Foundations of Social and Behavioral Sciences Theory

1. Discussion Question: Describe public/private space in our society today. What do you see as the most significant issues with public/private space in our lives? 

2. Reading Reflection: Solid ONE-page reflection paper about your thoughts on the reading. This could include a brief summary and your opinion. There are not many guidelines or format (e.g., APA, MLS style) for these weekly reading reflection assignments. But please use 12-point font, Times New Roman, and don’t get ridiculous with the margin settings.

Reading: Jeffrey Weintraub Public/Private: The Limitations of a Grand Dichotomy (file uploaded)

Lecture: Lecture: Public and Private Space/Place (file uploaded)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig5QAVfklJ4

No Plagiarismfollow instruction

Foundations Of Social And Behavioral Sciences Theory

1. Discussion Question: Describe public/private space in our society today. What do you see as the most significant issues with public/private space in our lives? 

2. Reading Reflection: Solid ONE-page reflection paper about your thoughts on the reading. This could include a brief summary and your opinion. There are not many guidelines or format (e.g., APA, MLS style) for these weekly reading reflection assignments. But please use 12-point font, Times New Roman, and don’t get ridiculous with the margin settings.

Reading: Jeffrey Weintraub Public/Private: The Limitations of a Grand Dichotomy (file uploaded)
Lecture: Lecture: Public and Private Space/Place (file uploaded)

Video:

continued…

Volume 7, Issue 2, Spring 1997

The Responsive Community

UP FRONT

4 Cloning: Taking Ethics Seriously — Peter Steinfels
Can Multiculturalism Unite Us? — Paul Jerome Croce
Giving Teachers Authority — Albert Shanker

ESSAYS

13

Public/Private

: The Limitations of a Grand Dichotomy

Jeff Weintraub

While notions of “public” and “private” are crucial to our
understandings of democracy and community, their meanings
are far from well-understood.

25 Can Design Make Community?
Philip Langdon

Relationships and values are the defining elements of commu-
nity. But a new breed of architects are showing that by paying
attention to the physical layout of a neighborhood, bonds,
shared understandings, and other elements of community can
be fostered.

38 Social Security and the Dividing
of the American Community
Jeff Madrick

In revamping the Social Security system, we must respond to
two questions: What is the extent of the problem, and what
impact will different solutions have on our national commit-
ment to the common good?

13

ESSAYS

Public/Private: The Limitations of
a Grand Dichotomy

Jeff Weintraub

In Norberto Bobbio’s useful phrase, the public/private distinction
stands out as one of the “grand dichotomies” of Western thought. It is
a binary opposition that is used to subsume a wide range of other
important distinctions and that attempts to dichotomize the social
universe in a comprehensive and sharply demarcated way. It is also,
when used incautiously, a major source of confusion. Part of the
attraction of this dichotomy no doubt lies in its apparent clarity and
simplicity; but this is deceptive. In fact, different sets of people who
employ the concepts of “public” and “private” mean very different
things by them—and often, without quite realizing it, mean several
things at once. The expanding literature on “public goods,” which
takes its lead from neoclassical economics, is addressing quite a
different subject from the “public sphere” of discussion and political
action delineated by Jürgen Habermas or Hannah Arendt, not to
mention the “public life” of sociability charted in different ways by
Philippe Ariès, Jane Jacobs, or Richard Sennett. The current debates
over “privatization” largely concern whether governmental functions
should be taken over by corporations. What does this have to do with
the world of “private life”—intimacy, sexuality, family, and friend-
ship—explored by social historians, cultural critics, and TV talk shows?

Public/Private

14 The Responsive Community • Spring 1997

Or with the notion of “privacy” that figures in the abortion contro-
versy?

The public/private distinction, in short, is not unitary, but pro-
tean. It comprises not a single paired opposition, but a complex family
of them, neither mutually reducible nor wholly unrelated. And these
multiple (but also overlapping) discourses of public and private do not
simply point to different phenomena; often they rest on different
underlying images of the social world, are driven by different con-
cerns, and raise very different issues. When we forget this, we not only
talk past each other, but confuse ourselves as well.

