"Privacy," by Garret Keizer - NYTimes.com Illustration by Oliver Munday Privacy is a topic that tends to inspire discursive essays rather than philosophical treatises. In "A Bachelor's Complaint," in 1823, Charles Lamb deplored the exhibitionism of married couples who "perk up" their public displays of affection when in the company of single friends. In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis lamented that American law, which protects privacy indirectly through laws safeguarding property, contains no remedies for the mental suffering that results from an offense against honor. Rather than attempting a comprehensive treatment of the subject, the privacy essayist identifies a distinctive value that privacy protects (ranging from dignity and autonomy to intimacy and friendship) and defends its value by using concrete examples and anecdotes from daily life. The latest contribution to this useful genre is Garret Keizer's "Privacy." Keizer is a contributing editor at Harper's, where part of his short book began as an essay, and his particular contribution is to concentrate on the "economic subtext" of the destruction of privacy. "You and I belong to a society in which the gap between the rich and the poor is widening even as our personal privacy shrinks," he writes, and he believes that "these two phenomena are connected." He defines privacy as a form of "resistance to exploitation" and says the rich have more ability to assert it than the poor. At the same time, he insists that respect for privacy is "essential to a democracy," and that privacy "might be placed on an even stronger footing in a more social democracy," with greater economic equality. At a time when the international debate about privacy largely concerns the ability to control personal information, Keizer's emphasis on the economic and class dimensions of privacy invasions is welcome. In a strong chapter called "The Privacy of the Poor," he observes that "the powerful have usually found ways to set themselves apart" - from the ships" captains who dine in private cabins to the bosses who separate themselves from their ­cubicle-dwelling underlings by retreating into private offices with doors that are often shut, "even on casual Fridays." He notes the sociologist Erving Goffman's studies of "total institutions" - from prisons and nursing homes to military camps and monasteries, which routinely deny privacy "as a means of fostering greater control." He suggests that because American constitutional protections for privacy are strongest in the home, "when a person's home is itself ambiguous, the right to privacy becomes less clear." But although Keizer thinks privacy is a value enjoyed more, in practice, by the rich than the poor, he resists the claim that privacy should be considered elitist or undemocratic. "Those who speak of the elitism of privacy are either dimwitted or disingenuous," he writes. Privacy amounts to the breather they don't want others to have, the opportunity to detach oneself from the pack and from the demagogue who leads it. All this is provocative, and it is offered as a series of aperçus about privacy that readers may find amusing or glib according to taste. "Air is free, but it tends to smell better in Malibu than in East L.A.," Keizer writes. But the book doesn't add up to "as thorough an introduction as possible to the big idea of privacy" that Keizer promises at the outset. Unconventionally, he defines privacy as "an essential (yes, you read right) human resistance to being used or interfered with." But this definition seems too broad to capture something distinctive about privacy. It's possible to resist being used or exploited without asserting privacy claims (by invoking minimum-wage laws, for example), and it's also possible to be used or exploited without having your privacy violated (say by trying to earn a living as a freelance journalist). At one point Keizer says the resistance to exploitation he has in mind "is strongest in defense of the physical body," but earlier he says that resistance to physical exploitation isn't at the core of his definition of privacy. In fact, the more intangible the use (as an entertainment for the curious, as a taste of revenge for the envious, as a shortcut in examination protocols for the busily overbooked doctor or nurse), the more likely one is to regard it as a breach of privacy, as opposed to the rougher uses of theft and assault. Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic, is a co-editor, with Benjamin Wittes, of "Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change."