The Right to Privacy 1914–1948: The Lost Years (SpringerBriefs in Law)

The book offers a provocative review of thinking about privacy and identity in the years encompassing and disrupted by the two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century – focusing (in particular) on the socio-technological transformations associated with modernism. It argues that, with many of the most interesting modern thinkers of the period dead or marginalised (or both) by 1948, their ideas about how rights such as privacy should develop to accommodate the exigencies of modern life failed to find much of a voice in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet they anticipated in surprising ways some of our ‘new’ ways of thinking in more recent times. After a brief introduction, the chapters are framed in terms of case studies on the right to privacy, the right to data protection and the right to be forgotten, each finishing with a consideration of how these rights require further rethinking in the digital century. Acknowledgements 6 About this Book 8 Contents 9 Chapter 1: Introduction 10 References 13 Chapter 2: Reimagining Privacy in the Face of Modernism 15 2.1 Introduction 15 2.2 Photography and Cinema 17 2.3 Telephone, Radio, Television 21 2.4 Echoing Arendt’s Vision of Social Privacy 25 References 28 Chapter 3: Asking for Data Rights in The Castle 30 3.1 Introduction 30 3.2 Weber Versus Kafka on Bureaucracy 32 3.3 Kafka’s Reformist Imagination 36 3.3.1 Adapting Bureaucracy to Accommodate Needs of Bureaucratic Subjects 36 3.3.2 Moving Beyond Bureaucratic Use of Officious and Intrusive Questionnaires 37 3.3.3 New Rights and Obligations to Address Current Social Problems 39 3.4 Revaluing Kafka in the Search for Data Rights 40 References 43 Chapter 4: Resisting Cinematographic Mechanism 46 4.1 Introduction 46 4.2 Bergson and Bergsonism 47 4.3 Bergsonism in Legal Action 50 4.4 Towards a Bergsonian Right of Creative Evolution 56 References 58 Chapter 5: Reappraisal 60 References 62