Introduction

In the face of orthodoxy, a range of academic works have questioned this conventional private/public distinction, especially during the last two decades. Already, in the 1960s, Habermas addressed the ‘colonization of everyday life’ in the era of mass welfare-state democracy caused by the increase and intensification of governmental intervention in everyday life (Habermas 1989). Since the 1970s, the welfare state has emerged as a subject of fierce criticism, both from the right and from the left spectra of the political world, as it had become an enormous governing apparatus, which was too inefficient and uneconomic as a governing system and deeply entangled

with the agents and governance of everyday life. The rise of the welfare state in the postwar period brought the social welfare of the nation-state’s population onto the governmental agenda, but this inevitably made the governing system of especially the industrially developed nation-states larger and more inclusive. In this respect, people’s everyday life under the welfare state appears to be a crucial site of political economy and, as a result of this, the world of political economy is intricately mingled with the world of everyday life. Thus, the distinction between the public and private spheres of activity has become blurred and irrelevant with the blossoming and growth of the welfare state, and both right and left critiques of the welfare state denounced the expansion of political intervention in everyday life, albeit on different ideological grounds, as political intervention was seen to erode individual freedom and agency.