Today, privacy and freedom of thought are two human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in article 12 that ‘No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy…’, and in article 18 that ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of thought…’. However, the two rights appeared at different times. The right to privacy is more recent than the right to freedom of thought in the history of human rights.
If the law is the expression of social and intellectual developments, we can pinpoint when privacy and freedom of thought became such pressing matters that they required legislation.
But this does little for our understanding of the long evolution of debates and the relation between the two.
Notions of freedom of conscience and thought were already expressed, represented and discussed from at least the early modern period in both political, religious, legal and literary texts.
The delayed occurrence in law for the rights of privacy and freedom of thought are puzzling for thinking the relationship between the two rights.
Why did the right to privacy, and thereby the need to protect privacy, emerge so much later than the need to protect freedom of thought and conscience? Have we not always needed privacy in order to exercise our freedom of thought? Were notions of privacy tacitly included in the various conceptions of freedom of thought? If thinkers need ‘a room of one’s own’, how have women’s privacy interfered with their freedom of thought?
These and other relevant issues in intellectual history are some of the questions we want to raise at this PRIVACY Seminar. While the research program at the Centre for Privacy studies focuses on the early modern period, this seminar also aims at reaching backwards and forwards into medieval and modern notions of freedom of thought and privacy.