The Logic of Privacy, Transparency, and Self- Governance

"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.