Individual Conscience Research Articles

The Politics of Undeserved Happiness

The Politics of Undeserved Happiness Zahi Zalloua (bio) In this essay, I want to critically engage with privilege theory and the now widespread liberal activist slogan "check your privilege" so prevalent on U.S. college campuses. Feminists were arguably the first to criticize unearned privilege, and in particular male privilege, as well as resistance on the part of the privileged to recognizing that privilege as exclusionary. American feminist Peggy McIntosh looks for example at the ways some men react negatively to the critique of male privilege, illustrating their reluctance to give up their power (McIntosh 2001, 95-105). Even when men acknowledge the historical discrimination of women, according to McIntosh, they often fail to see privilege as divisive: they fail to see, that is, how the notion of privilege is governed by a logic of exclusion. In discovering her own white privilege, McIntosh comments, "I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was 'meant' to remain oblivious" (94-95). To correct such shortcomings, privilege theory teaches that there is no privilege without the unprivileged. What comes out of the analysis of McIntosh and others, then, is the imperative to self-analyze, to check one's privilege. But what does it mean to check privilege? What is its critical force? Is it adequate to the task at hand? Simply stated, what is privilege theory questioning and what is it leaving intact? I counter here what could be described as privilege theory's liberal critique of unearned privilege on two fronts.1 On the first front, I draw on Herbert Marcuse's claim for "the need for 'undeserved' happiness" from his 1967 essay, "The End of Utopia." The "happiness" in "'undeserved' happiness" here should not be conflated with complacent satisfaction, with the attainment of a happy state—a view of happiness that psychoanalysis consistently questions—but should be understood instead as referring to modes of enjoyment, to unruly acts of libidinal gratification and [End Page 371] self-cultivation incongruous with the capitalist maxim, happiness as the deserved fruits of social productivity. Moreover, Marcuse's formulation throws a wrench in the logic of reward and punishment that often informs the contemporary discourse of privilege, a logic that unwittingly transforms the critique of structural inequalities into a matter of individual conscience: you should be verbally punished for assuming your unearned privilege (visible in the act of calling out someone's privilege in the accusatory charge, "your privilege is showing"), and rewarded for confessing your given privilege (whether or not that confession leads to a deeper engagement with the structural problems at work). On the second front, I scrutinize further privilege theory's under-theorized account of subjectivity. In this effort, I turn to Slavoj Žižek's Lacanian musings on the postmodern superego to demonstrate how the compulsory call "to check your privilege" at best provides a limited critical value and, at worst, is hegemonic and complicit with the very racist and sexist ideologies it seeks to undermine. Finally, I reread Marcuse's call for undeserved happiness along Žižekian lines as effecting a shift from privilege to fantasy: from the liberal imperative to "check your privilege" to the psychoanalytic injunction to "check our fantasy." The critique of privilege theory has emanated from two main camps: the Right condemns privilege theory for creating a victim industry and helping to legitimize a stifling atmosphere of political correctness (one in which marginalized groups—the unprivileged—are seen as exempt from criticism while white, Christian, heterosexual males are fair game), while the Left questions and complicates privilege theory's approach for its failure to truly get at oppression, seeing it as reformist rather than revolutionary. Both Marcuse and Žižek gesture toward a third line of critique. Their objections to privilege theory share much with the Left's verdict that this approach does not go far enough—and, at least in the case of Žižek, the Right's suspicion of political correctness, of tolerant liberal multiculturalism more generally—but, as we shall see, they converge here for significantly different reasons. Again, in its best forms, privilege theory...

A New Primacy of Conscience? Conscientious Objection, French Catholicism and the State during the Algerian War

This article explores how the Roman Catholic Church in France re-evaluated its traditional condemnation of conscientious objection in the closing years of the Algerian War. In contrast to the French Protestant Churches after 1948, the Catholic Church continued to proclaim objection to be detrimental to the principles of state sovereignty and obedience to legitimate authority. Despite this, cases of Catholic conscientious objectors like Jean le Meur and Jean Pezet brought contentious Church debates into the public sphere, dramatized in the press and the courtroom. The article traces how the moral dilemmas of the Algerian War created a space for new theological ideas that challenged the hierarchical, corporatist structure of the French Catholic Church and opened the way for a new emphasis on individual conscience that came to fruition with Vatican II. By focusing on Catholic activism during the war itself, the article also challenges the idea that support for conscientious objection emerged spontaneously after the end of the Algerian War. More broadly, the article addresses the wider narrative of the emergence of human rights by illustrating how the Algerian War proved to be a turning point in the relationship between individuals and authority.

