RICHARD SENNETT
355
desire to retreat and make private the realm of feeling , intimate emotions
like those involved in sex remained exposed and judged in societal terms .
There are also three beliefs underlying modern
Gemeinschaft.
The first is
the intensification of the idea of immanent personality to such an extent
that the world becomes a narcissistic mirror of the self. The second is the be–
lief that the self is a protean phenomenon. The third is that this immanent ,
protean self interacts with others and creates the conviction of its own
existence by engaging in market transactions of self-revelation. In part,
then , twentieth-century personality is clearly a consequence of nineteenth–
century assumptions, but it is also significant that modern terms of per–
sonality coincide with the increasing bureaucratization of industrial society .
And the result of modern
Gemeinschaft
is that people unable to "find
themselves" become all-too-willing to abandon each other.
PRIVACY TRANSFORMED INTO INTIMACY
Today the phrase " the private family" seems to connote a single idea,
but until the eighteenth century privacy was not associated with family or
intimate life, but rather with secrecy and governmental privilege . There
have been numerous attempts to explain the union of privacy and family life
in
the modern period, the most notable and direct being that of Engels .
Because of the sterility of human relations in the productive system of capi–
talism, Engels argued, people concentrated their desires for full emotional
relations in a single sphere, the home, and tried to make this sphere pri–
vileged, exempt from the emptiness which pervaded office or factory.
Engels's idea of privatization supplements the movement which Tonnes per–
ceived in the larger society from
Gemeinschaft
to
Gesellshaft
relations ; in
sum, the family becomes a miniature
Gemeinschaft
in a largely alien world .
The term privatization has become a cliche today among those who
study and write about the family , and has taken on two overtones which ob–
scure its meaning. All too often writings on the private family (an isolated
nuclear family in form) assume that privatization can actually work : people
who want to go and hide can really do so . This is the assumption of the his–
torian Phillippe Aries and those of his school when they talk about the
family withdrawing from the world in modern times. Missing in this account
is a recognition that the social forces which divide work from family also in–
vade the family itself. If we do recognize the pervasive power of capitalism,
then we must think of the experience of privatization in the nineteenth–
century family as an attempt to make the family warm and snug against the
outside, but an attempt which constantly failed because the alien world
