Podcast #321: The Demise of Private Life

Introduction

I’m Iona Italia, your host this week. My guest today is the historian Tiffany Jenkins, the author of the book Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. It’s not a long book, but it covers a lot of ground both historically and philosophically. Among other subjects, we talk about the evolution of the notion of a private sphere from the times of Ancient Greece to the Victorian era; about the origin of the idea of freedom of conscience, born out of the necessity of respecting people’s diverse private religious beliefs—a hard-won right only attained after centuries of bloodshed—the role of technology both in securing privacy (as with the gummed envelope) and in violating it (starting with the Kodak camera); the fetishisation of identity; the notion that the personal is political and finally the speech policing of today, when, Tiffany argues, the important boundaries between private and public have largely dissolved. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Tiffany Jenkins.