Freedom and Its Foundations: Towards a Person-Centred Social Theory

Abstract

I began this book by showing how the seeds of Gorz’s social theory first germinated under the influence of existential phenomenology. Having studied how his thinking has developed over the last forty or more years, we have seen how this philosophical background remains a rich vein which Gorz continues to draw upon in his critique of modern capitalism. In his most recent work Gorz’s ‘hermeneutics of the subject’ is now at the foreground of this critique, its prominence a reflection of the way the decomposition of organised capitalism has disrupted and destroyed traditional sources of meaning, certainty and solidarity, and how the ‘flight from freedom’ has taken refuge in various fundamentalisms and forms of bad faith. I also ended the previous chapter by emphasising the importance of the physical foundations of the subject’s lifeworld, and it is the embodied nature of lived experience that will form the concluding theme of this final chapter. I want to arrive at this conclusion, however, by way of a reformulation and elaboration of what I believe to be the most fruitful elements of Gorz’s critique of Marx. In doing so my aim is to argue for a person-centred social theory more sensitive to the human dimensions, and indeed foundations, of the subject’s autonomy.