Abstract
Freedom is one of the key concepts that citizens in liberal democratic societies employ to interpret themselves as agents. While this paper questions conventional uses of the liberal ideal of freedom, it also explores the possibility of advancing freedom through ideology critique. Basic to any human life is the feeling of power organized as subjectivity, or what is usually called agency. However, this feeling is mediated by interpretation, and interpretation in turn relies on categories available in a society. In liberal societies, much of this interpretation takes place in terms of the category of freedom. When such interpretation works or seems to work, it is not because it is true but because it is somehow plausible to us as we seek some way of thinking of the goals we pursue as our own. While there is an unavoidable element of subjection in how we acquire this interpretation, we nevertheless have a considerable if limited capacity to shape such subjection through democratic discursive processes and thereby render it free of domination. In this way we “redeem” freedom by disarming its ideological functions, and we do so in none other than the spirit of freedom itself.
The claim to legitimacy is related to the social-integrative preservation of a normatively determined social identity.Legitimations serve to make good this claim, that is, to show how and why existing (or recommended) institutions are fit to employ political power in such a way that the values constitutive for the identity of the society will be realized.
Jürgen Habermas1
1Habermas, Jürgen. 1979. Legitimation Problems in the Modern State. Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy. 178–205; 182–183. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
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Notes
- 1.
This concept of agency is a largely Nietzschean one, of which Mark Warren has given an excellent exposition. See Warren, Mark. 1988. Nietzsche and Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The expression “power organized as subjectivity” is taken from p. 59. My own account of agency draws on Nietzsche and Warren, especially at the early stages, but is meant to be judged on its own merits rather than in terms of accuracy of representation of either source.
- 2.
In its physical, sensuous dimension, power is energy or strength, and, as such, something to be “discharged” or “expended”. It is this aspect of power that Nietzsche refers to when he writes that “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power”. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1966. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Aphorism 13. New York: Random House.
- 3.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1966. op. cit. aphorism 259.
- 4.
Nietzsche’s insight here is twofold: seeing selfhood as systematically dependent on power and, more radically, showing that even the self, not just our picture of the external world, is in an important sense a construction. Nietzsche writes, for example, that “the ‘subject’ is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is”. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and Reginald John Hollingdale. Aphorism 481. New York: Random House.
- 5.
See, for example, Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and Reginald John Hollingdale. II, 1–3. New York: Random House; Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Aphorism 354. New York: Random House.
- 6.
Nietzsche speaks derogatorily of those human beings who are herd animals. By herd animals Nietzsche is best taken to mean not those who rely on attributions by others as such, for all humans do so by virtue of the way in which subjectivity is formed and sustained, but only those who rely exclusively on conventional attributions or attributions by institutional authorities.
- 7.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1983. On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. In Untimely Meditations, trans. Reginald John Hollingdale. 63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- 8.
See Althusser, Louis. 1971. Ideological state apparatuses. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster. 127–186; 182. New York: Monthly Review Press.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Foucault, Michel. 1990. History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley. p. 25. New York: Vintage Books.
- 11.
Ibid. 26.
- 12.
Ibid. 27.
- 13.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress. In The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. 340–372; 353. New York: Pantheon Books.
- 14.
The kind of moral and political code typical of a liberal order has at its center the idea that it is up to individuals to decide how to lead their lives according to their own best lights. To be sure, people desire this kind of freedom not only for its own sake but in order to pursue one conception of the good or another. But it is to be expected, in any liberal order, that people will pursue diverse, often conflicting conceptions of the good, and that they, or a very large percentage of them, will value the possibility of revising their conceptions of the good. Thus, a shared and enduring identification with a liberal order cannot come from any particular conception of the good, or even from any particular set of conceptions of the good, but must come from the more abstract notion of freedom to pursue and revise conceptions of the good. In other words, the mode of subjection must take the form of freedom, not the good.
- 15.
As Nicolas Rose puts it, “What began as a social norm…ends up as a personal desire.” Rose, Nicolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom. 88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- 16.
See Dean, Mitchell. 1999. Governmentality. 12. New York: Sage Publications.
- 17.
In this connection, Herbert Marcuse’s critique of the liberal-capitalist order in, say, One-Dimensional Man (1964, Boston: Beacon Press) remains relevant and illuminating. See also Dean, Mitchell. 1999. op. cit. 15: “She is thus urged to exercise her freedom in a specific fashion… . The margin of the exercise of freedom is of course extremely narrow.”
- 18.
On an understanding of ideology as a combination of epistemic confusion and service to reprehensible ends, see Geuss, Raymond. 1981. The Idea of a Critical Theory. 13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- 19.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. op. cit. 12 and 9, respectively.
- 20.
Ibid. 9.
- 21.
See Wuthnow, Robert. 1987. Meaning and Moral Order. 79–89. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- 22.
Marcuse, Herbert. op. cit. 1–12.
- 23.
Ibid. ch. 3.
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Ci, J. (2010). Redeeming Freedom. In: van Hooft, S., Vandekerckhove, W. (eds) Questioning Cosmopolitanism. Studies in Global Justice, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8704-1_4
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