2 Old Ways of Thinking about
Privacy
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What is new about new ways of thinking about privacy? What, by contrast,
were the old ways of thinking about privacy? The opposition can be clariWed by
conceiving of the accepted division between the private and the public realm as
either ‘‘naturally given’’ (the ‘‘old’’ view) or ‘‘drawn by convention’’ (the ‘‘new’’
view). In the traditional self-description of civil societies, the private and the
public spheres are separated in quasi-natural terms: to the realm of privacy
belong feelings, hearth and home, emotional care for the male members of
society, as well as the raising of the children, while reason, ‘‘brains,’’ and
professional life, by contrast, characterize the (male) public realm. As this
indicates, the ‘‘natural’’ coding of the separation between private and public
follows the borderline separating the sexes. It is because of this natural coding
that the private domain has a twofold signiWcance in the evaluative semantics
of civil societies. On the one hand, the domestic sphere, including the family, is
valued and prized as the realm sheltered from the demands of a hostile world, a
realm where love and aVection prevail rather than competition and the pursuit
of proWt, and which provides a haven both from the hard laws of the economy
and from the implacable rules of politics. Yet alongside this interpretation,
there exists another version, a negative one, which unambiguously associates
the private sphere with ‘‘women’’ and the public sphere with ‘‘men.’’ This
version represents the private as inferior to the public, just as nature is inferior
to culture (Landes 1998 ; Okin 1989 , 1991 ; Roessler 2005 ).
This is the traditional self-description of civil societies. This separation of
public from private, and gender-coded disparagement of the private, can be
found in one form or another throughout Western political philosophy. In
this sense, it is not restricted to liberal theory, butWnds its classic articulation
in Aristotle, according to whom the private domain is one of necessity,
restriction, conWnement, and subjection to the (unpleasant) laws of nature
and reproduction. For a modern Aristotelian such as Hannah Arendt, there is
a clear social ontology that makes it seem natural, as it were, for certain
things, persons, and activities to be regarded as private and others as public:
the private domain is the domain of the household, ‘‘the sphere where the
necessities of life, of individual survival as well as of continuity of the species,
[are] taken care of and guaranteed’’ (Arendt 1989 , 45 ). Even if Arendt no
longer sees this diVerentiation as necessarily coinciding with a gender-speciWc
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