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In a sardonic poem of 1940, composed just after his migration to the United States from Nice Britain, W. H. Auden memorialized an “Unknown Cit- izen.” Written in the kind of an epitaph for an “unknown” and but all- too- knowable citizen, the poem affords a capsule biography of an unnamed indi- vidual from the level of view of the social companies charged with monitoring and ordering his affairs. The citizen it commemorates is recognized by a string of code comparable to a U.S. Social Safety quantity— “JS / 07 / M / 378”— and his life quantities to a compendium of particulars gathered by employers, hospitals, colleges, psychologists, market researchers, insurers, journalists, and state bu- reaus. The poem’s remaining strains level si mul ta neously to the hubris and the limits of society’s information of this man. “Was he free? Was he completely happy? The ques- tion is absurd: Had something been fallacious, we must always actually have heard.”1
If seldom as eloquently as Auden, con momentary Individuals raised sim- ilar questions on those that sought to know them, whether or not for the goal of governance or revenue, safety or con ve nience, or social welfare or scholarly analysis. Certainly, the correct threshold for “understanding” a citizen in a demo cratic, cap i tal ist nation would grow to be in the twentieth century one of Individuals’ most enduring debates. How a lot ought to a society find a way to glean about the lives of its personal members, and the way a lot of oneself ought to one willingly reveal? What facets of a particular person have been price understanding— and to whom— and which components have been actually one’s personal? The place and when may a person’s privateness be assured? As the century superior, the questions grew to become extra insistent. Had been personal areas and ideas, undiscovered by others, even pos si ble underneath the situations of fashionable life? What would
Introduction
C o p y r i g h t 2 zero 1 eight . H a r v a r d U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s .
A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .
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an ever extra understanding society imply for the folks caught in its web— and for the particular person liberties that Individuals supposedly prized? To wit: May recognized residents be completely happy? Had been they, actually, free?
This guide borrows the poet’s questions to pry open the contentious profession of privateness in the fashionable United States. Particular person privateness first sur- confronted as a sustained po liti cal problem solely in the late nineteenth century, however it will swiftly grow to be a fixture— even fixation—of U.S. public tradition. As company business, social establishments, and the federal authorities swelled, so too did disputes over what type of prying and the way a lot probing into residents’ lives have been acceptable. These debates emerged alongside an more and more impersonal, city society: its methods for sustaining so- cial order but in addition its mass media, its scientific applied sciences in addition to its kinds of promoting. Privateness speak waxed and waned, following no predict- in a position path. But it surely intently tracked public consideration to the perils—and the promise—of being a recognized citizen.
Trendy privateness sensibilities have been honed at the crux of a contradiction. At the same time as Individuals grasped at wider freedoms in the twentieth century, they, like Auden’s protagonist, have been changing into ever extra intelligible to an increasing array of events: state bureaucracies and legislation enforcement; the popu lar press and entrepreneurs; monetary establishments and personal corpora- tions; scientific researchers and psychological consultants; and, finally, knowledge aggregators and proprietary algorithms. A understanding society impinged on particular person liberties in unsettling methods. Being recognized may deliver pun- ishment from the state or destroy a repute crafted for friends; it may increase one’s insurance coverage charges or price somebody a job. It may even compro- mise one’s free will and sense of au then tic personhood. As a result of they pos- sessed this capability to know, fashionable social establishments raised Auden’s questions fairly immediately. Rising applied sciences and media, novel modes of professional and company surveillance, and new practices of official docu- mentation all propelled the prob lem of particular person privateness to the foreground of U.S. public tradition. There it will stay, changing into increasingly central to residents’ assessments of their state and social order.
Individuals turned to privateness speak as a result of it helped them navigate the pull and push of a understanding society, one which sought to apprehend, govern, and minister to its members by capturing them in fuller and finer element. Such a society carried rewards in addition to dangers. The proliferation of tech- niques for rendering residents knowable, from credit score stories and CCTV
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cameras to psychological testing, promised alternative and safety, even self- understanding. However being recognized too effectively— via the monitoring of one’s sexual or consumption habits, as an illustration— may threaten private autonomy, undermining the notion of a free- standing particular person so foun- dational to U.S. politics and tradition. In like style, to stay unrecog- nizable was in sure contexts a signal of privilege, however in others a kind of disempowerment. Being traceable in a nationwide felony or DNA database was a dif fer ent matter than being identifiable to a benefits- granting pro- gram like Social Safety. It was pos si ble, that’s, to undergo not solely from too little but in addition from an excessive amount of privateness. Invisibility to ser vice suppliers or census takers may sharply restrict one’s social alternatives and authorized rights.2 Whereas one’s particular person dignity may require being shielded from public view in some contexts, in others it may demand just the reverse: the vali- dation of being named and seen. A eager for public recognition may oscillate with a want for obscurity, even inside the identical particular person. And so, whether or not one may very well be recognized precisely and authentically— and on one’s personal phrases, relatively than the bigger society’s— was yet one more Question Assignment ani- mating privateness’s presence in American public life.
