewhere called "willed community" zs): one marked by, among other things, fundamental
equality and the consideration and resolution of public issues through conscious collective
decision making.

Both the notion of citizenship and the notion of sovereignry went into eclipse in the Middle Ages,
for reasons which are understandable. For one thing, neither of them is compatible with the
feudal system of rule, based on a web of personal dependent ties and the absence of any
significant distinction berween "public" and "private" authority. The same can be said of the
customary communities of medieval gemeinschaft. As has frequently been stressed, a soci.ry of
this sort really does not have a differentiated public or private realm, in either of the senses I have
been discussirg. In such a conrexr, the distinction does not make sense.
A significant element in the shaping of moderniyy has involved the gradual rediscovery of these
notions and the aftempt to realtze and institutionalize them-and sometimes, in a move that
might have puzzled the ancienrs, ro combine them. Behind this process lie three grand historical
transformarions, whose complex interconnections need not trouble us here:

1. The development of modern civil society, which is the seedbed of liberalism. "Civil sociery" is, of
course, another historically complex and multivalent term; but I do not want to enter into the
relevant controversies at this point, so I will simply state my own position. Following Hegel's guide,
I will use "civil society" to refer to the social world of self-interested individualism, competition,
impersonaliqy, and contractual relationships-centered on the market-which, as thinkers in the
early modern Vest slowly came to recognize, seemed somehow able to run itself.

2. The recovery of the notion of sovereignry, to complement the norion of the atomistic liberal
individual. The rediscovery of sovereignty was obviously connected in its initial stages with the
gradud reassertion of royal power, with the multifaceted "recovery" of Roman law which often
accompanied it, and partieularly with the era of absolutism.2

14.

3. The recovery of the notion of citizenship. This followed a different route frorn the rediscovery of
sovereignty, beginning with the reemergence of the self-governing ciry in the later Middle Ages
and the rebirth of civic consciousness which this made possible.

16. equally paradoxical observation of Tocqueville's which is really central ro his argument in The
OId Regime.: that, precisely as the ..rriral ized, and bureau cratized French state achieved its
apotheosis, politicat life was smorhered and suppressed.

In short, these f\4/o notions of the "public"-and the two versions of the public/private distinction
in which they are embedded-resr on crucially different images of politics and society, and a good
deal of modern thought reflects the tension benveen them.

18. The second nodon of "public" is the one we have in mind if we speak of Mediterranean (but
not usually American) cities having a rich public life. It is what Philippe AriEs means when he says
that, in the sociery of the old regime, "life was lived in public," and the intense privatizatron of the
family and intimate relations, with their sharp separation from an impersonal "public" realm, had
not yet occurred. The essential point is that "public" in this sense has nothing to do, necessarily,
with collective decision making (let alone the state). The k.y to it is not solidarity or obligation, but
sociabiliry.

25. ) This is a space of heterogeneous coexistence, not of inclusive solidariry or of conscious

collective action; a space of symbolic display, of the complex blending of practical morives with
interaction ritual and personal ties, of physical proximiry coexistirg with social distance-and nnt
aspace (to use a Habermasian formulation) of discourse oriented to achieving rational consensus

26. If we compare the notions of "the public" of, for example, Hannah Arendt in The Human
Condition and Philippe AriAs in the passages just quoted, I think one could say that a certain image
of the ciqy lies in the background of each. But they are velF different cities. Arendt's ciry is, of
course, the polis; it is a self-governitg political communiqy whose common affairs are in the hands
of its citizens, which both allows and requires that they act rogether and deliberate explicitly
about collective ourcomes.

But the Greeks of Aristode's time were already familiar with an alternative image of the city, and it
was "Babylon": rhe worldciry defined by the interconnected facts that it was enormous,
heterogeneous, and unfree (that is, not self-governing). Size is not necessarily the essendal point.
The central point about "Babylon" was that it was not a political communiry; and, since its
heterogeneous multitudes were nor called upon ro be citizens, they could remain in apolitical
coexistence, and each could do as he wished without the occasion to deliberate with his
neighbors.

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