Furthermore, while many of these versions of the public/private
distinction can be illuminating if used for carefully defined purposes,
attempts to use any of them as a comprehensive dichotomous model
of society will always be profoundly misleading and can often be
practically disastrous. Either the procrustean dualism of their catego-
ries blanks out crucial mediating phenomena—including those that
should be of special interest to people concerned with questions of
community, democracy, or moral order—or else one pole of this
dichotomy is specified concretely while the other expands into a vague
and overly broad residual category, in which case significant distinc-
tions are lost.

Consider, as just one example, the common tendency to equate the
public/private dichotomy with the contrast between “the state” and
“the individual.” This perspective may be appropriate as, say, a mode
of framing certain very specific legal issues. But if we take it seriously
(or naively) as a basis for broader social and political discussion, then
it yields a peculiar and misleading picture of the social landscape,
since what is missing from it is, precisely, society. That is, it leaves out
(among other things) the institutional and cultural structures of the
social order and the crucial mediating practices of everyday sociability
and of civic engagement, which are neither “public” nor “private” in
terms of this framework, and which have their own distinctive dynam-
ics and requirements.

Matters are not improved if “private” is treated (explicitly or in
effect) as a residual category meaning “nonstate,” since that lumps
together such very different realms of social life as the market economy,

15

the family, and the fabric of local or neighborhood community. This
kind of conflation is not inconsequential, since unleashing the first
realm can often have massively disruptive effects on the other two.
Using “private” as a catch-all residual category for “nonstate” also
obscures, for example, the possible tensions between the “private”
rights and interests of individuals and the “private” life of the family,
the latter being a domain of “private” life that disintegrates unless
there are some limits on extreme individualism, and which is cultur-
ally valued precisely as a refuge against the competitive individualism
of the market (where “private interests” reign). And so on.

In short, any treatment of public and private should begin by
recognizing, and trying to clarify, the multiple and ambiguous charac-
ter of its subject matter. Substantively, reflection on these issues
suggests two interconnected conclusions. The first is the inadequacy
of any single or dichotomous model of the public/private distinction
to capture the institutional and cultural logic of modern societies. The
second is that, while we should certainly not give up the effort to draw
empirical and normative distinctions between public and private, we
should not expect the public/private distinction to provide us with
easy or straightforward solutions to our social, political, and moral
dilemmas.

Public and Private: Some Basic Orientations

Any notion of “public” or “private” makes sense only as one
element in a paired opposition (explicit or implicit). Let me first note
that, at the deepest and most general level, behind the different forms
of the public/private distinction are (at least) two fundamental, and
analytically quite distinct, kinds of imagery in terms of which “pri-
vate” can be contrasted with “public”:

• What is hidden or withdrawn vs. what is open, revealed, or
accessible.

• What is individual, or pertains only to an individual, vs. what is
collective, or affects the interests of a collectivity of individuals.
This individual/collective distinction can, by extension, take the
form of a distinction between part and whole (of some social
collectivity).

Public/Private

16 The Responsive Community • Spring 1997

We might refer to these two underlying criteria as “visibility” and
“collectivity.” The two may blur into each other in specific cases, and
can also be combined in various ways, but the difference in principle
is important. When an individual is described as pursuing a private
interest—or a group is described as pursuing a “special interest”—
rather than the public interest, the implication is not necessarily that
they are doing it in secret. The criterion involved is the second one: the
private is the particular. Likewise, the basis for using the term “public”
to describe the actions and agents of the state (so that public/private
= state/nonstate) lies in the state’s claim to be responsible for the
general interests and affairs of a politically organized collectivity, as
opposed to “private”—that is, merely particular—interests. Treating
the state as the locus of the “public” may be combined with arguments
for the openness or “publicity” of state actions; but it has been at least
as common to claim that, in order to advance the public interest, rulers
must maintain “state secrets” and have recourse to the arcana imperii.
I will forego providing examples where the criterion of “visibility” is
decisive, except to note that the use of the term “privacy” usually
signals the invocation of this criterion, since it generally concerns
things that we are able and/or entitled to keep hidden, sheltered, or
withdrawn from others.