Arguments about privateness have been actually arguments over what it meant to be a fashionable citizen. To invoke its shelter was to make a declare about the latitude for motion and anonymity a respectable, demo cratic society ought to afford its members. Responses to that declare uncovered the fault strains of civic membership. Which residents, after all, may very well be entrusted with privateness, and subsequently be liberated from official scrutiny? As a result of privateness may each foster intimacy and nurture vice, it got here full of assumptions about the sort of particular person entitled to it. And so, though privateness was obvi- ously not the solely means to discuss citizenship in the twentieth century, any dialog about privateness was already entangled with concepts about one’s standing in the broader society. How a lot privateness, for instance, ought to be allotted to prisoners, troopers, sufferers, or teen agers? When may dif fer ent types of sexual topics— male, feminine, straight, homosexual, married, single— declare its mantle? Below what social and financial situations may a particular person be stated genuinely to have privateness, and the way on a each day foundation did one’s class and race form entry to it? Extra usually, who had the capacity to maintain components of their lives secret? Conversely, who may very well be recog- nized and appraised for who they really have been? The diploma and nature of privateness that particular person Individuals loved— together with who may demand
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it and underneath what circumstances— have been methods of defining, and divvying up, civic membership. No received der, then, that privateness would grow to be a dominant theme of twentieth- century politics.
To conceive of privateness as a social profit and a mark of belonging enlarges the customary that means of citizenship as a standing conferred and regu- lated by the state.three Auden’s nameless topic, after all, was outlined not just by his nationality but in addition by his many different quasi- civic roles: em- ployee, union member, father, neighbor, and shopper. “The Unknown Citizen” factors us to the ways in which full inclusion in an industrial democracy was a matter of one’s capability to transfer comparatively freely via a drive subject of social establishments, personal in addition to public. For residents themselves, it’s clear, “citizenship” was by no means merely a juridical standing, however as a substitute a looser, extra expansive marker, gesturing to one’s capacity to train selection and autonomy in the many realms of social life.four Like them, this guide em- ploys the time period “citizen” in its most capacious sense. Privateness, understood as freedom from intrusion or scrutiny, may by these lights typically act as a substitute for explic itly enunciated rights. Its absence— through formal legislation or in- formal circumstance— may work to deny even full residents equal social standing. Asserting how one may very well be recognized in the office or the market, on a metropolis avenue or in a suburban bed room, was a declare to self- willpower in addition to social energy. Individuals in the twentieth century thus made of privateness rather more than a authorized proper. They made it foundational to their sense of personhood and nationwide identification.
Privateness has performed a important po liti cal and cultural position in the fashionable United States. But it surely has largely eluded students. This guide pursues its his- tory from a new vantage level: the Question Assignment of how Individuals would, and will, be recognized by their very own society. Throughout the final century and a half, tabloid journalism and new applied sciences, welfare bureaucracies and po- lice techniques, market analysis and character testing, scientific inquiry and laptop knowledge banks, tell- all memoirs and social media all posed this Question Assignment. In response, jurists and phi los o phers but in addition odd residents weighed the benefits and hazards of being recognized. They’d, in the professional cess, remake conventions about entry and intimacy, redrawing the bor- ders separating the personal from the public self. Educated on how residents approached unfamiliar practices of identification and intrusion, rec ord holding and revelation, this guide illuminates the deeply private— but in addition profoundly social and political— meanings they hooked up to personal issues. Spanning the lengthy twentieth century, from the period of “instantaneous photo-
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graphy” to our personal age of large knowledge, it affords a wide- angle view of privateness as Individuals have argued and imagined it.
Privateness, it scarcely wants saying, looms giant immediately. If the drumbeat of headlines and bestsellers is to be believed, Individuals are in the midst of an unpre ce dented privateness disaster— underneath “relentless surveillance,” on the highway to a absolutely clear society, and with “no place to cover.”5 The substances of this disaster are well-known to us. Knowledge mining and NSA spying, advice algorithms and digital footprints, bio- metric identification and in depth info sharing on social media platforms have raised fears about authorities and company surveillance to a excessive pitch. That a sure customary of safety from the gaze of others is routinely violated, and maybe unrecoverable, is extensively decried.
In this local weather of fear about any quantity of events and methods that expose us in opposition to our needs, privateness appears self- evidently a po liti cal matter. Regardless of privateness’s starring position in con momentary diagnoses of U.S. tradition, nonetheless, we now have a surprisingly poor grasp of the way it arrived there. Actually, privateness has figured for hundreds of years as an important ingredient in theorists’ formulations of liberal selfhood. Virtually endlessly elastic, the time period has, since its first look in En glish in 1534, accrued non secular, philosophical, social, po liti cal, authorized, and psychological dimensions.
But privateness was not at all times a matter of public import for Individuals. As a matter for widespread popu lar debate or as a frequent public language, it’s a creature nearly completely of the late nineteenth century. Born of disquiet about the standing of the personal particular person in the put up– Civil Warfare United States and an age when the contents of citizenship have been underneath reconstruction, fashionable privateness arrived on the scene si mul ta neously prized and endan- gered. A brand new kind of privateness speak took maintain on this period, with mounting num- bers of residents each claiming a proper to privateness and believing their privateness to be underneath siege. Solely in the twentieth century did privateness emerge as a central concern of American life, with some commentators going additional, tagging it an obsession or a “cult.” 6 And solely then was it vigorously pursued as a public, and typically collective, declare. “Privateness” gained an uncommon capability to body Individuals’ discussions about the state, their social institu- tions, and even themselves. That is a story that’s nonetheless unfolding, of course.
Privateness could have made a late entrance into U.S. politics and public life, however its endurance has been spectacular. Almost each main improvement in the United States since the Civil Warfare— public well being campaigns, media
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and communications applied sciences, navy mobilization, social welfare laws, office improvements, therapeutic strategies, city planning and suburbanization, social actions, felony and terrorist threats— has been assessed in phrases of its implications for residents’ privateness. Privateness speak has coursed via realms as dif fer ent as bioethics and superstar, nationwide safety and structure, social etiquette and professional codes. Not less than since the flip of the twentieth century, it has additionally been demo cratic: just about anybody can demand privateness, if not obtain it. Immigrants, laborers, schoolchildren, and prisoners have all laid declare to the idea. It has featured as repeatedly in science fiction as in scholarship, in poetry as in po liti cal commentary. Invoked as an important freedom and even a human proper, but nervous over as a fragile and maybe dying worth, privateness grew to become in the twentieth century a dominant concern of fashionable publics round the globe.7 In the put up– World Warfare II United States, considerations over its standing gathered sufficient momentum to launch a new constitutional proper. Since then, it’s secure to say, privateness’s position in the American public sphere has solely intensified.
Privateness in the fashionable United States thus has not been “personal” in any respect. Reasonably, it has functioned as a essential class of public life and a sturdy characteristic of partisan politics, at the same time as its availability—or absence— has formed numerous private selections and relationships. Extremely vis i ble contretemps over what ought to be stored out of the public eye throughout the final century fun- damentally formed U.S. po liti cal tradition. The identical is true immediately, at the same time as a giant physique of writing declares that privateness is useless and gone.eight In reality, pri- vacy has by no means been extra pres ent in American life. It informs pundits’ and residents’ discussions of matters starting from the social be hav ior of youth to airport screening procedures, and from on-line search monitoring to state intelligence operations. It repeatedly punctuates public life as a coverage con- cern, a authorized declare, and a person hope.
The trendy idea of privateness, as even this temporary sketch makes clear, is sprawling. It has for good cause prompted voluminous scholarship in legislation, philosophy, lit er a ture, communications, design, know-how, and the newer subject of surveillance research. But inquiries into its previous have been curiously confined. As I labored on this guide I stored arriving at a paradox: privateness is all over the place in fashionable Amer i ca and but hardly anyplace in fashionable Amer- ican historical past. Arguably one of the most charismatic phrases in the nationwide lexicon, privateness is lacking from the indexes and headings by which we or- ga nize our understanding of the previous. Key episodes in the authorized historical past of
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privateness are effectively charted, as are particular controversies. However the scholarship stays heavi ly state- and rights- centered, neglecting privateness’s significance as a cultural sensibility and public worth. Historic works that look at the thought of privateness in all of its unruliness, and even some of it, are scarce, espe- cially for the twentieth century— the interval through which it entered nationwide life with drive.9
Current histories of privateness are sometimes narrower affairs: explanations of the emergence of privateness rights, skilled on doctrine, pre ce dent, and coverage. Authorized students have devoted a lot consideration to the first extensively rec- ognized demand for a “proper to privateness” in 1890, the codification of state privateness legal guidelines over the ensuing de cades, and the enunciation of privateness as a constitutional proper in 1965.10 These works deal with the evolution of jurispru- dence as a proxy for much less neatly contained shifts in Individuals’ excited about intimacy and intrusion. However such research don’t dwell on adjustments in residents’ sensibilities or on the causes behind them. Scholarship on pri- vacy’s technical, juridical profession has thus made little affect on our under- standing of the politics and tradition of fashionable Amer i ca. Privateness as such makes solely a temporary—if dramatic— look in customary textbook surveys, normally starting in 1965 with Griswold v. Connecticut and cresting in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. It bursts on the scene as a po liti cal prob lem, is reworked into a constitutional if controversial proper, and, thus handled, promptly vanishes once more.
