Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Abstract
The English word private comes from the Latin privatus meaning "withdrawn
from public life, deprived of office, peculiar to oneself, or private,"
and which is itself the past participle otprivare, meaning "to bereave or to
deprive."
1 The Greek word idiotes means both "private person" and
"ignorant, ill-informed person" and is derived from idios meaning both
"private" and "peculiar" and which gives us the English idiot and
idiosyncrasy.
2
Hannah Arendt has suggested that a large part of what we consider the
private and intimate realm was held by the classical Greeks to be the sphere
of mere necessity and material dependence.
3 A citizen of classical Athens
had to leave the family and household and enter the public realm the
polis in order to achieve freedom and the realization of his human
potential.
4 Arendt's view has been criticized recently, but even her critic
concedes that life as a member of the polis was primary. "One's existence,
one's values, one's fulfillment as a member of the human species was
dependent on being a member of the polis."
5
All of this suggests that the classical civilizations had an idea of
privacy that is foreign to ours today. They devoted a lot of attention to the
question of what constitutes the good life. Yet they assigned a modest role
to privacy as a part of life. Certainly consideration of the ancients does not
require us to throw over our own understanding of privacy. It should bring
us to give some thought to it as a value in modern life.published or submitted for publicatio