There are a number of ways that these underlying criteria can be
conceived and combined to produce the various concrete versions of
the public/private distinction. Among the broad fields of discourse
within which different notions of “public” and “private” currently
play important roles, I think the following are the most significant
(though this list is not meant to be comprehensive):

I. The liberal-economistic model, dominant in most “public policy”
analysis and in a great deal of everyday legal and political debate,
which sees the public/private distinction primarily in terms of the
distinction between state administration and the market economy.

II. The civic perspective, which sees the “public” realm (or “public
sphere”) in terms of political community and citizenship, analyti-
cally distinct from both the market and the administrative state.

III. The approach, exemplified in different ways by the work of
Philippe Ariès and Jane Jacobs (and other figures in urban criti-

17

cism, social history, and anthropology), which sees the “public”
realm as a sphere of fluid and polymorphous sociability, distinct
from both the structures of formal organization and the “private”
domains of intimacy and domesticity.

IV. Those tendencies in feminist scholarship (and related areas)
that conceive of the distinction between “private” and “public” in
terms of the distinction between the family and the larger eco-
nomic and political order—with the market economy often be-
coming the paradigmatic “public” realm.

In the space available, unfortunately, I can address only the first
three, especially since feminist treatments of the public/private dis-
tinction have become too rich and diverse to characterize adequately
in a brief discussion. And even the first three perspectives will have to
be sketched very briefly.

I. The Liberal-Economistic Model: The Market and the State

This is the framework into which such terms as “public sector”
and “private sector” usually fit, and which structures the great bulk of
what is called “public policy” debate. The assumptions of neoclassical
economics tend to dominate—which is to say, putting the matter into
a grander theoretical perspective, the assumptions of utilitarian liber-
alism (nowadays often called “rational choice theory”). They are
embedded in a characteristic, if not always explicit, image of social
reality which, like most such images, has both descriptive and norma-
tive dimensions. What exists in society are: individuals pursuing their
self-interest more or less efficiently (i.e., “rationally,” in the peculiar
sense in which this term is used in utilitarian liberalism); voluntary
(particularly contractual) relations between individuals; and the state.
Thus, in practice the distinction between public and private—between
the “public sector” and the “private sector”—usually means the
distinction between “governmental” and “nongovernmental,” with
the implication that this distinction should be as clearly and sharply
dichotomous as possible. The field of the nongovernmental is con-
ceived essentially in terms of the market. It is therefore not surprising
that the use of the public/private distinction within this framework
has characteristically involved a preoccupation with questions of
jurisdiction, and especially with demarcating the sphere of the “pub-

Public/Private

18 The Responsive Community • Spring 1997

lic” authority of the state from the sphere of formally voluntary
relations between “private” individuals. These questions of jurisdic-
tion tend to predominantly boil down to disputes about whether
particular activities or services should be left to the market or be
subject to government “intervention,” usually conceived in terms of
administrative regulation backed by coercive force.

The fact that these disputes may often be quite bitter should not
conceal the fact that both sides are operating within a common
universe of discourse, drawing different conclusions from the same
premises. They are simply replicating the two classic answers to the
problem of order as posed by utilitarian liberalism. Locke and Adam
Smith on one hand, Hobbes and Bentham on the other, might be taken
as the most distinguished representatives of the two poles within this
universe of discourse: the side that leans toward a “natural” harmoni-
zation of selfish interests, whose grand theoretical achievement is the
theory of the market; and the more technocratic, social-engineering
side, which posits the need for a coercive agency standing above
society (epitomized by Hobbes’s Leviathan) that maintains order by
manipulating the structure of rewards and punishments within which
individuals pursue their “rational” interests. Given the underlying
assumptions, the “invisible hand” of the market and what Alfred
Chandler calls the “visible hand” of administrative regulation recur as
the two key solutions.

What is missing from this picture? One writer who starts within
this framework and deliberately brings out its limitations is Albert
Hirschman, particularly in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. “Exit”—which
exercises an indirect pressure on the operation of “firms, organiza-
tions, and states”—is the only option of the “rational” individual of
liberal theory. But that is inadequate as a mechanism to keep the world
going. There is also a role for “voice,” which means participation in
making (or, at least, influencing) decisions about matters of common
concern. And for “voice” to work requires some degree of “loyalty.”
Within the perspective from which Hirschman begins, “voice” is an
imported category, and “loyalty” an essentially residual one; thus,
both are only thinly fleshed out. But they point the way to the next
perspective, which focuses on the problem of citizenship.

