Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism - Hardcover

Krause, Sharon R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022623469X ISBN 13: 9780226234694

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one’s actions.

In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R. Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sharon R. Krause is professor in and chair of the Department of Political Science at Brown University. She is the author of Civil Passions and Liberalism with Honor.

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Freedom Beyond Sovereignty

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

By Sharon R. Krause

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-23469-4

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction / Reconstructing Liberal Individualism, 
One / Non-sovereign Agency, 
Two / Agency, Inequality, and Responsibility, 
Three / Vitalities of Non-sovereign Agency, 
Four / What Is Freedom?, 
Five / Plural Freedom, 
Conclusions / Redeeming Freedom, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Non-sovereign Agency

To call human agency non-sovereign is to say that the exercise of agency regularly comes apart from intentional choice and consistently eludes individual control. It means that agency extends beyond the internal faculties of the person to include intersubjective exchanges, which makes other people integral to the agency of the individual. Individual agency is non-sovereign because it is a socially distributed phenomenon in this sense. Moreover, agency is materially distributed as well as socially distributed because bodies (both human and nonhuman) have a part in agency. This chapter elaborates the various ways that agency is non-sovereign, emphasizing both its socially distributed and its corporeal character. I highlight the fact that individual agency extends beyond the boundaries of the self but insist that personal identity is a crucial component of agency. In addition, although agency eludes control and often comes apart from intentionality, it is by no means ineffectual. On the contrary, the non-sovereign approach shows that our agency is far more potent than we often think—or may wish to believe. Understanding both the limits of human agency and its sometimes unexpected potency is crucial to making progress against enduring injustice and establishing conditions for the freedom of all.

The first part of the chapter gives a preliminary statement of what agency is and what it means to say that agency is non-sovereign, the second part explores Arendt's account of non-sovereign agency, and the final part engages the new materialist literature to illuminate the bodily dimensions of agency. Arendt's view is generative for theorizing the non-sovereignty of agency but it is troubled by difficulties in her accounts of personal identity and responsibility. In a similar way, although the new materialism helps us understand the corporeal dimensions of individual agency and clarifies some dynamics of domination and oppression that are otherwise difficult to see, it often denies the importance of individuated identities and undercuts personal responsibility. For these reasons, I go some distance with Arendt and the new materialists but not all the way. In particular, I insist upon the importance of an enduring, individuated, and norm-responsive self as a key component of individual agency even while acknowledging agency's socially distributed and corporeal dimensions.

The Two Sides of Agency

As the affirmation of an individual's subjective existence through concrete action in the world, agency has both a subjectivity or selfhood aspect, and an aspect relating to efficacy or impact on the world. In parsing agency this way, I draw inspiration from the work of Bernard Williams. Williams identifies "two sides to action," which he calls deliberation and result. His distinctive "two-sides" approach offers a valuable analytic framework for beginning to theorize the contours of agency, although it does not provide everything we will need to elaborate these contours fully. The deliberation side of action connects agency to what Williams refers to as character and what I am calling selfhood, or personal identity, or subjective existence. Agents act deliberately, meaning in a way that reflects the unique constellation of dispositions, desires, beliefs, abilities, and personal histories that establish their distinctive characters and make them who they are as individuals.

It is worth emphasizing here that while the selfhood that figures in agency is robust, it should not be understood as singular or fixed or essential. Every self is something of a plurality containing multiple strands, some of which may sit uneasily with one another. Moreover, because we exist in dynamic relationship with our social and material environments, we are all subject to change. None of us remains perfectly identical over time. And because our characters evolve in connection with our changing circumstances, it would be wrong to think that any particular feature of our subjective existence constitutes an a priori essence. Even our most intransigent qualities take on shifting significance for who we are as our lives unfold because how these qualities figure in the constitution of our subjectivity depends partly on how the social and material contexts shape our experience of them. Finally, the self's transformation over time is itself a part of agency because we sometimes become new to ourselves in important ways as a result of what we do. In this respect, subjectivity or selfhood has a plural, open-ended quality. We shall return to this point presently.

Although personal identity is not strictly singular and is never fixed once and for all, it would be difficult to deny that we identify ourselves (and others) with particular characteristics. While most of us recognize the ways that we change over time—and it is not uncommon to feel disconnected from aspects of ourselves that were more prevalent in earlier stages of our lives—we generally experience from one moment to the next a sense of relatively unified subjectivity. When the teapot sings out, it is no mystery to me whether or not I was the one who set it to boil. There is an "I" who got out of bed this morning, made breakfast, and walked to work. This is the same "I" now seated before my computer. There is no confusion in my mind about who I am or how I got here, as there would have to be if nothing about us were continuous, if selfhood were thoroughly unstable. Other people perceive my selfhood, too. They address me by the same name each time they greet me; they expect me to remember the conversation we had yesterday. I have a friend who reminds me of my father. My partner, who knew my father well, agrees about the similarity. I do not doubt that the characteristic qualities in my friend that remind me of my father could change over time, or that they arose through a complex interaction of influences (i.e., I do not hold the qualities to be fixed or essential), but I would be very surprised—indeed, fundamentally disoriented—if the next time I saw him, none of the familiar features of his personality were on view.

The distinct selfhood that each of us has, which contains multiple strands and is always evolving but which is generally recognizable to ourselves and others as ours, is what Williams meant by character and what I mean by subjective existence, or selfhood, or personal identity. To define agency in terms of the affirmation of one's subjective existence implies that there is indeed something to be affirmed through one's actions, a self (however complex and evolving) that precedes any particular deed. It also implies a subject with sufficient reflexivity to be capable of recognizing herself—her character, her unique identity—in her actions and effects. Experientially speaking, this reflexive sense of self is crucial. Without it, the common experience that we all have of being agents, of seeing that the world is...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022623469X
• ISBN 13: 9780226234694
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 249
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar