Is Nothing Sacred? Privatization and the Person (Essay‪)‬

Privatization-in-General This essay offers a revision of privatization, situates it anew, and suggests a certain re-valuation of its values. Once, not so very long ago, what was called "privatization" was seen as a shocking thing, something that many considered as cheapening the things most "sacred" in our emphatically secular society. Now, though, the immediacy of that threat (or promise) has receded, supplanted by dismay at the excesses of what is widely diagnosed to be corporate greed. In taking stock of privatization, we seek to make sense not just of late twentieth century public asset sales, but of a wider privatizing logic. Strangely enough, the advent of the global financial crisis allows us to do this, as the collapse in equity prices from 2006-2009 has done rather more than make it seem pointless--it has brought a little more of the wider logic into public view--and made our own analytic task a little easier.