19

II. Citizenship: From the Polis to the “Public Sphere”

Here the “public” realm is the realm of political community based
on citizenship. At the heart of “public” life is a process of active
participation in collective decision making and collective action, car-
ried out within a framework of fundamental solidarity and equality.
This whole realm of activity, and the problematic it generates, are
essentially invisible within the framework of the first perspective.

In a sense, “public” means “political” in both perspectives I and II.
But these are very different meanings of “political.” For I, “political”
or “public” authority means the administrative state. For II, “politics”
means a world of discussion, debate, deliberation, collective decision
making, and action in concert. What separates the problematic of
citizenship, in any strong sense of the term, from the conceptual
framework of liberal social theory is that the practice of citizenship is
inseparable from active participation in a certain type of decision-
making community maintained by solidarity and by the exercise of
what used to be called republican virtue (or public spirit). In this
context, it makes sense to speak, not only of “public” jurisdiction and
“public interest,” but also of “public life.”

Both of these notions of “public” as “political” derive, ultimately,
from classical antiquity, embedded in two basic models of the “public”
realm. The first model comes from the self-governing polis or republic
(res publica, literally “public thing”), from which we inherit a notion of
politics as citizenship. The second model comes from the Roman
empire, from which we get the notion of sovereignty: a centralized, uni-
fied, and omnipotent apparatus of rule which stands above the society
and governs it through the enactment and administration of laws. The
“public” power of the sovereign rules over, and in principle on behalf
of, a society of “private” and politically passive individuals who are
bearers of rights granted to them and guaranteed by the sovereign.

Many of the ambiguities in our thinking about politics stem from
the fact that both of these underlying images have a significant
presence in modern thought. An approach based on the model of
sovereignty takes for granted, in its underlying premises, the separa-
tion between rulers and ruled (whether it takes the side of the rulers or
of the ruled). Classical moral and political philosophy, however, took
as its point of departure a fundamentally different, and considerably

Public/Private

20 The Responsive Community • Spring 1997

more exceptional, model of politics, one based on a process of collec-
tive decision making by a body of citizens united in a community
(albeit, of course, a restricted and exclusive community). Thus, the
central image of “political” action as we find it in Aristotle is not
domination and compliance (or resistance), but participation in collec-
tive self-determination. Aristotle’s classic definition of the citizen is
one who is capable both of ruling and of being ruled. The appropriate
sphere for domination is within the private realm of the household,
which is structured by relationships of “natural” inequality: between
master and slave, parent and child, husband and wife.

Both the notion of citizenship and the notion of sovereignty went,
understandably, into eclipse in the middle ages. A significant element
in the shaping of modernity has involved the gradual rediscovery of
these notions and the attempt to realize and institutionalize them.
Behind this process lie three grand historical transformations:

First, there is the development of modern civil society, which is the
seedbed of liberalism. “Civil society” is another historically complex
and multivalent term. Nowadays it is often used loosely to cover all
desirable social arrangements, which is not the sense in which I am
using it here. Following Hegel, I will use “civil society” to refer to the
social world of self-interested individualism, competition, imperson-
ality, and contractual relationships—centered on the market—which,
as thinkers in the early modern West slowly came to recognize,
seemed somehow capable of running itself.

The second transformation involves the recovery of the notion of
sovereignty, to complement the notion of the atomistic liberal individu-
al. To restate a point emphasized earlier, the liberal conception of the
public/private distinction turns fundamentally on the separation
between the administrative state and civil society—one dichotomy
being mapped onto the other.

Third, there is the recovery of the notion of citizenship. From this
perspective, the “public” realm is above all a realm of participatory
self-determination, deliberation, and conscious cooperation among
equals, the logic of which is distinct from those of both civil society and
the administrative state. Arendt’s conception of the “public realm,”
Habermas’s conception of the “public sphere,” and Tocqueville’s

21

conception of “political society” represent some of the more signifi-
cant efforts to capture the distinctive character of this “public” realm,
understood as the terrain of active citizenship. While their analyses
differ in various ways, all of them bring home the need to go beyond
dichotomous models of modern society. Thus, just as the “public”
realm (and politics) cannot be reduced to the state, the realm of social
life outside the state (and its control) cannot simply be identified as
“private.” In this respect, the historical experience of state-socialist
regimes has confirmed the insight behind one of Tocqueville’s charac-
teristically paradoxical arguments in The Old Regime and the French
Revolution: that, precisely as the centralized and bureaucratized French
state achieved its apotheosis, political life was smothered and sup-
pressed.

