Introduction: Public and Private Disruption in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The arrival of Covid-19 in 2020 brought severe disruption to our public and our private lives, and also to ordinary normative boundaries we maintain between the two which we had previously taken for granted, although they were already taking strain. In most areas of our lives, many of us were hastened to retreat from public, physical interpersonal interaction, confined to work and to socialize online from private spaces. This private retreat forced by communicable disease has been imposed by drastic public intervention, putting a severe strain on state finances and private economic activity, and harming innumerable private businesses, while the private wealth of the wealthiest few has soared. Since the 2008 financial crisis, rich governments have unloaded untold billions on the free market, stimulating recovery with unusual fiscal stimulus measures bailing out financial institutions, buying up toxic assets, urging record low interest rates, and now issuing pandemic relief measures. At the same time, extreme weather patterns have burned or flooded many parts of the world as critical effects of the climate crisis begin to heat up, yet states at the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference agreed on few curbs to the harmful private profit-making that costs environmental wellbeing. The branding of private wealth as a public good, which Ronald Reagan introduced with modest appeal to the family values of workingand middleclass American citizens in the 1980s, ultimately came to be represented by