ABSTRACT
For most people, mathematics and questions about privacy and publicity seem worlds apart, entirely incommensurable. This essay seeks to reverse that impression. In Jürgen Habermas’s infl uential account of how voluntary associations among people led to the emergence of a public sphere,2 the emphasis falls on the contributions of literary publics to the new institutional bases of civil society.3 As a corrective, my work on Renaissance algebra stresses the contributions of mathematics, not only to modes of discourse increasingly deemed appropriate in the domain of the public, but also to the rise of the very category of the “private” that underpins this developing “publicity.” For the private in Habermas’s formulation does not simply point to some sort of average everyday individuality that all human beings share. Rather, it is an abstraction through which individuals constituted themselves “voluntarily” in and through their aggregations as private people. Such abstraction was achieved through the conjunction of mathematics with literature, economics, natural philosophy, and law.
