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Winner, 2026 Harrison C. White Outstanding Book Award, Decision-Making, Social Networks, and Society Section, American Sociological Association
Winner, 2026 Outstanding Book Award, Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Section, American Sociological Association
The concept of privacy is central to public life in the United States. It is the fulcrum of countless conflicts over reproductive rights and consumer protection, the power of tech companies and the reach of state surveillance. How did privacy come to take on such import, and what have the consequences been for American institutions and society?
Martin Eiermann traces the transformation of privacy from a set of informal cultural norms into a potent political issue. Around the turn of the twentieth century, in a nation that was searching for order amid rapid change and frequent moral panics about the ills of modern life, privacy spoke to emerging social problems and new technological realities. During this tumultuous period, political mobilization and judicial contestation shaped a legal, institutional, and administrative privacy architecture that has partly endured into the twenty-first century. Eiermann rebuts the claim that technological change renders privacy obsolete, demonstrating that the concept became increasingly capacious when it was applied to the social problems and political disputes of the information age. And he shows that it is often the selectivity—not the ubiquity—of governmental and corporate data collection that should elicit our concerns.
Drawing on rich archival materials and computational research methods, The Limiting Principle provides a deeply original sociological account of the history, social significance, and limitations of privacy in the modern United States.
— Bruce G. Carruthers, author of The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America
What should be known? By whom? For what purposes? As Martin Eiermann argues in this elegant and innovative analysis, “privacy” is not a settled legal concept but an evolving response to threats of urbanization, commercialization, and our dependence on the firms, professionals, and governments entrusted with our personal secrets.
— Elisabeth S. Clemens, author of Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State
Martin Eiermann's masterful study of the "Early Information Age" in America reveals how privacy evolved from a private concern into a public obsession, and how a "limiting principle" on state, corporate, and public surveillance became inscribed in jurisprudence, regulation, and urban space. An indispensable antidote against our presentist myopia.
— Marion Fourcade, coauthor of The Ordinal Society
Rather than ask what privacy is or why it has vanished, Martin Eiermann provocatively reframes the question: how did privacy become foundational to political discussions and social debates, and then U.S. institutions and laws, in the first place? With stunning precision, he illuminates the early-twentieth-century emergence of the “privacy architecture” within which Americans still live.
— Sarah E. Igo, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America
One of the key strengths of the book is its methodological rigor....By foregrounding a critical orientation to how privacy has been (and continues to be) unevenly applied in US history, Eiermann offers a historically grounded framework for understanding the continued erosion of privacy in contemporary surveillance regimes.
Preface
Introduction: Privacy for a New Age
1. Under the Eaves of the Home: Domestic Privacy and the Cultivation of Self
2. In the Glare of the Calcium: Privacy in the Early Information Age
3. The Chief Curse of the Tenement: Moral Anxieties and the Codification of Privacy in Urban Life
4. Inviolate Personalities: Individual Privacy in an Era of Informational Persons
5. A Modern Legal Fact: How Privacy Gained a Foothold in American Jurisprudence
6. Governance by Exception: Bureaucratic Rule and the Limits of Privacy
Conclusion: Privacy in an Age of Surveillance
Methodological Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index