The Dao of Privacy
The Dao of Privacy

Summary/Abstract: In her 2012 book Configuring the Networked Self, Julie Cohen examines the “rhetoric of liberty” underlying debates about privacy rights (as well as intellectual property), and concludes that there are “deep inadequacies in the conventional ways of thinking about information rights and architectures.” Privacy is a concept that consistently eludes definition, reliant as it is upon the vagaries of human psychology and assumptions about the nature of selfhood and its relationship with the outside world. As Cohen points out, however, legal analysis of privacy tends to reduce the issue either to economic analysis or a normative theory of rights. Cohen asserts this tendency is deeply rooted, to its detriment, in “the ideological commitments of liberal political theory,” which in turn has its origins in “a tradition of Enlightenment rationalism extending from Kant to Weber to Habermas and Rawls.”

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