Events

Event Description

“Defending the Democratic Backstage: Jeremy Bentham's Sotimion as a Critique of Surveillance” 

Kristen Collins, Senior Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University

While twenty-first century digital technologies have expanded our political possibilities today, they also subject us to unprecedented mass surveillance: from each other, from private companies, and from state governments around the world. Consequently, our digital political economy is often compared to a panopticon, the eighteenth-century architectural design infamously championed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham and criticized by Michel Foucault in his classic text, Discipline and Punish. The panopticon harnessed asymmetrical surveillance in the service of moral conformity and social order. Yet, Bentham was also a strong critic of social censure, targeting in particular the ascetic sexual norms that penalized homosexuality and illegitimate pregnancy. His criticisms of the sexual double standard inspired his vision for the Sotimion, a private residence where unmarried women could conceal their pregnancies and preserve their social reputations. Unlike Bentham's prison-panopticon project, the Sotimion would have included private cabins for each resident, a common room governed by the residents themselves (akin to a social club), and an "examination room,' which would have enabled the residents to observe potential visitors, including lovers and friends, without being seen by them, enabling privacy without isolation. I use what I call the "soteric principle" of visibility to build on Bentham's broader theory of public opinion and defend the value of practices of anonymity, secrecy, and privacy, to freedom and democracy today.