Privacy

Personal privacy gained new stature in postwar America. Invoked as an essential freedom and even a human right, but worried over as a fragile and perhaps dying value, privacy was becoming a dominant concern of modern publics, with an unusual capacity to organize political debates. My contribution begins to historicize this key—yet curiously overlooked—term of modern U.S. political culture, in dialogue with developments in jurisprudence, state regulation, and technologies of surveillance.

I will suggest that universalist discourses around privacy in the 1940s paved the way for individual rights-based understandings in both law and popular culture by the early 1960s. Yet constitutional victories for privacy, understood as personal autonomy and control over decision-making, would soon seem hollow or even naïve in the face of what seemed like novel threats from official records and secret databases by the mid-1960s—particularly when coupled with the increasing use and power of computing. Hidden monitoring devices, vast warehouses of private information, and menacing bureaucracies loop through the cultural and political texts of the period. As James Rule, an early theorist of the “surveillance society,” asked: “Is it not clear that changes in the technology and social organization of surveillance over men’s private lives have changed the character of important social and political institutions?”

Others would join Rule in describing the scrutiny of populations as a basic feature of modern societies that depended on the collection of personal data for their very operation. This was a vision of society—and social power—that bore little resemblance to the legalistic, individual rights-based notions of just a decade earlier. It implied, among other things, that concepts of personal privacy might need reformulating for a new era. I will examine the constellation of forces that produced this “post-liberal” understanding of privacy and suggest some of its implications for analysts of public life.