Experiments with Freedom: Milieus of the Human

Abstract

Over 150 years ago, Karl Marx proclaimed that capitalism had opened up fractures and fissures in the solid crust of European society. Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betray oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock (577). Marx and Friedrich Engels's famous phrase, all that is solid melts into air (Berman 5), captures the constant political and cultural upheavals that characterize global modernity. Today, the ruptures and revolutions are associated with contradictory globalizing phenomena. The interplay between a capricious world and experiments with freedoms threatens to render modem norms of citizenship and human rights antiquated before they can ossify (Marx and Engels 70). The explosive growth and destruction of global markets is associated with various kinds of freedoms: freedom from old traditions, old obligations, spatial confinements, and political arrangements. Experimentations with freedoms-at the political, social, and individual levels-have historically accompanied capitalist expansion. The rise of nation-states in a global order has paralleled the growth of a world economy. These parallel developments have greatly complicated the meaning of freedom and obscured our understanding of the various forms it can take. What is citizenship if not the institutionalization of human rights as political membership in a nation-state? What are human rights if not the freedom from basic human want promised by a global community? Indeed, citizenship concepts that appear to us as enduring global norms of human existence are in constant flux, mirroring the constant upheavals of society and the eternal restlessness of capitalism. Contemporary globalization once again opens up questions about the nature of human freedom and claims in environments of uncertainties and risks. Insecurities linked to mass displacements, economic downturns, and market exclusions highlight the protective