Post-Critical Liberalism and Agonistic Freedom

Abstract

In recent decades, thought on freedom has been shaken up and inflected across the board by the same themes that inform its agonistic recasting: the polemics against universal reason, the limits of the human subject, and anti-essentialism. A growing chorus of liberal and other theorists, ranging from Joseph Raz (1986) and Richard Flathman (2003) to Cornelius Castoriadis (1987, 1997a), Michel Foucault (1997c, 2000e) and Roberto Unger (2001), have set out fresh visions of freedom in strikingly convergent terms. In all these schemes, the subject of freedom is analysed with reference to processes of social construction. Agents are divested of a permanent essence or a definite conception of the good. And freedom is always bounded, incomplete and episodic.