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338 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 stability in contexts in which territorially based ethnic minorities are quite powerful. Contributions of this nature serve a very important pedagogical purpose. In light of what the volume does and does not accomplish, it might be prudent for the editors to consider renaming the second edition >Diverse Minority Groups in Liberal Societies.= For as it is, citizenship is not the primary focus of the book, and it says very little about minorities in societies that are not liberal (Smith=s treatment of federalism in post-Soviet Russia notwithstanding). They might also consider billing it for what it is: a book by liberal thinkers who tend to favour minority rights accommodation that, at its best, helps one to think critically about differences between types of minority groups, as well as diverse strategies for accommodating ethnic diversity. (SEANA SUGRUE) Elizabeth Neill. Rites of Privacy and the Privacy Trade: On the Limits of Protection for the Self McGill-Queen=s University Press. xii, 196. $24.95 At a time when liberalism is treated with increasing scepticism from feminist and legal theorists who find its precepts constricting and unwieldy in mediating everyday conflicts and relationships B and I have to admit that I am one of these people B it is refreshing to read a book which tries to defend the liberal principles of privacy and autonomy from a deeply philosophical perspective. Elizabeth Neill, in Rites of Privacy and the Privacy Trade, writes an intellectual=s defence of liberalism. Her short but dense treatise claims that rights are natural by virtue of the fact that they are ontologically innate. Neill thus replaces the constructs of a liberal state of nature and Rawls=s veil of ignorance with a theory that claims that human nature is ontologically private and metaphorically sympathetic to natural rights. In structuring her argument, Neill theorizes that privacy is neither a negative right >to be left alone= nor a positive right >to control personal information.= Instead, she argues that it is metaphorically tied to the body and to a culturally universal bestowal of privacy on the acts of defecation and sexual intercourse. In turn, the body is the vessel which contains our most intimate thoughts which originate in the self and are absolutely private. Our symbolic attachment to this privacy endows us with human dignity. Neill thus attempts to give substance to the liberal parable that humans are dignified in and of themselves and thus deserving of natural rights. She believes that privacy precedes and substantiates natural rights. In establishing the ontological fact of privacy and its role in human dignity, Neill states that >[r]ights based in this conception of human beings are rights that no individual culture with adequate opportunity for individual rational development could reject.= This book then is clearly a humanities 339 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 response to those who not only question the capacity of rights to provide moral guidance across differing cultures but also ponder their utility within culturally diverse Western democracies. The author asserts that rights are indeed useful. Moreover, they are less complex and difficult than liberalism =s critics are apt to claim. In determining the extent of individual privacy vis-à-vis the state, Neill theorizes that there is a substantive difference between non-waivable rights (i.e., normative privacy rights for defecation and sexual intercourse as well as for personal thoughts), which are absolute, and waivable rights (i.e., rights which fluctuate across time and place), which are not absolute and thus may be permissibly transgressed. Politicians and jurists confuse static rights with fluctuating rights and thus have created liberal communities which >are forced to cater to individual conceptions of a private life to a point that sometimes provides undue economic protections and is sometimes to the detriment of the social good.= Neill argues that her conception of privacy which protects thought but not necessarily the prerogative of private property aids the social good in a manner that traditional conceptions of privacy do not. Moreover, her grounding of rights in a substantive human dignity strengthens liberalism=s place in...

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