Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

Concerns about capitalism’s tendency to discourage the constitution of a public world and simultaneously to encourage a retreat into privacy emerge almost as soon as capitalism becomes the dominant socioeconomic system in the world. In The Social Contract (which he wrote in 1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau laments the destructive effect of the turn away from public service. Though he doesn’t associate this effect directly with capitalism, he does lay out the alternative to participation in the public world in pecuniary terms. He notes, “As soon as public service ceases to be the Citizens’ principal business, and they prefer to serve with their purse rather than with their person, the State is already close to ruin.”¹ As capitalism has developed since Rousseau’s epoch, this tendency toward privatization has grown exponentially and today threatens the very existence of public space or of a commons.

The increasing privatization that has occurred after capitalism’s emergence is a direct product of the logic of capitalism. The more subjects become subjects of capitalism, the more they turn away from public space and seek refuge in their private worlds. Even when capitalism requires that subjects interact with each other in relations of production, distribution, and consumption, it demands that they do so as private beings. The philosophical proponents of capitalism inevitably tout this as a great benefit of the system. Rather than relying on a concern for the public world, it produces a society that succeeds solely on the basis of individuals pursuing their private interest.

What distinguishes the public world from private worlds is the absence of constraint on who can enter into it. Public spaces do not have fences to keep people out, and public forums do not bar anyone from participating. We create private worlds through the act of exclusion: private property is available only to its owners; private clubs are reserved only for members; and private discussions occur among an isolated few. Capitalism doesn’t create privacy, but the development of capitalism necessarily coincides with an increasing turn to private worlds. The system has its basis in private property, and the public world implicitly calls this basis into question.2

The absence of public space is not simply a problem for the lower classes that cannot afford entry into amusement parks where their children can play or gated neighborhoods where they take a stroll without worrying about violence. The privatization of the commons also represents a retreat from subjectivity itself and from the way the subject satisfies itself. The subject is inherently a public being: its subjectivity forms through its interaction with the desire of the Other. Without this interaction, there would be no subject at all. But capitalism obscures the role the Other has in forming the subject and works to convince the subject that it exists first and foremost as a private being and that public interactions occur only on the basis of this privacy.

In other words, capitalism reverses the actual chronological relationship of public and private. The subject first comes into existence as a public being and subsequently establishes a private world in which it shields itself from the public and fantasizes its isolation from others. The public world gives the subject its desire and forms the subject through subjecting it to the signifier. There is no subject prior to the human animal’s interaction with the public world, and the purely private subject is nothing but a capitalist fantasy.

Though Ludwig Wittgenstein did not imagine himself an anticapitalist philosopher, his critique of the idea of a private language in the Philosophical Investigations is actually an attack on this capitalist fantasy. Wittgenstein’s aim with his discussion of language in this work is to show that language itself is inherently public, that we don’t use language as a vehicle for expressing private thoughts that exist prior to or outside of language. Instead, public language provides the basis for the private thoughts that seem to exist independently of it. There can be no private language, Wittgenstin argues, because language depends on rules, and rules make sense only as a public phenomenon.

Wittgenstein contends that the fact that we view people as following rules when they use a language proves that we view them as public beings and language as a public structure. One cannot imagine someone following a rule privately: there would be no way to distinguish whether the person was following the rule or not since there would be no other arbiter of rule-following than the person herself or himself. In his analysis of Wittgenstein’s private language argument, Saul Kripke points out, “if one person is considered in isolation, the notion of a rule as guiding the person who adopts it can have no substantive content.”3 Language depends on rules, and rules always imply a public. Thus, the speaking subject begins as a public subject, which is why we can judge whether or not this subject correctly follows the rules of the language it uses. If the subject were first a private being and only secondarily a public one, we could not judge the subject’s relationship to the rules of language. The fact that we do reveals that we view the subject as a public being even as capitalism tries to convince us of its private status.

What’s more, the satisfaction of the subject depends on its exposure to the public. The public world disturbs the psychic equilibrium of the subject, but this disturbance is the source of the subject’s satisfaction. It inaugurates subjectivity by installing an obstacle for the subject that begins its desiring. The subject experiences the obstacle as a barrier to its desire, but it is this obstacle that constitutes the desiring subject. The subject depends on the public world for the obstacle that enables it to desire, even though this obstacle at the same time makes the subject’s desire impossible to realize.