In short, these two notions of the “public”—and the two versions
of the public/private distinction in which they are embedded—rest on
crucially different images of politics and society, and a good deal of
modern thought reflects the tension between them. However, they far
from exhaust the significant discussion of public and private. For
example, neither of them addresses the alternative vision of public life
that links it, neither to the state nor to citizenship, but to sociability.

III. “Public” Life as Sociability

Consider this passage by Jane Jacobs from The Death and Life of
Great American Cities:

The tolerance, the room for great differences among neigh-
bors—differences that often go far deeper than differences in
color—which are possible and normal in intensely urban life,
but which are so foreign to suburbs and pseudosuburbs, are
possible and normal only when streets of great cities have
built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace to-
gether on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved
terms. Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear,
sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s
wealth of public life may grow.

This conveys a rather different vision of “public life,” and of the public
space in which it can thrive, from those at the heart of the civic
perspective. The “wealth” of the “public life” celebrated here lies not
in self-determination or collective action, but in the multi-stranded
liveliness and spontaneity arising from the ongoing intercourse of

Public/Private

22 The Responsive Community • Spring 1997

heterogeneous individuals and groups that can maintain a civilized
coexistence. Without it, cities become increasingly unworkable, dan-
gerous, and unlivable. Both of these forms, or aspects, of public life are
valuable and ought to be encouraged; indeed, in the right circum-
stances they can even be complementary. But it is clear that they differ
in their defining characteristics, requirements, and implications.

The key to this alternative version of the “public” realm is not
solidarity or obligation, but sociability. Nor does this notion apply
only to the life of great cosmopolitan cities. It is also what the social
historian Philippe Ariès has in mind when he says that, in the society
of the old regime, “life…was lived in public,” and the intense
privatization of the family and intimate relations, with their sharp
separation from an impersonal “public” realm, had not yet occurred.

Ariès makes this remark in the context of a sweeping interpreta-
tion of the transformations in the texture of Western society from the
old regime to the modern era. At the heart of this picture—supported,
in its essentials, by a wide range of other scholarship—is the decay of
the older public realm of polymorphous sociability and, with it, the
sharpening polarization of social life between an increasingly imper-
sonal and severely instrumental “public” realm (of the market, the
modern state, and bureaucratic organization) and a “private” realm
increasingly devoted to creating islands of intense intimacy and
emotionality (including the modern child-centered family; the mod-
ern ideals of romantic marriage and anti-instrumental friendship; and
so on). For Ariès (to put words in his mouth), modern civil society
represents not the “private” realm but the new “public” realm; the
“private” realm is the realm of personal life, above all of domesticity.

Indeed, one of the most salient forms of the public/private distinc-
tion in modern culture (in both thought and practice) is that which
demarcates the “private” realm of “personal life” from the “public”
realm of gesellschaft, epitomized by the market and bureaucratically
administered formal organization. This contrast is widely experi-
enced as one of the great divides of modern life. But historically these
two poles emerge together, to a great extent in dialectical tension with
each other; and the sharpness of the split between them is one of the
defining characteristics of modernity. In fact, many of these distinc-
tively modern forms of “private” relationship take much of their

23

meaning from the fact that they are defined in opposition to the logic
of gesellschaft. Ariès sums up his view of this process with this remark:

It is not individualism which has triumphed, but the family.
But this family has advanced in proportion as sociability has
retreated. It is as if the modern family had sought to take the
place of the old social relationships (as these gradually de-
faulted) in order to preserve mankind from an unbearable
moral solitude.

