Is privacy compatible with a healthy society?
Surely so, we might answer. But the question is more complicated than it might seem.
Utopias are generally described as healthy societies. In Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), people enjoy excellent health. The narrator, Raphael Hythloday, a traveller who claims to have visited Utopia, reports that, ‘nowhere are people’s bodies more vigorous or less susceptible to disease’ (78).[1]
In The History of the Sevarambians (1675–9), the narrator describes the inhabitants as ‘strong’[2]:
[F]or the most part [they] enjoy a great degree of Health, which is owing partly to their Birth and Manner of living, and partly to their Gaiety and Liveliness of Disposition.
Hence, utopians are not automatically healthy. As in the utopia of the Sevarambians, social conditions, and reasonable efforts to exercise and live moderately result in good health.
Utopia is never perfect, but a place where, mainly on account of good governance and circumstances, life is better.
However, many such healthy utopian societies also have limited privacy. In More’s Utopia, both privacy and private property have been abolished:
Every house has a front door to the street and a back door to the garden. The double doors, which open easily with a push of the hand and close again automatically, let anyone come in—so there is nothing private anywhere.
Hythloday himself is an advocate of a communal society without private property. In Book I of Utopia, he debates this issue with More and his friend Pieter Gilles in Antwerp. They consider the impact of the enclosures of common lands—a proto-capitalist example of privatization then taking place in England. The commons were being given to private landholders to graze sheep for profit, leaving many peasants destitute.
During this discussion, Hythloday has this to say about a healthy society:
so long as private property remains, there is no hope at all of effecting a cure and restoring society to good health. While you try to cure one part, you aggravate the wound in other parts.
Hythloday’s statement resonates across 500 years for those concerned about the privatization of public health care in Europe today.
So, is private property (perhaps also privacy) incompatible with a healthy society?
Jennifer Rust has analysed the health-care regime in Utopia in detail. She finds that the Latin word More used for ‘health’, salus, has three senses. It refers to ‘the physical health of the individual body’, ‘the wider welfare of the commonwealth’, and also ‘spiritual salvation’.[3]
More’s understanding of the concept of health then has to do with at least three of the heuristic zones of Mette Birkedal Bruun’s phenomenological approach to privacy: soul/self, body and state.[4]
Appropriately enough: health (like disease) resists the arbitrary borders that humans construct between individual selves, peoples, and countries, as the WHO definition makes clear[5]:
Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
Importantly, Rust also finds More’s thought experiment to contain the ideological seeds of modern public health systems. Drawing on Foucault’s writings on biopolitics, she argues that Utopia dramatizes a sixteenth-century crisis in the notion of the pastoral, which was being challenged by the enclosures. Not only is privatization of the commons making shepherds and sheep the agents of the landlords’ expropriation of the peasants. Abbots of the Church are among the private landholders; so they have abandoned their pastoral duty by participating in the terror of the ‘devouring’ sheep.
In Utopia, the remedy is the transference of pastoral power to the Utopian state which organizes excellent health care for all, with four hospitals provided outside each town, mini-towns of their own that offer excellent care for soul, body and community.
The cost of the state’s assumption of responsibility for health is that there is no privacy nor private property anywhere.
In fact, my reading of Utopia finds that there are some contradictions to the complete elimination of privacy. Those who practise a minority religion are allowed to worship privately in private homes; which suggests that the open doors of houses must sometimes remain closed.
In the hospitals too, there is a regime of private enclosure. The sick are confined to one part of the hospitals with lots of space to keep them from infecting the travellers who also stay there. The space of the hospitals themselves is also private, in the sense that they are located away from the towns to ensure a measure of quarantine against infectious diseases.
Hythloday exaggerates when he claims there is no privacy anywhere in Utopia. It is true that there is a radical limitation on individual privacy. But there is also, by comparison with contemporary England, a rearrangement of the privacy regime. The spaces and borders of privacy between individuals and parts of society have been reorganized.
Privacy is not only about the sole individual. In Bruun’s understanding, it is ‘the practice and experience of withdrawal, boundary drawing, and control of access’[4]. By definition, control implies others from which the individual (or individuals) withdraws, as in when the sick are withdrawn to the hospital.
Utopia warns readers that both private property and privacy might be incompatible with good health and the healthy society, in circumstances where due care has not been paid to their governance.
Utopia is a thought experiment. In practice, there might be a sweet spot between the extremes. It is for readers to think about how regimes of privacy might be renegotiated to ensure a better balance between public and private interests; and better health for individuals as well as for communities.
References
1. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. by George M. Logan, trans. by Robert M. Adams, 3rd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
2. Denis Veiras, The History of the Sevarambians: A Utopian Novel, ed. by John Christian Laursen and Cyrus Masroori (State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 261.
3. Jennifer R. Rust, ‘Ad Salutem Publicam: Public Health and Pastoral Government in More’s Utopia’, Textual Practice, 37.5 (2023), pp. 706–24.
4. Mette Birkedal Bruun, ‘Towards an Approach to Early Modern Privacy: The Retirement of the Great Condé’, in Early Modern Privacy: Sources and Approaches, ed. by Michaël Green, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, and Mette Birkedal Bruun (Brill, 2022), pp. 12–60.
5. World Health Organization, ‘Constitution’. https://www.who.int/about/governance/constitution.







