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The Limiting Principle: How Privacy Became a Public Issue
Author(s): Martin Eiermann (Author)
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication Date: July 29, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 360 pages
- ISBN-10: 0231218885
- ISBN-13: 9780231218887
Book Description
Martin Eiermann traces the transformation of privacy from a set of informal cultural norms into a potent political issue. Around the turn of the twentieth century, in a nation that was searching for order amid rapid change and frequent moral panics about the ills of modern life, privacy spoke to emerging social problems and new technological realities. During this tumultuous period, political mobilization and judicial contestation shaped a legal, institutional, and administrative privacy architecture that has partly endured into the twenty-first century. Eiermann rebuts the claim that technological change renders privacy obsolete, demonstrating that the concept became increasingly capacious when it was applied to the social problems and political disputes of the information age. And he shows that it is often the selectivity―not the ubiquity―of governmental and corporate data collection that should elicit our concerns.
Drawing on rich archival materials and computational research methods,
The Limiting Principle provides a deeply original sociological account of the history, social significance, and limitations of privacy in the modern United States.Editorial Reviews
Review
“What should be known? By whom? For what purposes? As Martin Eiermann argues in this elegant and innovative analysis, “privacy” is not a settled legal concept but an evolving response to threats of urbanization, commercialization, and our dependence on the firms, professionals, and governments entrusted with our personal secrets.” — Elisabeth S. Clemens, author of
Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State“Martin Eiermann’s masterful study of the “Early Information Age” in America reveals how privacy evolved from a private concern into a public obsession, and how a “limiting principle” on state, corporate, and public surveillance became inscribed in jurisprudence, regulation, and urban space. An indispensable antidote against our presentist myopia.” — Marion Fourcade, coauthor of
The Ordinal Society“Rather than ask what privacy is or why it has vanished, Martin Eiermann provocatively reframes the question: how did privacy become foundational to political discussions and social debates, and then U.S. institutions and laws, in the first place? With stunning precision, he illuminates the early-twentieth-century emergence of the “privacy architecture” within which Americans still live.” — Sarah E. Igo, author of
The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America“One of the key strengths of the book is its methodological rigor….By foregrounding a critical orientation to how privacy has been (and continues to be) unevenly applied in US history, Eiermann offers a historically grounded framework for understanding the continued erosion of privacy in contemporary surveillance regimes.” ―
Surveillance and Society
