Some books are picked up out of a sense of duty. In my case that applies to almost any text for which the starting point is that it provides ‘lessons from America’ – and even more so when that proposition is shallowly rooted in the clichéd belief that what happens in the USA today provides a mirror in which we can see what will happen in the UK tomorrow. It was with all these unpropitious beginnings that I began to read Andrew Stark's Drawing The Line, only to have them rapidly confounded. While all the usual health warnings about reading the book as a form of astrology apply, the compelling reason for being drawn into it lies in the remarkable dissection it provides of one of the master narratives of contemporary American policy making.

The unifying theme which runs through the text lies in Stark's surgical dissection of the battle-lines drawn between those who advocate the case for services to be provided through public effort and organisation, and those who prefer the virtues of private provision. His key proposition, explored and re-explored in succeeding social policy contexts, is that the arguments advanced on both sides overlap far more often than might be expected. In drawing sharply different conclusions, he suggests antagonists gloss over, fail to see or deliberately obscure the shared arguments they turn out to deploy. Readers who are followers of modern rugby union will be familiar with that moment when referees instruct opposing packs of forwards to touch–pause–engage. Stark's tour of policy hot-spots – taking in crime, housing, education and health, as well as social security – demonstrates all these phases in action. There are places and policies where the debate is preparatory and conducted at arms-length. There are instances where the contestants have reached an uneasy pause in proceedings, because either some (temporary) truce has been called or (more often) in order to re-group for further battles. Both of these phases, however, have the feel of steps on the path to ever-more intense engagement, in which heavy weight groups of organised and determined individuals push, strain and (from time to time) gouge their way to supremacy, in winner-takes-all fashion. When, on 2 January 1998, Miguel Valdes, a private security guard, employed to police the private space of a Florida bank, shot a customer for double parking, he was very clearly at one end of a spectrum. Along that same continuum however, a publicly employed police officer might be hired by a ‘private’ gated community to enforce its rules in relation, for example, to the mowing of lawns. In the first example, a sort of galloping privatisation has invaded a previously public domain. In the second, private rules are being enforced through uniformed public police. The point, for Stark, is that the justifications offered on both sides draw on the same public and private values. Beneath the very different policy prescriptions lies a set of variations on a common theme.

In this brief review, some of this discussion can best be illustrated in the chapter which deals with ‘space’. The debate over ‘gated’ communities, it seems, has long moved on from any anxiety that physical separation of rich from poor might have injurious social consequences. Here the debate is about whether such communities should have the right to separate governmental, as well as merely material, space. The aptly named city of Hidden Hills in California, for example, makes and enforces its own laws in relation to a whole series of communal matters, and these laws take precedence over those of the state itself. Indeed, the ‘City Hall’ of Hidden Hills, from which public officials continue to discharge some functions such as management of (privatised) waste collection services, has been shifted to a building 75 feet outside the town's own gates. Alongside this shift to ‘privatopias’ goes a series of landmark law suits, in which the well-heeled residents of such communities demand to be excluded from the tax burden of paying for public facilities which, they say, they never use. In this line of argument, private provision claims the mantle of solid public and civic virtue: it is the consequence, they say, of having privately voluntarily shouldered the burden of an array of traditionally public responsibilities – public sanitation, security, transportation and so on. On the other side of the tracks, thousands of public roads are being provided, by local residents, with the appearance of gates, hoping, Stark says, to keep out gangs, drug dealers, traffic and litter.

The apparent incursion of private values into public space is defended by some of the least well off communities through the egalitarian argument that such protections should not be the exclusive right of those who can afford private communities. Those who side themselves with the private market values of property deploy public sphere values in campaigns for tax deductions. Those who live in public neighbourhoods deploy the argument of civic equality in order to inhibit free public access through gates or barricades. It is, Stark argues, the sort of subtlety and complexity which emerges whenever debates between what ought properly to be private and properly public are stripped down and dispassionately examined.

Enjoyable as well as instructive, this is one of those relatively rare academic books which can be enjoyed on the sun lounger as much as in the study. Readers anxious about the hold on immortality represented by their own oeuvres may draw comfort from the prospect that, in the age of austerity on which we are all embarked, the institutions for which we work might soon adopt an approach to space already well deployed in American higher education. There, it is not only the naming rights of whole buildings that are available for purchase or even the entire libraries which they contain. Readers need not fear that the price of being identified with a whole book case might exceed your royalty incomes. For a more modest sum, a single shelf can be named after you. As the civic virtue represented by your books might fade, the privatised space on which they rest will ensure, in a way which John Brown surely did not mean, that your soul will go marching on.