The Politics of Privacy
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document in English
political science
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published 03/06/2008
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Summary
Eastern European Communist regimes deemed it necessary to cultivate a high degree of state discipline in their societies. Much of the public life and social engagement of the populace operated through mechanisms of surveillance and control. Authors and scholars have argued that the regimes retained power through these measures. Milan Kundera, a twentieth-century Czech author who lived through Communism, portrays just such a post-World War II Czechoslovakia in his novel The Joke. His account suggests that Communist practices of ritualism, surveillance, and purges grew out of the larger contradiction between social equality and one-Party rule. Privacy and individualism were sacrificed at the altar of social equality; however, this notion of equality reified social class.
Table of Contents
- Fascism had ushered in an era in which hidden feelings of anti-Semitism.
- Until 1948 multiple opinions were given legitimate expression.
- Rituals were one important method of eliminating the public/private distiction.
- As individuals ceded their privacy in the service of collective action, the worth of the individual diminished in relation to the worth of his or her category.
- The irony of Communist Party rule in Czechoslovakia was that the social hierarchy was not necessarily upset but merely reversed.
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