It seems counterintuitive to say that our satisfaction depends on the obstacle to our desire. But the counterintuitive status of this claim testifies to the extent of our investment in the priority of privacy. When we imagine ourselves as essentially private beings, we view the public world as a threat to the realization of our desire. This view leads one to safeguard one’s privacy. But if we view the object as a necessary obstacle that provides us satisfaction only as long as it remains as obstacle, we will commit ourselves to the public world and the encounter with the other qua obstacle that occurs in that world.

In order to understand the division between public and private space, Rousseau distinguishes between two forms of subjectivity—homme and citoyen. An homme is a figure of the private world who pursues self-interest and neglects wider concerns, while a citoyen is devoted to the public world and interacts in that world. Though Rousseau has fears about the homme completely eclipsing the citoyen, it is not until the twentieth century that the threat to the public world becomes dire and seemingly irreversible. The first philosopher to pay attention to this threat was Hannah Arendt, who, in The Human Condition, chronicles what she calls the evanescence of action and work at the expense of labor.4 For Arendt, labor occurs exclusively in the private realm and concerns only the reproduction of life. Because it confines itself to private reproduction, labor has no creative power.⁵ Work, in contrast, creates a public world, and action represents political engagement in this world. When labor becomes our privileged or even sole mode of being, we lose these creative possibilities.

The critique of the disappearance of the citoyen becomes even more pronounced in the work of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière.⁶ Both Agamben and Rancière notice an evanescence of politics in the contemporary world. The protection and reproduction of life—what Arendt calls labor—has invaded and subsumed the realm of politics. As Agamben points out in numerous works, a zone of indistinction between life and politics has arisen. He claims, “our private biological body has become indistinguishable from our body politic, experiences that once used to be called political suddenly were confined to our biological body, and private experiences present themselves all of a sudden outside us as body politic.”⁷ The transformation of politics into private concerns about life and the body is the elimination of politics proper. The homme comes to replace the citoyen completely, and with the disappearance of the citoyen we enter into a world dominated by privacy and bereft of public space.

This transformation is not simply a cultural transformation, a product of changing social mores. It is intrinsically connected to the development of capitalism. The premise of the capitalist economy is that the subject is fundamentally an homme and only secondarily a citoyen. Concern for one’s private interest always trumps concern for the public world, and one becomes involved in public matters only to safeguard private interest, like the homeowners who protest the construction of a nuclear power plant because it would threaten their property values. The capitalist system encourages elevation of privacy as the only real concern, and it thus leads to the elimination of politics as such.

Capitalist economists, whatever their specific orientation, accurately identify the system’s reliance on private interest and its opposition to the public world. As a field, economy limits its judgments on why people pursue the ends that they do and focuses on what they do. According to the foundational axiom of capitalist economics, people act as they desire. But this desire is always conceived as the desire for the advancement of private interest. From Adam Smith to the leading current capitalist economists, the pursuit of private interest has remained the governing explanation for human behavior. Smith famously claims, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”8 Capitalism works through its reliance on private interest and its disdain for the public world, which takes care of itself when we allow private interest free reign.

The public world is at best a beneficent by-product and at worst an intransigent barrier to capitalist production. According to the theoretical champions of capitalism, this world has no independent existence because no one acts on its behalf. When people enter the public world, it is in order to advance their self-interest and affect changes in their private world, which is the only world that really counts. Capitalism disregards the public world because this world is not where our interest lies.

Capitalism only functions properly, however, when we accede to the self-interestedness of human nature. This is a claim that almost every capitalist economist repeats. For instance, in his Principles of Economics, marginal utility theorist Carl Menger argues, “every individual will attempt to secure his own requirements as completely as possible to the exclusion of others.”⁹ When capitalism runs as smoothly as it can, this pursuit of private requirements leads to the gratification of the requirements of others. Serving one’s private interest benefits the public good.

Even as behavioral economists have recently begun to correct the dogmatism of rational choice theory and insist on the limits of the human pursuit of maximal self-interest or utility, the underlying assumptions of the driving forces of economic activity remain relatively the same. If choices cease to be completely rational, private self-interest is nonetheless the foundational point of departure. The behavioral revolution is less a revolution than a reform designed to keep the system—or at least our ways of understanding the system—afloat.

