IT WAS to a great extent an awareness of the growing divergence—indeed a realization of the very distinction—between public and private lives that, as we noted above, characterized so much of the social and political thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One could claim that the core of all eighteenth-century attempts to articulate a notion of civil society lay in this recognition of the problematic relation between the pri- vate and the public, the individual and the social, public ethics and individ- ual interests, individual passions and public concerns.1For if constitutive
of the emergent eighteenth-century notion of civil society was some sense of a shared public, so was the very existence of the private. It was, after all, the very existence of a free and equal citizenry—that autonomous, agentic individual, the private subject—that made civil society possible at all. The public space of interaction could be conceived as a public space only in so far as it was distinguished from those social actors who entered it as private individuals. Where there was no private sphere, there was, concomitantly, no public one: both had to exist for sense to be made of either one.
We have already seen that it was precisely those eighteenth-century moral philosophers of civil society who first posited a personal or private sphere, of friendship and trust (as opposed to interest) as one of the unalter- able benefits of “commercial” (what we would term “modern”) society. In premodern and feudal society bonds of personal affinity were rooted in codes of status and honor, while in the court societies existent from the sixteenth century they were tied to a personalized politics of court status. Freed from the constraints of calculation and interest, the private sphere became in the eighteenth century a realm where the personal nature of indi- vidual relations (i.e., friendship) was freed from concerns of social station. Thus, just as the individual emerged through the myriad of new and imper- sonal role relations in the public sphere, the very idea of the private emerged concomitantly as a realm of trust and mutuality existent apart from the systemically defined role relations of the public sphere.
If with the Scottish moralists, the idea of civil society emerged as a way to bridge the two worlds of public and private, of interest and trust, of less and more labile role expectations, we have seen too how the realm of the private, founded on individual conscience, took a certain moral priority, constituting, with Smith for instance, the true residency of virtue (or with
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Immanuel Kant, the realm of the ethical).2Here, however, a new dynamic
evolves. For the very emergence of a realm of trust as an (ideal) potentiality of true mutuality also makes of trust something problematic. Just as the potential for trust emerges when mutual role expectations are no longer determined by public norms, so does the potential for mistrust. With the ability to negotiate roles and role expectations, an element of risk enters social relations that was, to a great degree, absent when roles (and hence role expectations) were perceived as embedded within strict normative definitions. If we follow Giddens’s framework and contrast trust between individuals and confidence in abstract system—as two modes of negotiat- ing risk—we see that where relatively strict definitions of role behavior apply, the mutuality of roles is embedded, as it were, within the overall social system. One need not develop trust within particular role-sets because the relationship between role incumbents is structured by the exis- tence of an overriding systemic logic. Rather than trust between individu- als, what anchors the mutuality of the relationship is confidence in the sys- tem. The specific normative values of said system are, of course, variable. They can be organized around the certainties of kinship (honor), a transcen- dental religion (faith), or the logic of market exchange and the principles of abstract, rational, and universal rights of the individual (contract). These inform the system of modern social relations. In the last case, however, the issue of trust does become a problem.
The move, if you will, from faith (confidence plus sacrality) to trust, which brings with it a heightened degree of indeterminacy, also fundamen- tally transforms the nature of social relations, engendering, in modernity, the very particular distinction and tension between public and private which has become a hallmark of modern civilization. Thus, in ideal-typical terms, modern societies are characterized by the existence of two types of relation, those defined by public, formal, relatively determined (and often increasingly legally defined) roles and those defined by negotiable, labile, and relatively indeterminate role expectations. Whereas earlier societies tended to subsume the vast majority of role-sets (and so of interaction) within the parameters of determined, normative, and publicly sanctioned expectations, the specificity of modernity is precisely the emergence of a realm of interaction that, while not so defined, is nevertheless seen as a repository of value: the realm of the private.
To put the issue somewhat starkly, we are thus identifying the public realm with the phenomenon of confidence in systemically enforced expec- tations and the private with those of trust, individual agency, and a space for the negotiation of role expectations. Rather than making an absolute distinction, I would suggest envisioning these as existing along a contin- uum where the more negotiation, agency, and trust existing in an interac- tion, the more it can usefully be conceived as being of a private nature and
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the more confidence in systemically mandated (and sanctioned) forms of interaction, the more public its nature. (We may, just for example’s sake, take the interaction between a father and his six-year-old daughter. The same father and daughter will interact differently in their living room and in the mall. This difference is the difference between the public and the private, between less and more negotiable forms of role incumbency that I am indicating above).
