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In Plato\u2019s <\/span>Republic<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> a dramatic turn takes place at the beginning of the fifth book. Earlier in the dialogue, Socrates analogizes between the soul of a human being and a city, constructing a perfect \u201ccity in speech,\u201d the <\/span>Kallipolis<\/span><\/i>. As a city has parts that must be in order to be just, so too with the soul. Having demonstrated, Socrates thinks, that justice is in reality about the proper order of the soul, how one orders one\u2019s internal life rather than primarily about external action, Socrates declares he is ready to discuss deficient types of souls by comparison. His interlocutors resist. They want to hear more about this hypothetical city, this analogy to a just soul. What will its rulers be like? How will it be and remain perfect? The story is incomplete, their curiosity unsatisfied.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Socrates also resists. He declares that he is being asked to move from the realm of knowledge into the realm of opinion\u2014to speculate, in other words. His friends are immovable. Socrates relents, but not before warning his interlocutors that things are about to get very, very weird. First, Socrates says, the rulers of the city must live in absolute equality, judged only by their fitness to rule and not by their sex. This will require men and women to be educated together. To be educated together in this sense would be to be educated in both music (intellectual arts) and gymnastics (physical arts). That is, in the perfect city, men and women will be made to exercise together. This being ancient Greece, the implication is \u201cexercise together nude.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This is, of course, shocking, but Socrates proceeds to the next proposal, which is shocking in a different way. In the perfect city, reproduction must be managed closely, not allowed to happen when people choose but carefully regulated for eugenic purposes. The right people must copulate at the right time to produce the right offspring; those offspring will then be raised in common by all members of the ruling class. In two radical proposals, Socrates has obliterated social and political distinctions on the basis of sex and nixed the traditional family structure, favouring instead scheduled sex and communal child care. The perfect city, it seems, must turn what were previously considered \u201cprivate\u201d matters into \u201cpublic\u201d ones. The scandal of Socrates\u2019s <\/span>Kallipolis<\/span><\/i> is that it conflates the spheres of family and city by having the best city regulate the sexual and reproductive habits of its citizens, not just by generally applicable law but to the extent of geometric precision.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n If this proposal seems absurd in a serious philosophical dialogue, it should. It is intended to shock and provoke. Think of a similar policy that forms the comedic hook of Aristophanes\u2019s comedy <\/span>Assemblywomen. <\/span><\/i>After sabotaging their husbands to keep them home from the work of legislating, and subsequently dressing in their husbands\u2019 clothing, the wives of Athens take seats as legislators. The newly female-dominated legislative assembly immediately begins making coercive and intrusive sexual regulations designed to benefit neglected, older, ugly women, which then backfire tremendously in practice.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Neither of these instructive ancient stories from different genres would quite make sense if the specific intervention of the polis into these matters weren\u2019t, as a norm, viewed as transgressive of the boundary between private and public. In other words, since at least the ancient world, we have had some intuition about what is often called the \u201cpublic-private distinction.\u201d That there exists some sphere of life, some domain of existence, subject to less direct oversight from the coercive reach of government or the prying eyes of religious prudes is a truism often embraced, often referenced, but perhaps seldom understood or reasoned to its logical extent.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Though it has roots in political thinking from time immemorial, the centrality of the distinction to liberal democratic theorizing and the precise boundaries of the distinction itself are of more recent stock. In a seminal paper for the <\/span>University of Pennsylvania Law Review<\/span><\/i>, Morton\u202fJ. Horwitz locates the origin of the modern public-private distinction in \u201ca double movement in modern political and legal thought,\u201d whereby the \u201cpublic realm\u201d itself became a coherent thing, defined in law and practice, while a counterposed realm or sphere of the \u201cprivate,\u201d \u201cfree from the encroaching power of the state,\u201d developed. While \u201cone can find the origins of the idea of a distinctively private realm in the natural-rights liberalism of Locke and his successors,\u201d Horwitz argues, the distinction was \u201cbrought to the center of the stage in American legal and political theory\u201d in the nineteenth century. The pre-existing conceptual distinction, in Horwitz\u2019s words, crystallized. Despite attempts by opponents of this distinction to undermine it for progressive causes in the 1920s and \u201930s, Horwitz argues that at the time of his writing (1982) the public-private distinction was \u201calive and, if anything, growing in influence.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Still today, the persistent influence of the distinction is seen, heard, and felt any time discussion arises around bioethical and biotechnological issues, particularly those relating to reproductive matters, fertility treatments, embryo selection, and the like. How often in public policy discussions around abortion do we hear the phrase \u201cThat is between a woman and her doctor\u201d? Think, too, of how often policy discussions around reproductive or sexual issues are framed as a certain party or religious institution wanting to \u201ccome into your bedroom.\u201d For instance, a recent ad campaign designed to frighten young men with the possibility of Donald Trump banning their access to internet pornography shows an old, white, male, Republican congressman intruding on intimate moments. This rhetoric implies a fear of boundary transgression, <\/span>a confusion of spheres<\/span><\/a>, permitting someone with legitimate public authority, or perhaps limited ecclesial authority, to extend that authority illegitimately into the sanctified space of that we call \u201cprivate.\u201d The distinction, then, remains very much alive.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n