The rational choice theorist contends that individuals act according to the dictates of private interest. If we look at behavioral economist Richard Thaler’s modification of rational choice theory, we can see how the underlying assumption of private self-interest remains the same. Thaler concludes his purportedly revolutionary The Winner’s Curse with an argument for a new way of accounting for economic activity. He says, “rational models tend to be simple and elegant with precise predictions, while behavioral models tend to be complicated, and messy, with much vaguer predictions. But, look at it this way. Would you rather be elegant and precisely wrong, or messy and vaguely right?”10 Thaler and other behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman challenge our capacity for choosing rationally where our private self-interest lies, but they don’t challenge the idea of private self-interest itself. This idea is implicit within the capitalist system and not just the product of some wrongheaded economists. If one invests oneself in the exigencies of the capitalist economy, one necessarily sees some form of self-interest as the motivating factor in life.

Thinking of ourselves as private and self-interested beings may seem unflattering, but at the same time, it enables us to avoid confronting the intrusion of the public world in our own satisfaction. The trauma manifested in the neighbor is the trauma of our own subjectivity that refuses to allow us to pursue our self-interest, no matter how diligently we commit ourselves to this project. The great deception of the capitalist system is that it convinces us that we are self-interested beings when we are in fact beings devoted to imperiling and even destroying our self-interest.

Capitalism and its defenders take pride in admitting that capitalism assumes the worst in people and then takes advantage of their baseness to develop widespread social prosperity. But capitalism’s success doesn’t stem from its brutal honesty about the human psyche. Subjects adhere to it so fervently because it protects them from confronting the traumatic nature of their mode of obtaining satisfaction. Capitalism’s picture of the psyche is actually too flattering, not too pessimistic. Capitalism allows us to believe that we find satisfaction in what we successfully accumulate and not in our unending pursuit of failure.

The theorists of capitalism envision the development of social interaction, but this interaction remains just an extension of private self-interest. There is no public world—and no public space—in the capitalist world that they theorize because capitalism constantly works against the formation of this world. Capitalism’s allergy to the public world inspires a thoroughgoing retreat from this world. This retreat manifests itself in massive privatization.

The contemporary impulse to privatize public areas is widespread: it manifests itself in the call to sell publicly owned land, to create privately owned and maintained roads, to build private prisons, to construct gated communities, and, in the most general terms, to privilege “austerity” in public finances. The worldwide response to the financial crisis of 2008 cogently reveals the extent of today’s obsession with privacy, especially when we contrast it with Franklin Roosevelt’s reaction to the Great Depression. Though there were attempts to use government money to stimulate economic growth and rescue the economy, these efforts were often inadequate and reflected a clear bias against public investment. Rather than committing substantial resources to the development of a national rail system or alternative energy plants, Barack Obama’s stimulus package of 2009 had no broad public aims and included large expenses for tax cuts, a private rather than a public stimulus focused on increasing consumption.11 This is an indication of the increased hold that capitalist thinking has on the world today.

But even Barack Obama’s minimal gesture toward public investment met with severe criticism and occasioned an exaggerated concern with budget deficits. This same concern prompted the austerity movement in European countries as well, where leaders cut spending on public projects. The ostensible line of thought behind these cuts was that public debt was responsible for the economic crisis, when it was clear that the turn to privacy and away from public oversight was the culprit. The fact that private speculation, not government spending, occasioned the crisis disappeared beneath the apotheosis of privacy that followed the crisis. It was as if privacy, so self-evidently a good, couldn’t possibly be to blame. As a result, the cause of the financial crisis—less investment in the public world—becomes the solution to it. Such Bizarro World thinking reveals not that people are easily manipulated but the extent to which the investment in privacy dominates our thinking today. We can’t imagine that privacy might be the problem, nor can we imagine that a greater commitment to the public world might be the solution. But this degree of investment in privacy has not always been the case within the capitalist system.

Despite capitalism’s inherent tendency toward privacy, the emergence of capitalism coincided with an unprecedented creation of public space and an explosion of the public sphere of political contestation. Though such space existed in classical Greece and other societies, it is only in capitalist modernity that public space and the public sphere loses the restrictiveness that characterizes it in its past manifestations. That is, the bourgeois public sphere is open, at least theoretically, to anyone who desires to enter into it. This is what Jürgen Habermas celebrates—and then laments its decline—in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.12 Though Habermas is not an apologist for capitalism, he does see its initial benefit for the development of a public. He claims, “Bourgeois culture was not mere ideology. The rational-critical debate of private people in the salons, clubs, and reading societies was not directly subject to the cycle of production and consumption, that is, to the dictates of life’s necessities. Even in its merely literary form (of self-elucidation of the novel experiences of subjectivity) it possessed instead a ‘political’ character in the Greek sense of being emancipated from the constraints of survival requirements.”¹³ The emergence of public sites for political discussion did not haphazardly coincide with capitalism’s rise to dominance. The two are intricately related. Capitalism leads to the development of a public world because it necessitates interaction in the form of exchange.

