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Foreword. <p>I. Introduction.</p> <p>1. Discourses on privacy.</p> <p>2. Privacy: conceptual clarifications.</p> <p>3. The framework of liberal democracy.</p> <p>4. Cultural differences: autonomy and authenticity.</p> <p>5. A comment on the method.</p> <p>6. Privacy and autonomy: the line of argument.</p> <p>II. Equal Freedom, Equal Privacy.</p> <p>On the Critique of the Liberal Tradition.</p> <p>1. Head or heart: contradictions in the liberal concept of privacy.</p> <p>2. The feminist critique.</p> <p>3. Three classics of liberal thought: Locke, Mill and Rawls.</p> <p>4. Equality and difference between the sexes.</p> <p>Parenthesis: On the debate over equality and difference.</p> <p>5. Equal freedom, equal privacy.</p> <p>III. Freedom, Privacy and Autonomy.</p> <p>1. Introduction.</p> <p>2. A general concept of freedom.</p> <p>3. Freedom and autonomy.</p> <p>Authenticity and identification.</p> <p>Parenthesis: On the concept of authenticity.</p> <p>The genesis of desires and autonomy as habitus.</p> <p>Goals and projects.</p> <p>4. Why do we value privacy?.</p> <p>5. Privacy and autonomy.</p> <p>IV. The Three Dimensions of Privacy.</p> <p>1. Decisional privacy: scope for action and decisions.</p> <p>1.1. Private matters and freedom for decisions.</p> <p>Parenthesis: abortion and the right to decisional privacy (Roe vs. Wade).</p> <p>1.2. Decisional privacy and autonomy (1): the communitarian critique.</p> <p>1.3. Decisional privacy and autonomy (2): the feminist critique.</p> <p>1.4. What sort of freedom is protected by privacy?.</p> <p>2. Informational privacy: limits to knowledge.</p> <p>2.1. Expectations: what do other people know about me?.</p> <p>2.2. Informational privacy and unspecified others: the Panopticon.</p> <p>2.3. Informational privacy and specified others: collusions, friendships and intimate relations.</p> <p>2.4. Expectations, knowledge, autonomy.</p> <p>3. Local privacy: the private home.</p> <p>3.1. The refuge of privacy.</p> <p>3.2. A room of one's own: self-invention, self-presentation and autonomy.</p> <p>3.3. Privacy and the family: love and justice.</p> <p>V. Interfaces: Public and Private.</p> <p>1. Interfaces and ambivalences.</p> <p>2. Exposure: the staging of privacy in the public realm.</p> <p>3. Concealment: the protection of the public realm from private matters.</p> <p>4. The private and the public person: dissonant identities</p>

<b>Beate Rössler</b> is Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam.

This new book by Beate Rössler is a work of real quality and originality on an extremely topical issue: the issue of privacy and the relations between the private and the public. <br /> <p><br /> </p> <p>Rössler investigates the reasons why we value privacy and why we ought to value it. In the context of modern, liberal societies, Rössler develops a theory of the private which links privacy and autonomy in a constitutive way: privacy is a necessary condition to lead an autonomous life. The book develops a theory of freedom and autonomy which sees the ability to pose the “practical question” of how one wants to live, of what a person strives to be, at the centre of the modern idea of autonomy.<br /> </p> <p><br /> </p> <p>The question of privacy is emerging as an increasingly important topic in social and political theory and is central to many current debates in law, the media and politics. <i>The Value of Privacy</i> will be widely recognised to be a classic contribution to the subject.</p>

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