Public and Private

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Abstract
The problem of public and private is often thought to be a boundary problem. ‘Public’ and ‘private’ are said to denote separate areas of human endeavour – distinct ‘realms’, ‘spheres’, or ‘spaces’. The task of formulating clear boundaries, however, has proven to be enormously complex. It seems that every attempt at conceptualizing a purely private area of activity runs into a particular kind of difficulty, namely, many of the activities characteristic of the private sphere turn out to be activities toward which no responsible public authority could possibly remain indifferent: abuse within the family, collusion in the business world, criminal conspiracy among friends. It may be, however, that the problem of public and private, conceived as a boundary problem, is thereby misconceived. It would perhaps be better to think of public and private as denoting not primarily – perhaps not at all – separate realms of endeavour but different ways of being in the world, different ‘manners of acting’. To act in a private manner is simply different in character from acting in a public manner. Such a formulation, if pursued with care, would allow us to accept fully the arguments of those who would question the very idea of a private realm, while still permitting us to retain a vigorous and compelling public/private distinction.

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