Though capitalism and its defenders constitute exchange as a private matter between individuals, the process of exchange tends, at least initially, to produce a public world in which exchange can occur.¹⁴ This public world brings subjects into contact with each other and creates the political debate Habermas celebrates. But the public world of nascent capitalist society remains only a side effect of capitalist relations of production rather than an intrinsic necessity. That is to say, the structure of capitalist exchange leads to the formation of public space but doesn’t necessitate that space. If exchange could occur uninterrupted without any public world, then this world would not form.

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas laments the disintegration of this sphere, but he doesn’t try to explain this transformation in terms of changes within capitalism itself. Nonetheless, capitalism itself does change during the time of the disintegration of the public sphere. The most significant shift in the nature of capitalism occurs gradually, but most dramatically, at the end of the nineteenth century. Whereas early capitalism focuses on the act of production and the creation of dedicated laborers, twentieth-century capitalism creates consumers. Twentieth-century subjects of capitalism don’t consume in order to work like their forebears, but rather work in order to consume. When consumption—an ostensibly private activity—becomes one’s end, public space and public discussion cease to be a primary concern. The subject can consume in private, and as consumption becomes the only social preoccupation, public space becomes increasingly rare. Private spaces that provide arenas for consumption, like shopping malls, come to function as ersatz public spaces. The problem with these ersatz public spaces is that the rules of privacy apply there, in contrast to genuine public spaces. The private security forces of a mall can police political discussion, squelch dissent, and prohibit collective association without any repercussions whatsoever.15 The public police force cannot act in this way in public space. Though there are countless examples of public police forces squelching dissent, they typically must keep up the appearance of respecting the right to dissent, which is what private security forces can disregard. Here appearances matter because they effectively sustain the freedom of the public world.

Many of the cultural theorists who lament the recent decline of a public space link this decline either directly or indirectly to the predominance of consumerism. Sociologist Robert Putnam, for instance, views the turn away from the public world as a consequence of a specific form of consumption—television watching. In his celebrated account of rampant privatization in Bowling Alone, he claims, “More television watching means less of virtually every form of civic participation and social involvement.”¹⁶ The consumption of television and video images appeals to contemporary subjects in a way that “civic participation” cannot. It allows subjects to bypass the possibility of trauma that arises from public encounters and to live within the safety of the private world. This is what Christopher Lasch labels the “culture of narcissism,” a culture in which public life becomes anathema and “consumption promises to fill the aching void.”¹⁷ For theorists such as Putnam and Lasch, consumption carries with it an automatic identification with privacy.

But to lay the blame on consumption for the decline of the public world would be to proceed too quickly. Certainly capitalism depends on consumption, and consumption occurs in private transactions. With the advent of the Internet, consumption can become even more private: one need not leave one’s home in order to consume as much as one wants, and one need not even rely on the public mail system to receive one’s new commodities. But consumption retains a public dimension insofar as one consumes in order to make an impression on the Other. Though there are commodities that subjects buy for completely private consumption, most have a clear public effect. A designer dress, an iPhone, a minivan, even a cup of Starbucks coffee—these popular objects owe their popularity to the effects that they have on the public. We consume in order to be thought of in a certain way. I am the kind of person who drives a minivan, while you are the kind that wears a designer dress. The private purchase of the commodity speaks to the public that it ostensibly avoids.

From its inception, psychoanalysis has taken the side of the individual subject in this subject’s struggle against the demands of civilization. In this sense, it seems to be a certified opponent of the public world. Neurosis, as understood by psychoanalysis, is nothing other than the price the subject pays for its submission to the demands made by the social order. The neurotic symptom emerges out of the subject’s refusal to submit completely.18 In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud goes so far as to wonder if entrance into society as such represents a good deal for the individual. He sees that the pleasure principle might be easier to fulfill without social restrictions. Freud notes, “In the developmental process of the individual, the programme of the pleasure principle, which consists in finding the satisfaction of happiness, is retained as the main aim. Integration in, or adaptation to, a human community appears as a scarcely avoidable condition which must be fulfilled before this aim of happiness can be achieved. If it could be done without that condition, it would perhaps be preferable.”¹⁹ In the end, Freud does not believe it possible to do without social restrictions altogether, even if, from some perspective, that might be “preferable.”

