Public and Private

Peter J. Steinberger

Political Studies, 1999, vol. 47, issue 2, 292-313

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.

Date: 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00201

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:polstu:v:47:y:1999:i:2:p:292-313

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0032-3217

Access Statistics for this article

Political Studies is currently edited by Matthew Festenstein and Martin Smith

More articles in Political Studies from Political Studies Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().