The Logic of Privacy, Transparency, and Self- Governance

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Transparency" is the constant refrain of democratic politics, a promised aid to accountability and integrity in public life. Secrecy is stigmatized as a work of corruption, tolerable (if at all) by a compromise of democratic principles. My dissertation challenges both ideas. It argues that secrecy and transparency are best understood as complementary, not contradictory, practices. And it develops a normative account of liberal democratic politics in which (qualified) duties of transparency coexist with (qualified) permissions to act behind closed doors. The project begins with some history. I show that the language of transparency gained currency only in the last quarter century, and explain how its proximate sources promote three dubious assumptions-that disclosure should in principle be maximized, that it prevents misrule more or less automatically, and that its value is either instrumental, or rooted in a reductive notion of democracy as the rule of popular opinion.