There are wonderful accounts that take up facets of the historical past of pri- vacy, particularly regarding sexual regulation, the standard press, and state spying.11 Every of these is a huge and sophisticated matter in its personal proper. However fixing on a single pressure of privateness’s historical past might be deceptive. For instance, the two main narratives about privateness in the United States— its eradica- tion via state, office, and digital surveillance, on the one hand, and its gradual, if tenuous, triumph via hard- received felony or reproductive rights, on the different— level towards radically opposed conclu- sions.12 Impor tant as such scholarship is, it can not do justice to privateness’s wide- ranging, generative position in U.S. public tradition. It can not clarify why Individuals have so repeatedly turned to privateness to discuss such not like issues: their intimate relationships, their dwelling areas, their private knowledge, their po liti cal rights, and even their psyches. And it can not account for why residents’ understandings of and emotions about privateness have developed over time. But exactly what we require is a historical past of privateness’s per sis tent, pli- in a position attraction. Solely by attending to its arrival in disparate spheres— legislation and
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know-how, medication and media, lit er a ture and structure— will we find a way to fathom how privateness got here to sit at the very core of American politics and social life.
My panoramic method makes an attempt to overcome what’s so far a patch- work historical past. This guide intentionally friends into different sensible unrelated do- mains in U.S. society so as to piece collectively a new image of how and why privateness got here to matter a lot to fashionable Individuals. Reasonably than lament privateness’s disappearance, as achieve this many latest commentators, I observe privateness’s appearances in the U.S. public sphere, asking: When and why did privateness make its claims on residents’ consideration? In what phrases, and with what penalties? How, in the professional cess, have been Individuals’ expecta- tions of privateness not merely diminished however reworked?
What, certainly, made privateness such a compelling idiom, introduced to bear on matters as different as intelligence gathering and confessional memoirs? Pri- vacy speak, I argue, has been a response to, and typically a decision of, an inescapable deadlock of fashionable life: the proven fact that, at the same time as U.S. public tradition purported to honor the will and selections of particular person residents, its companies pressed in new and forceful methods on the personal particular person. “Privateness” hardly ever referenced a factor with particular contents; relatively it served as an index to altering concepts about society itself.13 Authorized scholar Lawrence Tribe captures this sense of privateness when he describes it as “nothing lower than society’s limiting princi ple.”14 And certainly, residents enlisted it, time and time once more, to repair the line between the fashionable particular person and the col- lectivities to which he or she belonged.
To name one thing personal, an choice increasingly Individuals exer- cised in the twentieth century, was nearly by no means to make recourse to an agreed-on definition. It was to make an argument about the correct rela- tionship amongst citizen, state, and society. Sociologist Christena Nippert- Eng places it this fashion: “privateness is about nothing lower than attempting to dwell each as a member of a selection of social items—as half of a quantity of bigger wholes— and as a person— a distinctive, individuated self.”15 The subject of privateness invited, even incited, grassroots social theorizing about energy and intimacy, surveillance and subjectivity. It was the public vocabulary citi- zens reached for to debate the scope of the state, the conduct of social re- lations, and the very borders of the self.