If psychoanalysis emerges out of the suffering that integration into the social order causes, it also reveals how the subject’s satisfaction depends on the public world that appears to thwart this satisfaction. This idea, as much as any other, forms the basis for psychoanalytic practice. Unlike philosophers like Descartes or Kant, Freud doesn’t believe that one can arrive at the truth of one’s being through private introspection. It is only when one is in public and talking to others that one reveals this truth. This is why others know us better than we know ourselves, even when we try to maintain a hidden inwardness that we reveal to no one. In order to interact with others, we must constantly pay attention not to what they say explicitly but to the desire that their words express in the act of concealing.²⁰ We constantly read the unconscious truth of those with whom we interact. No amount of introspection can replace public interaction for the revelation of truth.

Psychoanalysis eschews the possibility of self-analysis for precisely this reason. Although Freud claims to have performed a self-analysis, and even published the results, he doesn’t develop this as a general practice or possibility. In fact, Jacques Lacan calls Freud’s self-analysis the “original sin” of psychoanalysis. Self-analysis is impossible because it remains within the domain of privacy, a domain predominated by narcissistic illusion and imaginary ideals. Private analysis or self-reflection always obeys the restrictions of consciousness and never allows the disturbance of the unconscious to manifest itself. We might go so far as to seek our unconscious introspectively, but it will always remain one step ahead of our conscious self-reflection. A disturbance that we seek is never a disturbance. In public interactions, however, one often does encounter the unconscious. It erupts all the time and forces us to engage in a constant quasi psychoanalysis of each other just to navigate our daily life.

When we practice self-reflection, we pay attention to our conscious intentions rather than to the signifiers that we employ unconsciously. To psychoanalyze oneself is to fall further into one’s private self-deception. Psychoanalysis requires the analyst to act as the point of connection to the public world. The lack of a face-to-face encounter in the psychoanalytic session is simultaneously an abandonment of private intimacy. The patient speaks to a public and not a private desire. This association of psychoanalysis with the public world places it at odds with the demands of capitalism.

The psychoanalytic session—and this distinguishes it, more than anything else, from other forms of therapy—occurs in a public space. Even though psychoanalysts don’t typically go on television and give public accounts of their patients’ private lives, the act of analysis itself is public in the sense that it publicizes what the patient would prefer to have remain private. In the act of analysis, the patient confronts a public and articulates its desire through this confrontation. The analyst stands in for the desire of the public, and the subject discovers its desire through the encounter with this desire of the Other.21 By assisting the subject in discovering and naming its own desire, psychoanalysis hopes to lead the subject to a changed relation with its object. Subjects come to psychoanalysis without knowing the truth of their desire, and they leave, hopefully, recognizing that the satisfaction of desiring derives from the obstacle rather than from overcoming it.

This is the recognition that the logic of capitalism spares the subject. The capitalist subject views the trauma of the public encounter as a temporary barrier on the path to an immersion in the complete satisfaction of privacy. The capitalist subject enters the public world—by, say, driving on public roads—in order to arrive at a shopping mall where it can purchase a potentially satisfying object of desire and then return to enjoy that object in private. Satisfaction, for the capitalist subject, resides in the private realm because this is a realm where one can have the object without the barrier that exists in public.

Psychoanalysis provides a different relationship to the object. The capitalist subject imagines itself dissatisfied because it imagines itself constantly overcoming obstacles to arrive at the object, but in fact the obstacles are the object. If the subject can recognize its satisfaction in its obstacle, then the public world undergoes a dramatic transformation. Rather than seeking an object in this world and retreating with the object into one’s private oasis, one must embrace the public world as the site of the obstacle. Without the public qua obstacle, the subject would lose its ability to satisfy itself, which is why capitalism’s hostility to the public world itself is not sincere. But the subject has the ability to recognize the public obstacle to the realization of its desire as the source of its satisfaction.²²

The changed attitude toward the obstacle permits the subject to find satisfaction where it formerly saw only dissatisfaction. The barrier to the satisfaction that capitalism posits transforms into the source of the satisfaction for the subject. Satisfaction in the obstacle replaces an unending and dissatisfying pursuit. The subject overcomes the constitutive dissatisfaction that capitalism requires by transforming the relation to the obstacle. The subject that finds satisfaction in the obstacle doesn’t fit well into the role of the capitalist producer or consumer.

