The Risk of Autonomy. The ideal of self-legislation beyond the fear of civil war and its institutional containment

Abstract

The modern understanding of autonomy (at least in its strong version) often includes the idea of selflegislation. As was paradigmatically the case for the French Revolution, self-legislation was considered as ideally neither bound by tradition nor by existing institutions. But some contemporary political theorists of the bourgeois revolutions (including Hobbes and Burke) felt uneasy about the loss of order and therefore tried to dispense with the concept of autonomy altogether. This article reconstructs this unease and its relation to Habermas′ proposal of staging the desire for autonomy within an institutional setting. Habermas′ suggestion privileges the existing institutional order over the desire for autonomy. Against Habermas I stress the importance of the desire for autonomy with its consequences for threatening the authority of law. Against this threat, I advocate that we recognize an existing institutional order actively and explicitly.