Key Arguments

• Common wealth 'remained, or rather was intended to remain, strictly private'; only government shielding owners in competition was 'common.'
• The contradiction of a public realm shared only as protection for private interests has become moot because both public and private have been submerged in the social.
• This leads to a condition in which the public becomes a 'function of the private' and the private 'the only common concern left.'

Source Quotes

Without the process of accumulation, wealth would at once fall back into the opposite process of disintegration through use and consumption. Common wealth, therefore, can never become common in the sense we speak of a common world; it remained, or rather was intended to remain, strictly private. Only the government, appointed to shield the private owners from each other in the competitive struggle for more wealth, was common.

Common wealth, therefore, can never become common in the sense we speak of a common world; it remained, or rather was intended to remain, strictly private. Only the government, appointed to shield the private owners from each other in the competitive struggle for more wealth, was common. The obvious contradiction in this modern concept of government, where the only thing people have in common is their private interests, need no longer bother us as it still bothered Marx, since we know that the contradiction between private and public, typical of the initial stages of the modern age, has been a temporary phenomenon which introduced the utter extinction of the very difference between the private and public realms, the submersion of both in the sphere of the social.

Only the government, appointed to shield the private owners from each other in the competitive struggle for more wealth, was common. The obvious contradiction in this modern concept of government, where the only thing people have in common is their private interests, need no longer bother us as it still bothered Marx, since we know that the contradiction between private and public, typical of the initial stages of the modern age, has been a temporary phenomenon which introduced the utter extinction of the very difference between the private and public realms, the submersion of both in the sphere of the social. By the same token, we are in a far better position to realize the consequences for human existence when both the public and private spheres of life are gone, the public because it has become a function of the private and the private because it has become the only common concern left.

The obvious contradiction in this modern concept of government, where the only thing people have in common is their private interests, need no longer bother us as it still bothered Marx, since we know that the contradiction between private and public, typical of the initial stages of the modern age, has been a temporary phenomenon which introduced the utter extinction of the very difference between the private and public realms, the submersion of both in the sphere of the social. By the same token, we are in a far better position to realize the consequences for human existence when both the public and private spheres of life are gone, the public because it has become a function of the private and the private because it has become the only common concern left. Seen from this viewpoint, the modern discovery of intimacy seems a flight from the whole outer world into the inner subjectivity of the individual, which formerly had been sheltered and protected by the private realm.

Key Concepts

• Common wealth, therefore, can never become common in the sense we speak of a common world; it remained, or rather was intended to remain, strictly private
• Only the government, appointed to shield the private owners from each other in the competitive struggle for more wealth, was common
• the contradiction between private and public, typical of the initial stages of the modern age, has been a temporary phenomenon which introduced the utter extinction of the very difference between the private and public realms, the submersion of both in the sphere of the social
• the public because it has become a function of the private and the private because it has become the only common concern left

Context

9 THE SOCIAL AND THE PRIVATE: Consequences of wealth’s publicization: administrative commonality, and eventual dissolution of the public/private distinction into the social.