Our desire moves metonymically from object to object without ever successfully obtaining satisfaction in the object that it seeks. Each time that I obtain an object of desire, I quickly find this object dissatisfying and move on to another object. This is because of the key distinction between the object of desire and the object that causes desire (or what makes the object of desire desirable). The object that arouses my desire is not the object of desire itself but what prevents me from obtaining this object, the barrier to an experience of the object’s complete abundance.23 Desire depends on the obstacle, but the capitalist subject doesn’t recognize this dependence and instead imagines that the obstacle is only there to be surpassed. This inability to recognize the necessity of the obstacle produces the capitalist subject’s hostility to the public world, which is the obstacle as such, the obstacle that causes the subject to emerge.

While adhering to the logic of capitalism, the subject doesn’t grasp the constitutive role of the limit. It is the difference between the Coke that I drink and the can that limits the amount of Coke that I have. This limit constitutes the Coke as desirable, and as a barrier, it functions as the object-cause of my desire. When I have the object of desire without the object-cause, without the limit that prevents me from fully having it, I cease to desire the object of desire, and it becomes a normal empirical object. If I could drink an unlimited amount of Coke at any time, I would simply cease to desire it.²⁴ It is not only the can but also concerns about health, caloric intake, and propriety that serves as obstacles to this unbridled consumption. The fact that I would become obese if I drank two liters of Coke per day institutes even the desire for a small bottle. The object-cause of desire—that is, the obstacle to the object of desire—renders the latter sublime and thus desirable. But the capitalist subject remains blind to the constitutive role of the obstacle and thus remains resistant to venturing out into the public world where obstacles abound.

Psychoanalysis reveals, in contrast, that the subject’s satisfaction derives from the repetition of the failure to obtain the object, and the subject who recognizes the form of its satisfaction can see the necessity of the public world, which is the site of the subject’s original loss. The satisfaction of the subject does not reside in what it accumulates but in its repeated failures to accumulate. Though the capitalist subject sees itself as avoiding repetition by moving from object to object, this subject repeats the same trajectory without knowing it. Even though the object changes, the failure remains the same. The capitalist subject, just like every subject, finds satisfaction in failure. It is just that the capitalist subject doesn’t recognize the form of its own satisfaction. But this misrecognition can have dramatic effects on the structure of the social order.

As Doinel arrives at the ocean, Truffaut turns the tables on the spectator with a closing shot that is almost unprecedented in its audacity. Rather than finding freedom at the shore or the realization of his desire as the spectator expects, Doinel encounters the ocean as an obstacle that forces him to turn back toward the public world he has fled throughout the film. In the final shot, Truffaut follows Doinel to the water’s edge, and the film ends with a freeze-frame of Doinel as he turns around and returns to the world. This is one of the key scenes in Truffaut’s filmmaking career because it clearly depicts the move from seeking the satisfying object to finding the necessity of the obstacle and its ramifications for the public world. The subject that recognizes the necessity of the obstacle, like Doinel at the end of Les quatre cents coups, no longer flees the public but opens itself to the public world, which is what Truffaut suggests with the turn back toward the world in the final shot. This subject recognizes that there is nothing beyond the public world and that its satisfaction can only be found through this obstacle, not by escaping it.25

The totalitarianisms of the twentieth century seem to bespeak the dangers of the public world that eclipses all privacy. Under Stalinism one could have no private life that might not at any moment become a public crime. Stalinism’s universal suspicion appears to be the nefarious result of its complete elimination of privacy. Private dissent became implicitly public and treasonous—and thus punishable with the gulag or death. If capitalism has a tendency toward privatization, at least it saves us from the totalitarian rule that renders everything public. One might, along these lines, interpret the contemporary turn toward privatization as a response to a ruthless totalitarian rule that forced every bit of privacy under public scrutiny.

But as Hannah Arendt makes clear in her famous study of Nazism and Stalinism, these systems did not develop out of an embrace of universalized public space but rather out of a profound commitment to privacy. This is a point in Origins of Totalitarianism that few subsequent thinkers have noticed, but it fits within Arendt’s critique of privacy developed in other works. For this reason, it is perhaps the key insight of her analysis. As Arendt describes how totalitarian rule emerges, she claims, “Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives.”²⁶ It is precisely the attempt to cling to one’s private world and avoid the public that nourishes the totalitarian impulse that wipes out all privacy. A commitment to the public world itself sustains the private world as the product of the former.