ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the varied and conflicting meanings associated with public and private life, in order to chronicle the multiple public and private political realities involved in contemporary politics. It introduces classic liberalism's sharp separation of the private from the public, where the two are conceptualized as dichotomous and as autonomous within their respective spheres. Dividing social, political, and economic life into simple categories of public and private derives from the received tradition of classic liberalism. As a strict economic concept, privatization refers to the improved efficiencies realized in the production and delivery of goods and services by private firms in contrast to public agencies. Privatization in this strict economic sense shifts the locus of service production from public agencies to private firms. Symbolic appeals invoking norms of efficiency, private sector superiority, and market competition that are associated with the instrumental, or economic, concept of privatization resonate with belief systems based on the society's inherited liberalism.
