Autorentext

Martin Eiermann is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Klappentext

"Privacy serves as a powerful limiting principle in U.S. society. It structures the terrain upon which a wide array of conflicts play out over the exercise of power, the rights of individuals, and the organization of society. From postwar campaigns for abortion rights to digital consumer rights and state surveillance after 9/11, the logic of privacy has been present in many of the big political, legal, economic, and cultural debates of the last decades. This was not always the case. In The Limiting Principle Martin Eiermann leverages the tools of historical and computational social science science to develop a conception of privacy as a political logic. He shows how before the middle of the nineteenth century, the language of privacy appeared primarily in literary fiction and discussions of the family home, yet it was almost wholly absent from politics, jurisprudence, and U.S. public discourse generally. He examines how privacy evolved from a relatively narrow cultural trope into a salient political logic, and it identifies the impact of this transformation on the exercise of informational power and the making of modern American society. Privacy emerged as a salient political logic when it was tied into a web of institutional practices, moral panics, and social movements, and thereby lifted into the halls of power and into the annals of American jurisprudence. This approach differs from common conceptions of privacy as an individual right or a psychological need, exercised within society not against it"-- Provided by publisher.