Subject: Re: M-TH: Privacy and Marxism (fwd)
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 01:10:08 -0500 (EST)
From: "hoov" <hoov-AT-freenet.tlh.fl.us>


> Doesn't liberalism fundamentally rest
> itself upon the public/private split, according to which the public is
> equated with the political/the State and the "private affairs" such as
> family and economy are thought of as apolitical? 
> Yoshie


if civil society is a realm of autonomous associations and groups involving
relations among individuals, then it constitutes a "private" sphere of life 
in contrast to the "public" sphere of the state...for Locke, civil society 
was distinguished from the state of nature by the presence of a common 
authority (government)...for Hegel, civil society was a realm of 
individualism and self-interested behavior (the market)...

recent characterizations of civil society (I'm thinking specifically of Alan
Wolfe here) posit it as a "third force" between market and government...
consisting of family, community customs, friendship rituals, mutual
concerns, civil society apparently offers human ties that make life
tolerable...according to Wolfe, where either market or government begins
to replace civil society, there occurs a loss of moral agency and a
weakening of social solidarity...Wolfe cites family breakdown in the US
resulting from invasion of commercial values at the expense of mutual
commitment and Scandinavian children and elderly becoming wards of an
impersonal bureaucracy to defend his thesis...

Jean Elshtain offers a different take on the public/private split...she
suggests that the 18th century epistemological emphasis on this split
was a patriarchal doctrine...she then argues for an understanding of
the relationship between private and public realms...opposing 
ideologies that abolish the private sphere by picturing life as
entirely bound up with questions of race, class, and gender, she argues
that we are creatures of family, shared language, and community...
we are neither products of a socially determined role structure (I
guess she's taking on what she considers to be Marxism here), nor are we
free agents inventing our own lives in isolation from others (so much
for Friedman as well)...Elshtain points to such "forces" as self-
reflection, instinctual urges, emotional ties to others, and
variations that time bring to life...ultimately, the family is the
crucial institution in which private and public realms meet...her
"maternal" feminism leads her to argue for finding a sense of roots
in one's personal life that allows for participation in public life...

I'm not advocating any of this stuff, just "thinkin' out loud"...Michael
Hoover


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