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The Origins of Modern Privacy

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The Classical Liberal Case for Privacy in a World of Surveillance and Technological Change

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism ((PASTCL))

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Abstract

This chapter considers the origins of privacy in the early modern era. It contrasts an earlier historical consensus around the early modern development of individualism, home privacy, and interiority with recent scholarship that argues these ‘modern’ notions of privacy were both more ambiguous and came later. Rather than focusing on the growth of individualism as a basis for privacy, the chapter looks at the creation of the unitary nuclear family. In the early modern era families became more concrete and private. Yet the removal of family life from social observation also meant that subjugation within the family—such as that defined by the ‘separate spheres’ doctrine—could result in undesired privacy, particularly for women.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (Vienna: The Phaidon Press, 1944), 70.

  2. 2.

    William G Hoskins, “The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570–1640,” Past & Present, no. 4 (1953).

  3. 3.

    Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 11.

  4. 4.

    Eric Mercer, Furniture, 700–1700 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969).

  5. 5.

    Philippe Ariès, “Introduction,” in A History of Private Life, ed. Roger Chartier (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989).

  6. 6.

    Ibid., 6.

  7. 7.

    Patricia Meyer Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 10.

  8. 8.

    Katherine Newey, “‘What Think You of Books?’: Reading in ‘Pride and Prejudice’,” Sydney Studies in English 21 (2008).

  9. 9.

    Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Publishing, 2007).

  10. 10.

    Ibid., 315–17.

  11. 11.

    Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 167–68.

  12. 12.

    Mary Thomas Crane, “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2009).

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 8.

  14. 14.

    Orlin.

  15. 15.

    Greta Olson, “Keyholes in Eighteenth-Century Novels as Liminal Spaces between the Public and Private Spheres,” in Sites of Discourse—Public and Private Spheres—Legal Culture: Papers from a Conference Held at the Technical University of Dresden, ed. Uwe Böker and Julie Hibbard (Amsterdam: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 64, 2002).

  16. 16.

    Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Cecil A. Meadows, Discovering Oil Lamps (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008).

  17. 17.

    Mary Johnson, Madam Johnson’s Present: Or, Every Young Woman’s Companion, Fourth edition (Dublin: James Williams, 1770), 192.

  18. 18.

    Roger Fouquet and Peter JG Pearson, “Seven Centuries of Energy Services: The Price and Use of Light in the United Kingdom (1300–2000),” The Energy Journal (2006).

  19. 19.

    See the discussion in Orlin, 185.

  20. 20.

    Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 527.

  21. 21.

    Steven Horwitz, Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2015); Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (London: Penguin Publishing Group, 2006).

  22. 22.

    Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 244–45.

  23. 23.

    Olson.

  24. 24.

    Orlin, 192.

  25. 25.

    R. Filmer and J.P. Sommerville, Filmer: ‘Patriarcha’ and Other Writings (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  26. 26.

    Gordon Schochet, “The Significant Sounds of Silence: The Absence of Women from the Political Thought of Sir Robert Filmer and John Locke (or, “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?”),” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  27. 27.

    John Locke, The Works of John Locke, Vol. 4 (Economic Writings and Two Treatises of Government) (London: Rivington, 1824, 12th ed.), 378.

  28. 28.

    The key text is Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). See also Kristin Anne Kelly, Domestic Violence and the Politics of Privacy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003); Janice Richardson, Law and the Philosophy of Privacy (New York: Routledge, 2015).

  29. 29.

    Locke, 247.

  30. 30.

    Melissa A. Butler, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on Patriarchy,” The American Political Science Review 72, no. 1 (1978).

  31. 31.

    Christoph Heyl, “We Are Not at Home: Protecting Domestic Privacy in Post-Fire Middle-Class London,” The London Journal 27, no. 2 (2002).

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 15.

  33. 33.

    Ibid.

  34. 34.

    Joanne McEwan and Pamela Sharpe, “‘It Buys Me Freedom’: Genteel Lodging in Late-Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century London,” Parergon 24, no. 2 (2007).

  35. 35.

    Amanda Vickery, “An Englishman’s Home Is His Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House,” Past and Present 199, no. 1 (2008).

  36. 36.

    Lawrence Eliot Klein, “Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions About Evidence and Analytic Procedure,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 1 (1995), 105.

  37. 37.

    Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Cited in Orlin.

  38. 38.

    Thomas Smith and Elizabeth Lamond, A Discourse of the Common Weal of This Realm of England: First Printed in 1581 and Commonly Attributed to W.S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893), 16.

  39. 39.

    Orlin, 11.

  40. 40.

    Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 19–20.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 295.

  42. 42.

    G. Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 1.

  43. 43.

    Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

  44. 44.

    Horwitz, 88–89.

  45. 45.

    Coontz.

  46. 46.

    Sennett.

  47. 47.

    Ruby Ross Goodnow and Rayne Adams, The Honest House; Presenting Examples of the Usual Problems Which Face the Home-Builder, Together with an Exposition of the Simple Architectural Principles Which Underlie Them (New York: The Century Co., 1914), 49.

  48. 48.

    S.J. Kleinberg, “Gendered Space: Housing, Privacy and Domesticity in the Nineteenth Century United States,” in Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior, ed. Janet Floyd and Inga Bryden (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).

  49. 49.

    Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (London: Penguin Books, 1987).

  50. 50.

    For example, Kristina Milnor, Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also the discussion in Judith A. Swanson, The Public and the Private in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” The Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993).

  51. 51.

    Joseph Addison, Spectator, vol. 81 (1711).

  52. 52.

    Horwitz.

  53. 53.

    Jane Rendell, “Friendship and Politics: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1891) and Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829–1925),” in Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).

  54. 54.

    Kelly.

  55. 55.

    Anne Digby, “Victorian Values and Women in Public and Private” (paper presented at the Proceedings of the British Academy, 1992).

  56. 56.

    Coontz.

  57. 57.

    Richard Steele, The Spectator (1711).

  58. 58.

    Horwitz.

  59. 59.

    Margaret Hunt, “Wife Beating, Domesticity and Women’s Independence in Eighteenth-Century London,” Gender & History 4, no. 1 (1992).

  60. 60.

    See the discussion in Anita Allen, Unpopular Privacy: What Must We Hide? (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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  1. RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Chris Berg

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Berg, C. (2018). The Origins of Modern Privacy. In: The Classical Liberal Case for Privacy in a World of Surveillance and Technological Change. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96583-3_5

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