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Limited Alternatives and Personal Identity: The Relation Between Freedom and Personal Responsibility

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Abstract

If one can describe the evolution of ever more complex and anonymous social structures in general terms as the path of social evolution, then societies have evolved from clan and tribal societies that can be described as being pre-feudal because they are based on constantly renegotiated social alliances, to more complex societies where these renegotiations of social arrangements have settled down into rather hereditary and then later on bureaucratic social class and political hierarchies that can be described as feudal societies, to post-feudal societies that have evolved beyond this so that bureaucratic structures become so fine-tuned that they are used to produce checks and balances in society between various social institutions. The psychological ramifications of this path of evolution are discussed with emphasis on the differences between societies that induce authoritarian personalities, and those that induce narcissistic personalities.

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Correspondence to Jerome Braun .

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Braun, J. (2013). Limited Alternatives and Personal Identity: The Relation Between Freedom and Personal Responsibility. In: Democratic Culture and Moral Character. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6754-6_8

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