Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy

Front Cover
Jeff Weintraub, Krishan Kumar
University of Chicago Press, Mar 15, 1997 - Philosophy - 380 pages
These essays, by widely respected scholars in fields ranging from social and political theory to historical sociology and cultural studies, illuminate the significance of the public/private distinction for an increasingly wide range of debates. Commenting on controversies surrounding such issues as abortion rights, identity politics, and the requirements of democratization, many of these essays clarify crucial processes that have shaped the culture and institutions of modern societies.

In contexts ranging from friendship, the family, and personal life to nationalism, democratic citizenship, the role of women in social and political life, and the contrasts between western and (post-)Communist societies, this book brings out the ways the various uses of the public/private distinction are simultaneously distinct and interconnected. Public and Private in Thought and Practice will be of interest to students and scholars in disciplines including politics, law, philosophy, history, sociology, and women's studies.

Contributors include Jeff Weintraub, Allan Silver, Craig Calhoun, Daniela Gobetti, Jean L. Cohen, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Alan Wolfe, Krishan Kumar, David Brain, Karen Hansen, Marc Garcelon, and Oleg Kharkhordin.


 

Contents

The Theory and Politics of the PublicPrivate Distinction
1
Two Different Sorts of CommerceFriendship and Strangership in Civil Society
43
Nationalism and the Public Sphere
75
Humankind as a System Private and Public Agency at the Origins of Modern Liberalism
103
Rethinking Privacy Autonomy Identity and the Abortion Controversy
133
The Displacement of Politics
166
Public and Private in Theory and Practice Some Implications of an Uncertain Boundary
182
Home The Promise and Predicament of Private Life at the End of the Twentieth Century
204
From Public Housing to Private Communities The Discipline of Design and the Materialization of the PublicPrivate Distinction in the Built Environm...
237
Rediscovering the Social Visiting Practices in Antebellum New England and the Limits of the PublicPrivate Dichotomy
268
The Shadow of the Leviathan Public and Private in Communist and PostCommunist Society
303
Reveal and Dissimulate A Genealogy of Private Life in Soviet Russia
333
Index
365
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About the author (1997)

Krishan Kumar is Professor of Social Thought at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Stephen Bann is Professor of Modern Cultural Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury.

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