One could certainly argue that while these characteristics may adhere to interaction on the micro level, they do not hold in the aggregate of collec- tive action on the macro level. Argument may thus be made that the great class struggles of the nineteenth century (the period of high modernity par excellence) were nothing less than the public, often violent, negotiation of role expectations. What after all are worker’s rights and entitlements if not specific sets of universally recognized (within the nation-state) role expec- tations that only emerged following a period of intense negotiation be- tween the relevant social actors (employers, workers, government agen- cies, and other corporate actors)? But such a criticism would miss its mark. For precisely what I would wish to argue is for the ways in which different forms of micro interaction inform and structure the manner of the macro public contest. Thus, in Europe and to some extent in Latin America, where the public/private distinction is quite developed, the social actors who en- tered the public arena to negotiate different role expectations did so as
public actors and not as private selves. They entered the public realm of
social action, precisely in their public capacity as representatives of work- ers’ councils, employers’ associations, and the like. Moreover, we should not forget that the struggle over role definitions is different from a process of negotiation within and between different agreed-upon accepted defini- tions of role behavior. In the second case, a given set of definitions, or at least their outer boundaries, are accepted by role-set members, and negotia- tion progresses within these boundaries. This is very different from a strug- gle (especially a violent, not to mention a revolutionary, struggle) over the very definition of a role or, in the case of revolution, its negation.
Interesting to note, if only in passing, is the comparative perspective that emerges from these remarks. In Europe, where the public/private distinc- tion was more absolute and so the definition of roles more structured, so the establishment of accepted role definitions (in the field of production) was less violent than in the United States. There, by contrast, where the public/ private distinction was more mediated and fluid, more labile, the process of establishing new role definitions in the sphere of industrial production was characterized by a process of more violent negotiation.
In explaining this divergence of labor violence in the United States and Europe, I would think that we would do well to look at the extent to which different roles and, most especially, the distinction between private and
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public realms was institutionalized. In Europe, where this distinction was highly institutionalized, a given structure of reciprocal expectations tended to mediate the violence of the “negotiation” process; while in the United States, the very lability of boundaries and the inability to posit or assume shared expectations between contesting parties gave to the labor struggle its especially violent characteristics. This, despite the fact that in the United States (as opposed to Europe) the working class was never excluded from membership in the collective, and so labor struggles were never over iden- tity and membership as they were in Europe (as represented by the struggle over the franchise—a fact which would have led one to assume more vio- lent rather than less violent struggles).3
The corollary to this in the realm of social movements and organizations is that in the United States the public sphere is warrened coast to coast by a multitude of private organizations which continually remake the public realm. In Europe this process is much more the work of State/administra- tive directives and hence the realm of the State per se, which is conse- quently seen as the public space par excellence; as such it is the object of contestation by, as just noted, individuals acting as public personae. Thus, I am not claiming that a public realm of systemic definitions and con- fidence (or lack thereof) is not a contested one; but, rather, that the very nature of this contestation may be differently constructed by either publicly or privately defined individual actions. In Europe it is more the former and in the United States the latter. On the other hand and as part of the same dynamic, what are most often defined as private affairs, morals, attitudes, and behavior—of the everyman and woman—have a much more “public” resonance in the United States than in Europe and as such are more of an issue of public regulation: from prohibition to today’s moral crusades against smoking, certain forms of language use (what is termed political correctness), and so on. In this context it is useful to recall the great reti- cence of the French press to discuss François Mitterrand’s mistress and their daughter as well as the rather unproblematic nature of their appear- ance at his funeral alongside his more publicly recognized family, an ap- pearance that would certainly have been impossible in the United States.
One of the interesting derivatives of this particular American propensity to blur the boundaries of public and private realms is the way this exacer- bates the difficulty modern societies have with the existence of ambiguity, both conceptually and, more importantly, in the field of human relations.4
For with the increasing difficulty of modern societies to construct a shared world of life experience (i.e., familiarity) and with trust increasingly less capable of complementing confidence in universalistic, univocal, and ab- stract systems (of increasingly instrumental nature) as the basis of social life, ambiguity becomes intolerable and often unacceptable. The existence of situations of interpersonal indeterminacy thus becomes not something to
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be navigated through but an aspect of life to be restricted to the greatest extent possible.
In the United States this has in fact emerged as an increasingly salient concern of both the public and private realms. In the latter context I suggest recalling some of the stories told by the French-born anthropologist Rahel Wasserfall, who when visiting this country as a Fulbright Fellow found that the very American academic valuation of pluralism seemed to lead to a uniquely American obsession with ambiguity, especially in relations be- tween the genders.5Ambiguity in gender relations, she noted, was not tol-
erated at all and the type of “flirtation,” “letting things happen,” that she was familiar with in other cultures was not countenanced in the profes- sional, American academic environment. Rather, at the very beginning of any interaction, even the most innocuous and professional, her interlocu- tors (regardless of their own gender) felt it imperative to establish almost immediately the boundaries, potentialities, and restrictions of the interac- tion. Thus, for example, she notes:
I was meeting a male anthropologist who was about my age, and we were on our way to have lunch. Almost immediately he said something about going with his wife to Washington over the weekend. I myself found a way to answer a few sentences later that, “I will be going to visit my partner in LA next month.” After this (in my view strange) dialogue, we went on talking about anthropology and his interests.6
Wasserfall’s fears that she was unwittingly giving off sexual messages to men (and hence the above interaction) were soon set to rest when she real- ized that women too (albeit gay women) also immediately on meeting pro- claimed their willingness (or lack thereof) to enter into a new relationship. As she notes, she soon learned that men and women both were very con- cerned to know “not my class, my kin, my religious or political beliefs, or the origin of my family, but my marital situation.”
