On her book The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America
Cover Interview of April 08, 2018
The wide angle
As an historian of ideas, I’m keenly interested in people’s
convictions and how they change. I’ve been especially curious about the way
ordinary Americans have revised their understandings of the society they lived
in. In my first book, for instance, I explored how citizens’ visions of the
national public—majorities and minorities, mainstream and fringe—were altered
by the sudden influx of popular polls and surveys in the first half of the
twentieth century.
Privacy is a fascinating topic for probing how ideas, even
deeply cherished ones, shape shift. This is because Americans usually treat it
as an essential and unchanging value, if one also always under threat. But a
look into the history of how Americans have debated, litigated, and lived
privacy over the past century and a half reveals a concept in constant turmoil.
Certainly, citizens viewed and wielded privacy differently depending on their
status and circumstances, and some could barely access it at all.
Rather than ask what happened to Americans’ privacy—as if it
were a stable or measurable thing—I wanted to know why modern citizens talked
and thought so much about it. What was that talk really about? What was it
doing in political debates and constitutional jurisprudence but also in social
criticism, professional protocols, architectural plans, and popular culture? How
had it evolved over time? And what might it reveal about the changing texture
of both personal and public life?
I found that some of the ways Americans debated the fate of
personal privacy in the late nineteenth century often felt surprisingly
familiar in the twenty-first. But there have also been striking transformations,
which in my view can only be explained by following in the tracks of the known
citizen.
One was Americans’ gradual turn from an emphasis on tangible
claims to privacy—in the form of property rights and physical space—to
intangible ones centered on psychological freedom, decisional autonomy, and
personal identity as a more knowing society took root. Another transformation
was in the shifting sense of who was entitled to privacy’s refuge. If privacy
was a privilege reserved for the “man of reputation” at the outset of my story,
it was claimed (although not always successfully) by a much wider array of Americans
by the end, including juveniles, patients, soldiers, union members, pregnant
women, research subjects, and welfare recipients. The expansion of formal
privacy rights and regulations across the twentieth century testified
persuasively to the need for protections from those claiming a right to know.
But perhaps the most unexpected development was the way in
which the closely guarded secrets of the Victorian era moved out into the open
after the 1960s, whether in political, psychological, or pop-cultural form. Although
never completely or finally, an older fear of exposure gave way to a premium on
transparency. Already known so well, many citizens today are willing to live
more openly by embracing new modes of revelation and disclosure.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The wide angle
As an historian of ideas, I’m keenly interested in people’s convictions and how they change. I’ve been especially curious about the way ordinary Americans have revised their understandings of the society they lived in. In my first book, for instance, I explored how citizens’ visions of the national public—majorities and minorities, mainstream and fringe—were altered by the sudden influx of popular polls and surveys in the first half of the twentieth century.
Privacy is a fascinating topic for probing how ideas, even deeply cherished ones, shape shift. This is because Americans usually treat it as an essential and unchanging value, if one also always under threat. But a look into the history of how Americans have debated, litigated, and lived privacy over the past century and a half reveals a concept in constant turmoil. Certainly, citizens viewed and wielded privacy differently depending on their status and circumstances, and some could barely access it at all.
Rather than ask what happened to Americans’ privacy—as if it were a stable or measurable thing—I wanted to know why modern citizens talked and thought so much about it. What was that talk really about? What was it doing in political debates and constitutional jurisprudence but also in social criticism, professional protocols, architectural plans, and popular culture? How had it evolved over time? And what might it reveal about the changing texture of both personal and public life?
I found that some of the ways Americans debated the fate of personal privacy in the late nineteenth century often felt surprisingly familiar in the twenty-first. But there have also been striking transformations, which in my view can only be explained by following in the tracks of the known citizen.
One was Americans’ gradual turn from an emphasis on tangible claims to privacy—in the form of property rights and physical space—to intangible ones centered on psychological freedom, decisional autonomy, and personal identity as a more knowing society took root. Another transformation was in the shifting sense of who was entitled to privacy’s refuge. If privacy was a privilege reserved for the “man of reputation” at the outset of my story, it was claimed (although not always successfully) by a much wider array of Americans by the end, including juveniles, patients, soldiers, union members, pregnant women, research subjects, and welfare recipients. The expansion of formal privacy rights and regulations across the twentieth century testified persuasively to the need for protections from those claiming a right to know.
But perhaps the most unexpected development was the way in which the closely guarded secrets of the Victorian era moved out into the open after the 1960s, whether in political, psychological, or pop-cultural form. Although never completely or finally, an older fear of exposure gave way to a premium on transparency. Already known so well, many citizens today are willing to live more openly by embracing new modes of revelation and disclosure.