4. The fourth unit-idea is the notion of privacy, of
a private existence within a public world, an area
within which the individual is free from interference
and able to do and think whatever he chooses. This
is an essentially modern idea, largely absent from an-
cient civilizations and medieval Europe. It constitutes
perhaps the central idea of liberalism, whose history
has largely been an argument about where the bound-
aries lie, according to what principles they are to be
justified, whence interference derives, and how it is to
be checked. It presupposes a picture of man to whom
privacy is essential, even sacred, with a life of his own
to live. Sir Isaiah Berlin has characterized this idea
as “negative liberty,” involving a “sense of privacy,
... of the area of personal relationships as something
sacred in its own right...,” arguing that
This is liberty as it has been conceived by liberals in the
modern world from the days of Erasmus (some would say
of Occam) to our own. Every plea for civil liberties, every
protest against exploitation and humiliation, against the
encroachment of public authority, or the mass hypnosis of
custom or organised propaganda, springs from this individ-
ualistic, and much disputed, conception of man
(1958, pp.
14, 12).
We have already met this idea in Tocqueville who,
though alarmed by the social and political conse-
quences of the excessive retreat into privacy under
democracy, nonetheless held “negative liberty” as a
preeminent value. It is found (with different concep-
tions of the private area of noninterference) in Locke,
Paine, Burke, Jefferson, and Acton. It is found, above
all, in the writings of John Stuart Mill and Benjamin
Constant, which contain the classic liberal justifications
for preserving private liberty. For Mill, the “only part
of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable
to society, is that which concerns others. In the part
which merely concerns himself, his independence is,
of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and
mind, the individual is sovereign” (On Liberty, Ch. I).
For Constant,
... everything which does not interfere with order; every-
thing which belongs only to the inward nature of man, such
as opinion; everything which, in the expression of opinion,
does not harm others... everything which, in regard to
industry, allows the free exercise of rival industry—is indi-
vidual and cannot legitimately be subjected to the power
of society
(Mélanges de littérature et de politique [1829],
Preface).
Constant further remarked on the essentially modern
character of this notion of liberty as “the peaceful
enjoyment of personal independence”: the ancients, “to
preserve their political importance and their part in
the administration of the State, were ready to renounce
their private independence,” whereas “Nearly all the
enjoyments of the moderns are in their private lives:
the immense majority, forever excluded from power,
necessarily take only a very passing interest in their
public lives” (De l'esprit de conquête [1814], Part II,
Ch. VI).
This idea is to be seen as contrasting not only with
various types of authoritarianism, but also with that
powerful tradition of thought (reaching back through
Elton Mayo to Rousseau) which stresses “community”
and “groupism,” aiming to cure psychological and
social ills, or to achieve political and social purposes,
through attachment to groups, whether these are pri-
mary groups, work groups, professional associations,
classes, parties, religious orders, corporations, city-
states, or nations. It is this tradition which David
Riesman attacks in his essay “Individualism Reconsid-
ered,” in which he concludes that “to hold that con-
formity with society is not only a necessity but also
a duty” is to “destroy that margin of freedom which
gives life its savor and its endless possibility for ad-
vance” (Individualism Reconsidered [1954], Ch. 2).
Perhaps the most striking, and certainly the most
influential contemporary expression of “groupism” is
in the thought of Mao Tse-Tung. According to Mao,
liberalism “is extremely harmful in a revolutionary
collective... a corrosive which eats away unity, un-
dermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissen-
sion”; it “stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it
places personal interests first and the interests of the
revolution second....” A Communist should “be more
concerned about the Party and the masses than about
any private person, and more concerned about others
than about himself” (“Combat Liberalism,” September
7, 1937).
In general, the idea of privacy refers to a relation
between the individual, on the one hand, and society
or the state, on the other—a relation characteristically
held by liberals to be desirable, either as an ultimate
value, or (as with Mill) as a means to the realization
of other values.
