Effects of the crisis of the public sphere on security

Theoretical and historical perspectives

Abstract

The present article advances the idea that public security is a fundamental and paradoxical issue in the contemporary world. It frequently places in conflict the protection and preservation of individual rights and the prevention and repression of criminality. The article affirms that this is a false paradox. Public policies must be consistent with Human Rights. But the article seeks to show that the profound crisis of the political public sphere increases the feeling of insecurity and provokes support for private measures of control of urban delinquency. To this end, the article reviews the notion of public space in the Greek tradition and in the thought of John Locke. In the first case, the fundamental opposition was between the private and the public, according to the classic conception of Aristotle on the ambivalent nature of the politeia. In the second, individualism, or the private use of reason, constituted the main philosophical basis of democracy and, since the French Revolution, the basis for the universal conception of rights. The affirmation of individual rights expressed a counterposition to the hierarchical conceptions of society and history, which justified the centralization of state power, social differentiation and privileges. The present crisis of security, therefore, not only masks the importance of individual rights, but mirrors the decline of the public sphere, radicalized, in the global world.