The Charm of Secrecy: Secrecy and Society as Secrecy Studies

Certain subjects and/or challenges, which start as a whisper, may take decades to gain foothold in academic and public consciousness and formally "claimed" as a social problem. 1 Since the conclusion of World War II, secrecy, for example, as the intentional or unintentional concealment of information (Simmel 1950, 330), has been the subject of distinct government investigations, scholarly inquiry, and consistently reported in the mainstream and alternative media. While these explorations have shaped some understanding of how individuals, groups, and institutions hold secrets that "can be either an action or knowledge...can be potential or effective, stable or unstable, factual or imaginary" (Bellman 1981, 1), secrecy has not been uniformly characterized as a social problem.