UC Berkeley

It is tempting to treat privacy either as an anti-social idea that separates people from social life — thus placing it towards the fringe of sociological scholarship — or as a historical anachronism that can scarcely survive in the computational age. In this dissertation, I develop an alternative perspective that firmly anchors the study of privacy in the sociological tradition and historicizes the emergence of privacy as a salient political logic in the United States.

Focusing on the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, I use the tools of historical sociology and computational social science to investigate the gradual diffusion and uneven institutionalization of the logic of privacy, and I identify the consequences and socio-historical significance of this transformation for the organization of American society and the exercise of informational power. I develop my argument based on a multi-method analysis that combines two years of research in federal, state, and municipal archives with the analysis of census micro-data and digitized government records, a computational study of historical text, and a social network analysis of legal citation patterns.

An initial theoretical chapter lays the conceptual groundwork by distinguishing the dichotomization of public and private from the historically contingent constitution of privacy; and it outlines three sociological anchors of my argument: To study privacy as an emerging political logic suggests an analytical focus on episodes of contestation, on the practices of institutions and institutional actors, and on the entanglement of privacy and informational power with moralized, gendered, and racialized conceptions of the social order. Four empirical chapters then analyze the diffusion and institutionalization of privacy in empirically distinct theaters of world-making, focusing respectively on U.S. public discourse, urban reform movements and municipal legislation during the Progressive Era, American jurisprudence about the “right to privacy”, and privacy governance within the expanding bureaucratic state.

1 I show (1) that the language of privacy carried a relatively stable meaning but gradually diffused into new domains of public discourse as it was applied to emerging social problems and invoked to comprehend and contest new technologies; (2) that tenement reform advocates incorporated demands for privacy into their political agenda and exploited local political opportunity structures to prevail in legislative battles, encoding a distinctly middle-class conception of familial privacy in tenement regulation and in the urban architecture of working-class neighborhoods; (3) that the right to privacy first gained a foothold in U.S. jurisprudence as an attempt to reign in the collection of personal information by non-state actors, but that it was ultimately consecrated by federal courts as a state-centric and constitutionally-grounded right after two decades of intra-judicial interpretive struggles over legal meaning and precedent; and (4) that the many-handed American state relied on a complex patchwork of exceptions to make the exercise of informational power compatible with expectations of — and institutional commitments to — privacy, thereby producing an uneven landscape of legibility that left some types of information and some populations uniquely exposed to the official gaze. As I show in the conclusion, legal codification and organizational path dependencies have allowed some of these historical changes to cast a shadow into the present day.

Each chapter yields historically bounded and empirically grounded conclusions about the diffusion and institutionalization of privacy as a political logic that remain attuned to the exigencies of specific situations and institutional circumstance. Collectively, they draw attention to the years between 1870 and 1930 as a period of transformative change that elevated the salience and social significance of privacy within the institutional infrastructure of American society. They document processes of institutionalization that settled struggles in the political domain and insulated political priorities against recurring challenges; they demonstrate the encoding of moral imaginaries and political ideologies in the language of spatial and informational privacy; they identify the routine use of exceptions as a central feature of bureaucratic rule and an important dimension of the uneven development of the so-called “new American state”; and they draw attention to the partial and selective application of privacy to a diverse populace.

This has several larger implications for the study of privacy and informational power. First, I add to an evolving sociological literature that has begun to reclaim privacy from legal historians and moral philosophers, treating it as a proper object of sociological inquiry and linking it to long-standing sociological debates about power, inequality, and the self/society relationship. Second, I provide a corrective to accounts that treat privacy norms as a straightforward expression of technological circumstance and lament the death of privacy in the twenty-first century. Third, I stake an analytical claim about the contextuality of privacy and the benefits of middle-range inquiry. Instead of searching for universal definitions or shared essences, sociologists can study the piecemeal constitution of abstract concepts (like privacy) in specific settings, focusing on the micro-social foundations of macro-social trends and on the amalgamation and sublimation through which varied discourses and proto-boundaries are assembled into a minimally coherent whole.