Extra particularly, privateness was the language of selection for addressing the ways in which U.S. residents have been— progressively and, some would say,
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relentlessly— rendered knowable by advantage of dwelling in a fashionable industrial society. Given the quantity and vary of events that aspired to know them, Individuals rightfully puzzled what facets of one’s physique, character, identification, biography, and knowledge a person had final declare to. In dif- fer ent methods, a candid photograph graph, a monetary rec ord, and a psychiatric di- agnosis every raised this Question Assignment: How distinct from the mesh of institu- tions, practices, and norms that constituted social existence may a particular person really be? Privateness speak tried to bridge the pressure between ex- panding claims to private inviolability and extra refined strategies of infringing on it. It mediated, too, between the want to be “not to mention” and the urge to be recognized. These tensions created particular prob lems in a nationwide tradition staked on private autonomy. Invoking privateness was one of the chief ways in which Individuals of all stripes weighed in on a permanent po- liti cal and philosophical quandary as to what separated self from society.16
And but, as we might count on, privateness was not a shared or unitary con- cern, however was skilled and summoned in markedly uneven methods in the American twentieth century. Residents seen and wielded privateness dif- ferently relying on their standing and circumstances, and a few may barely entry it in any respect. As a common rule, these excluded from full po liti cal citizenship as a result of of their class, race, gender, age, nationality, able- bodiedness, or sexuality—or combos thereof— additionally suffered most from a lack of privateness.17 Prisoners and different institutionalized populations, but in addition the younger, the poor, and the infirm, had few defenses in opposition to the intrusive monitoring of their lives. Racial minorities, immigrants, and noncitizens have been topic to far greater charges of police and bureaucratic surveillance than have been white native- born Individuals; intensely scrutinized, they have been maybe at all times much less deeply recognized by brokers of the dominant society.18 Ladies and sexual minorities have been presumed to have a lesser declare on privateness than heterosexual males, and as a consequence they got here first to the rec- ognition that altering privateness’s phrases via disclosure and confession could be the path to a extra inclusive public sphere.
In distinction, proudly owning a house, making a snug dwelling, and con- forming to dominant norms of respectability all decidedly elevated one’s probabilities of evading society’s gaze. And but it was usually white middle- class residents who denounced privateness invasions most vociferously. This has led some to take into account privateness speak a bourgeois pastime, the preoccupation of a choose half of the inhabitants.19 Elite Individuals have typically embraced that characterization; privateness, famous the outstanding nineteenth- century
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editor E. L. Godkin, was “one factor to a man who has at all times lived in his personal home, and one other to a man who has at all times lived in a boarding- home.”20 It’s undoubtedly the case that privateness debates in the United States got here with a class profile. As privileged residents felt the press of social establishments on their very own lives and liberties, their par tic u lar worries be- got here the fodder for media protection, congressional hearings, and public coverage. However additionally it is evident that privateness’s promise beckoned, if in a selection of registers, to a wider swath of Individuals, together with juveniles, sufferers, troopers, union members, analysis topics, and welfare recipients. As W. H. Auden—an immigrant to the United States and a homosexual man— effectively understood, the extent to which a person may very well be rendered know- in a position was full of consequence in a fashionable nation.21 The efflorescence and democ ratization of privateness speak over the course of the twentieth century have been testomony to that reality.
Exactly as a result of privateness in the United States has been billed as a per- sonal possession, exterior the realm of the state or politics, its historical past opens an illuminating win dow onto the social strains of fashionable citizenship. Throughout the final century privateness was more and more linked to that the majority public of identities, the rights- bearing citizen. Privateness speak thus grew to become a potent avenue for claiming and circumscribing the social advantages of a fashionable in- dustrial democracy. At the identical time, insisting on recognition—as a citizen, a holder of a particular identification, a particular person out of the shadows— was primary to enacting one’s membership in society. How well-known a citizen could be was a delicate marker of standing and energy, a fissure like another reducing throughout professions of equality and alternative in American life.
Charting the travels of one thing as summary, but in addition as intimate, as “pri- vacy” has its challenges. To start with, the Question Assignment of what privateness is has lengthy bedev iled authorized and philosophical discussions. In the course of re- looking this guide it was amusing, if additionally sobering, to come throughout different observers’ frustrations with how ungovernable a topic it’s. “Few values so basic to society as privateness have been left so undefined in social concept or have been the topic of such obscure and confused writing by social scientists,” charged authorized scholar Alan Westin in 1967.22 Forty years later, Daniel Solove, a main theorist of privateness, branded it “a idea in disarray.”23 Like the climate, concluded a sociologist in 2016, privateness is “a lot mentioned, little understood, and never simple to management.”24 A big physique of work however affords ever- finer taxonomies of privateness’s “spatial,” “deci-
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W. H. Auden memorialized a “Unknown Citizen” in a satirical poem written in 1940, shortly after his relocation to the United States from Nice Britain. The poem, written in the kind of an epitaph for a “unknown” however all-too-well-known particular person, offers a temporary biography of an unidentified particular person from the perspective of the social establishments tasked with following and ordering his affairs. The person it honors is acknowledged by a code that resembles a Social Safety quantity in the United States—”JS / 07 / M / 378″—and his life is a compilation of particulars acquired by employers, hospitals, colleges, psychologists, market researchers, insurers, journalists, and state bureaucracies. The poem’s concluding strains all refer to the identical factor.