This is not necessarily a happy or secure solution. It is more likely
that the emotional “overloading” of the domain of intimate relations
will develop in tandem with the increasing emotional emptiness and
isolation of an inhospitable “public” domain. Not that many of us
would want to abandon the satisfactions of intimate life or the advan-
tages of impersonal institutions: they are, at least potentially, among
the benefits of modernity. But if they confront us as sharply dichoto-
mized and exclusive alternatives, they add up to an unsatisfactory
prospect. Once again, part of the solution, both theoretical and prac-
tical, lies in complexification—a key element of which would be the
existence and vitality of a sphere of public life, in the sense of sociabil-
ity, that can mediate between the particular intimacies of “private” life
and the extreme impersonality and instrumentalism of gesellschaft.

The Great Divide—and Its Limits

I hope it is clear that this discussion has only scratched the surface
of its subject. A number of crucial issues remain to be considered. For
example, like Ariès, most feminist treatments of the public/private
distinction have tended to treat the family as the paradigmatic “pri-
vate” realm, in contrast to the “public” sphere of extra-familial eco-
nomic and political activity. But, while the arguments discussed in
section III focus on the ways that many of the characteristically
modern forms of public/private division cut through the lives of both
men and women, feminists have brought out important ways that
these “domestic/public” divisions are gender-linked in terms of both
social structure and ideology. Feminist scholars, among others, have
also suggested how the impact of industrial capitalism, by sharpening
the separation (in both reality and perception) between “home” life
and “work” life, has helped to accentuate yet another dimension of the
public/private distinction in modern societies. And so on.

Public/Private

24 The Responsive Community • Spring 1997

The public/private distinction is irreducibly multiple, inherently
problematic, and often treacherous. But the proper response is not, I
think, simply to abandon it as unworkable, hopelessly misleading,
and/or ideologically oppressive. It can also be a powerful instrument
of social analysis and moral reflection if it is approached with due
caution and conceptual self-awareness. It is, in any event, an inescap-
able element of the theoretical vocabularies as well as the institutional
and cultural landscapes of modern societies. Thus, it can neither be
conveniently simplified nor usefully avoided. The variability, ambi-
guity, and complexity of the public/private distinction need to be
recognized and confronted—but so do the richness and apparent
indispensability of this grand dichotomy.

Drawing by Leo Cullum; © 1997 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

Cultural Geographies of the Modern World

Private and Public Places

The Public-Private
Binary

• “Binary distinctions are an analytic
procedure, but their usefulness does
not guarantee that existence divides
like that. We should look with
suspicion on anyone who declared
that there are two kinds of people, or
two kinds of reality or processes.” –
Mary Douglas (anthropologist) “Judgments on
James Frazier”

• Public/private binary has been
asserted long before modernity. It is a
“grand dichotomy” of Western
thought

• Not only across eras but within eras,
public/private have been thought of in
very different ways

The Public-Private
Binary

• Public: From Latin publicus (the
people or pertaining to the people or
community)

• Private: From Latin privatus (set apart,
belonging to oneself), from Old Latin
privus (one’s own)

The Public-Private
Binary

• Most modern definitions refer to one
of two kinds of imagery:

A) What is hidden or withdrawn
versus what is open, revealed, or
accessible

B) What is individual, or pertains to
an individual, versus what is
collective, or affects the interests
of a collectivity of individuals. This
individual/collective distinction
can, by extension, take the form
of a distinction between part and
whole (of some social collectivity)

Weintraub, p. 15

The Public-Private
Binary

• What different kinds of modern human action are implied in these
dichotomies?

1. Nation-state administration vs. market economy (liberal-economistic
model)

2. Political community vs. market and state (republican-

virtue

model)

3. Sociability vs. individual and familial privacy (dramaturgic model)

4. Market and state vs. family (feminist model)

Each model has its own political and social
philosophies and its own image of public and

private space

Liberal-Economistic
Model

• Neo-classical economic
thought divides the social world
into “public sector” and
“private sector”

• The private sector is the
economic relations of free
individuals and the public
sector is composed of the
organizations that regulate
individuals

• Key questions revolve around
the balance between free
individuals and coercive-
collective organizations

John Locke

John Stuart Mill

Liberal-Economistic
Model

• Public space = areas controlled
by the administrative state

– Government buildings

– Public schools

– Public roads

– Public sidewalks

– Public parks

– Government owned land

Liberal-Economistic
Model

• Private space = areas owned
and controlled by non-
governmental entities
(individuals and corporations)

– Residential homes

– Individual human bodies

– Shopping malls

– Automobiles

– Workplaces

Liberal-Economistic
Model

• Key controversies:

– Symbolic: what kind of
symbolic gestures can be
made in collectively owned
(public) space?

