The concept of privacy is central to public life in the United States. It is the fulcrum of countless conflicts over reproductive rights and consumer protection, the power of tech companies and the reach of state surveillance. How did privacy come to take on such import, and what have the consequences been for American institutions and society? 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.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction: Privacy for a New Age 1. Under the Eaves of the Home: Domestic Privacy and the Cultivation of Self 2. In the Glare of the Calcium: Privacy in the Early Information Age 3. The Chief Curse of the Tenement: Moral Anxieties and the Codification of Privacy in Urban Life 4. Inviolate Personalities: Individual Privacy in an Era of Informational Persons 5. A Modern Legal Fact: How Privacy Gained a Foothold in American Jurisprudence 6. Governance by Exception: Bureaucratic Rule and the Limits of Privacy Conclusion: Privacy in an Age of Surveillance Methodological Coda Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index