This mode of behavior is, I would claim, directly correspondent with the analytic claims made above: The interstitial spaces of system can no longer be easily “filled in” by structures of shared or imputed familiarity (which did, in fact, once define the culture of American universities—white, male, Protestant, and from the leisure class) which would have allowed one to trust. (Trust, we recall, can only be proffered or accepted against a back- ground of indeterminacy, what is termed here ambiguity.) In its stead, there is then an attempt, in Wasserfall’s terms, to “tailor,” or explicitly define crucial (though not immediately relevant) aspects of one’s status. As we can only “trust” to other’s agency, we seek to delineate the precise contours of the potential interaction through an explicit (if subtle) recitation of our place in the world (at least in terms of this discrete set of factors). All in all, this is not that different from—indeed, is but a Western, individualist
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variant of—the contemporary Bedouin who upon meeting strangers estab- lish one another’s lineage relations, the better to know if they are friends or enemies. Perhaps many of the most “burning” of contemporary issues re- volving around political correctness, new norms of interpersonal behavior, and the almost obsessive concern with explicating (often legally) gender roles and role expectations are to be viewed in this light: as an attempt to reestablish familiarity rather than trust as the basis of social unconditional- ities, as providing the ground of interaction.
This is a process that takes place not only on the level of individual or private interaction, but it is becoming an important component of public culture as well. Those problems of indeterminacy and ambiguity that be- devil the private sphere are also making themselves increasingly felt in the public realm as well. Both manifestations result from that particular defini- tion of society’s unconditionalities where the very institutionalization of the rights of man and citizen (as public values) increasingly leaves the realm of the private as the paramount realm of value and meaning (and ethical action).7 This process has been most accomplished in the United
States, though aspects of this trend were already present in the eighteenth century and can be found in the foundation texts of political liberalism as well as in the thought of the Scottish moralists. So, for example, and as noted above, the very idea of civil society contains a stress on the private realm as that of value and ethical action as opposed to the public stress of other political traditions such as those of civic virtue.
Within this developing dynamic of public and private, and the increasing relegation of meaning and value to the realm of the private the problem of trust takes on an added dimension because it is only in the negotiation between private realms—those occasioned by trust—that shared value can emerge. The problem of shared value (or lack thereof, which is precisely what stands at the core of current debates between communitarians and liberals on the definition of the public good) brings us directly to the prob- lem of the collectivity—of defining its boundaries, criteria of membership and participation and, most especially, modes of representation. It is this problem (or set of problems) that stands behind much of what is currently termed “the culture wars,” analysis of which will in fact provide a useful introduction to the crises of familiarity and trust that we seem to be facing at the close of the twentieth century.8
To appreciate the sociological aspects of this debate we should return to the distinction made by Norberto Bobbio between relations among parts (private) and between the parts and the whole (public). What will be argued is that whereas Bobbio’s distinction holds for premodern and classical modern culture where the public realm was one that included the relation between different roles (and structures or institutions) and the representa- tive social whole, the very logic of modernity, resting on the idea of the
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individual as moral absolute, fundamentally transforms this set of rela- tions. For with the terms of representation increasingly being defined by the autonomous, rights-bearing individual, the representation of the public sphere (and so of relations between public and private) becomes increas- ingly problematic. This problem is essentially that noted by Luhmann of the part (the private/individual) supporting the whole (the public/collec- tive).9 With the realm of value relegated to the sphere of the private, it
becomes increasingly difficult to represent the collective whole, the realm of the public (especially when we consider the moral or value-laden aspect of every representation). In this sense and very tersely we may note that the loss of honor as a category of public value represents the triumph of the private. Contrariwise, such a radically constituted private cannot support itself, cannot, in fact, represent itself: this is the situation at present.
If we bear in mind the legal aspects of any process of representation, we find one particularly salient illustration of this process (and one not uncon- nected to the loss of honor) in the field of family law where, as Mary Glen- don has noted, “the emergence of new legal images of the family . . . stress the separate personalities of the family members rather than the unitary aspect of the family.”10 Quoting the 1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird court deci-
sion which stressed that “the married couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own, but an association of two individuals each