Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

In 1890, Samuel D. Warren II and Louis D. Brandeis published a Harvard Law Review article advancing the idea that individuals have a “right to privacy.” Their essay became a touchstone for countless twentieth-century legal rulings, including Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), a named precedent in Roe v. Wade (1973). As Justine S. Murison explains in Faith in Exposure, the Warren–Brandeis essay maintained that privacy deserves legal protection as a set of feelings bound up with marriage, domesticity, and one’s authentic self, a formulation that crystallized the tremendous value that Americans had come to give privacy over the previous century. This understanding of privacy was thoroughly secular, as it associated a person’s true self not with religion or the soul but with a sacrosanct domesticity and a complex yet self-contained individuality. Giving expression to long-simmering American cultural beliefs, the essay effectively codified privacy as “sacredness in a secular key” (210). Faith in Exposure elaborates on the Warren–Brandeis article in its final chapter, but readers who turn to that discussion first will grasp more quickly the still-relevant legal stakes of this book’s cultural and literary history of privacy. The book’s core argument is that under American secularism, privacy came to function as a powerful locus of meaning associated not simply with discrete spaces such as the home or church but with “an affect and a performance of an authentic—and authentically moral—self” (24). Building on Saba Mahmood’s claim that