On her book The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America
Cover Interview of April 09, 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.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
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.