– Religious symbolism
(Salazar v. Buono, McCreary
County v. ACLU)

Cross commemorating WWI veterans on
public land, Mojave National Preserve

Stephen Colbert: Symbol Minded

Liberal-Economistic
Model
• Key controversies:

– Economic: What effect does
public administration have
on privately owned space?
What effect does publicly
owned space have on
privately owned space?

Liberal-Economistic
Model
• Key controversies:

– Economic: What effect does
public administration have
on privately owned space?
What effect does publicly
owned space have on
privately owned space?

Republican-Virtue
Model

• Res = Thing(s); Publicus = The
People, what is common to all
in a community

• Small-r republican political
philosophy separates the social
world into a collective-civic-
public sphere on one hand

• And an individual, self-
interested, private sphere on
the other

Jean-Jacque
Rousseau

Republican-Virtue
Model

• Democratic communities are
maintained by solidarity and
republican virtue

– Solidarity: A tight emotional
bond between individuals
who share a common interest

– Republican virtue: personal
characteristics necessary for
citizens to rule themselves

• This civic type of public action
goes unacknowledged in the
liberal-economistic view

Montesquieu

Republican-Virtue
Model

• Jurgen Habermas: the Public
Sphere is an arena in which
citizens can

– learn about democracy and
citizenship

– deliberate on public matters

– see the public good more
clearly

• Spaces of the public sphere:

– British Coffee Houses

– French Salons

– German Tischgesellschaften

Republican-Virtue
Model

Montesquieu

• Public space = areas in which
a politically connected citizenry
gathers, deliberates, and
expresses itself

– Public hearings

– Political debates

– Monumental spaces
(Washington Mall)

– Coffee shops, book clubs,
social organizations

Republican-Virtue
Model
• Private space = areas that do

not pertain to the common
good/collective interest

– Home?

– Individual human bodies?

Dramaturgic Model

• Human world separated into

a public sociability and
individual privacy

Ideal Public Sociability

Public Sociability
Face-to-face interaction

Diversity and Difference

Life lived in public

Privacy
Intimate Family Life

Individuality

Notice the
difference from
solidarity and

virtue

The Loss of Public Sociability

Public Sociability
Face-to-face interaction
Diversity and Difference

Life lived in public

Privacy
Intimate Family Life
Individuality

The Loss of Public
Sociability

Public Sociability
Face-to-face interaction
Diversity and Difference
Life lived in public

Privacy
Intimate Family Life
Individuality

The Loss of Public Sociability
Public Sociability
Face-to-face interaction
Diversity and Difference
Life lived in public
Privacy
Intimate Family Life
Individuality

Gesellschaft
Market and State

The Loss of Public
Sociability

No larger cultural
community (sacred

canopy). Ariès:
“unbearable moral

solitude”

Public Sociability
Face-to-face interaction

Intermingling
Life lived in public

Privacy
Intimate Family Life
Individuality

Gesellschaft
Market and State

Instrumental Relations

Dramaturgic Model

• Public space = areas in which
embodied individuals
intermingle, see each other,
recognize each other,
communicate, live

• Walkable streets

• Neighborhood cafes

• Neighborhood parks

• Public transportation

James H. Kunstler: Public Spaces Should Be Inspired
Centers of Civic Life

Feminist Model The Gendered Nature of Public/Private

Dominant Conceptions of the Public/Private

Public Sociability
Face-to-face interaction
Diversity and Difference
Life lived in public
Privacy
Intimate Family Life
Individuality

Man’s Sphere

Woman’s Sphere

1. The private sphere/space was
simply a residual category in
most political theory

2. The private sphere/space was
devalued and dismissed

The Feminist Case
Against Public/Private

The Feminist Case
Against Public/Private

3. Public-private distinctions have
often served to “naturalize”
women’s subordination and
disenfranchisement

4. The concept of the private
sphere and privacy has been
used to hide abuse and neglect
from legal redress