The Special Responsibility of Government Lawyers and the Iraq Inquiry

The United Kingdom House of Commons endorsed the decision to invade and occupy Iraq on 18 March 2003. That morning, Elizabeth Wilmshurst—a deputy legal adviser at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO)—requested early retirement after almost 30 years of public service, because she regarded the intervention as unlawful without a United Nations Security Council resolution explicitly authorising the use of force. Despite her well-received testimony before the Iraq Inquiry, the Report of the Inquiry left the story of Wilmshurst’s departure on the cutting room floor. With her decision to speak law to power erased from the official record, international law’s heroine had been reduced to a bit part. The absence of discussion of Wilmshurst’s departure in the Report is emblematic of the Inquiry’s limited coverage of the role of government lawyers in foreign ministries who advise on international law. In particular, the Report did not express a view on the government lawyer’s so-called ‘special responsibility’, a conception of the advisory function introduced by FCO legal advisers during the Inquiry hearings. This article examines the scope of the government legal adviser’s special responsibility, discussing the manner in which such a responsibility might be discharged before and after policy decision-making on the use of force. The argument proceeds as follows. Section II canvasses the Report’s restricted treatment of the FCO legal adviser’s responsibilities, compared to its in-depth analysis of the role of the Attorney General. Section III considers an issue that the Report does not explore, and that advisers themselves relegate to the domain of individual conscience: the options available to an adviser after a policy decision is made, where their advice has not been accepted. Section IV asserts that the adviser’s choice to either remain in post or resign in protest conditions their subsequent involvement in legal explanation for the use of force, with a direct bearing on the continued operation of their special responsibility. In an effort to ‘make sense of inquiry sensemaking’, Section V concludes by arguing that the lessons stipulated in the Report support a conception of the adviser’s special responsibility that is exercisable rather than extinguished after a policy decision is reached.

Owning one’s past

Abstract In this paper, I engage with the question of historical interpretation as a form of dialogue that can face an individual conscience with disturbing choices and decisions made at an earlier time, and the expectations we might have about a proper response. My paper draws on Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical ideas, as well as on a controversial part of his biography – his alleged involvement in the Petain circle in France in the early 1940s – to propose that instead of thinking about historical knowledge as reconstruction of another time, revelation of beliefs, or even exposure of intentions, we should consider it as a form of dialogical remembering that marks two joint features of subjectivity: fallibility and attestation. My paper does articulate a defense of Ricoeur’s philosophical conception of forgiveness, but offers neither an apology for nor an accusation on moral and political grounds.

SYNDROME OF ACQUIRED MENTAL IMMUNODEFICIENCY AS A POLYMORPHIC IDENTITY DISORDER AND THE PREDICTOR OF ADDICTIVE EPIDEMICS

Galloping growth of addictive disorders in the modern world of mental epidemics requires the improvement of existing models of prevention and protection. The article systematizes the characteristics and classification of addictions. Substantial discrepancies between official statistics and epidemiological studies on prevalence of addictions are shown, reflecting the unrealized potential of mental preventology. The isolation of the acquired mental immunodeficiency syndrome (AMIDS) as a polymorphic identity disorder is justified. The phenomenology of AMIDS in propaedeutics of mental medicine (MM) is described. The task of the primary addictological prevention is to increase the level of mental immunity (MI) as a biopsychosociospiritual identity matrix and the basis for the security of the individual and society. Mental security (MS) is the safe interaction of individual and social conscience with the environment. The MS accumulates and focuses MI resources and mental resilience registries that are measured and forecasted, modeled and managed by various mental health services (MHS). MHS is a synergetic ψ-cluster of the state and society that provides the MS. The task of forecasting and warning of threats to MS is performed by systemic monitoring of mental health, which is the interface of public conscience and the MHS tool. Groups of indicators of MS as protection of individual and public conscience from external and internal threats, including the risk assessment of the destructiveness of biogenesis and sociogenesis, psychogenesis and animogenesis, as well as systemic dysfunctions of MI are singled out. Abnormalities of MI functions that make up the clinical phenomenology of AMIDS in the pathogenesis of addictive disorders are systematized. The possibilities of the MI technological platform in the system approach to the prevention of addictations are substantiated, and the principles of the structural and functional development of the MHS are singled out. MM becomes one of the pilot models of the new resource support of the Russian public health system in the current crisis reality.

Communities of Practice as Systems: The Case of TEALEAF

This work provides an update to the Erasmus Plus TEALEAF project. The outcomes of a week-long EU-funded/Irish Government-recognized teacher course in July 2016 is described within the context of a qualitative small-scale study investigating teachers’ progress in the course. The explicit aim of the teacher course was to equip a diverse group of teachers with the initial tools to work to produce simple digital apps for learning about biodiversity in their respective domains. A community of practice seeks to establish a new concept of the pre-existing generalised collective conscience through triangulated conversation between the generalised and particularised collective and individual consciences; in particular, to revise the generalised collective conscience that teachers can program apps for learning about biodiversity. A number of features of teaching and learning were selected in general and their relationship to constructivism delineated. The teachers were prompted for their responses to each day of the course through a self-evaluation tool and the responses were ranked according to the rubric. The data was analyzed using multidimensional scaling—ASCAL procedure—in SPSS 23TM and within the repertory grid domain according to the RepSocio tool in Rep 5TM. The plots show a gradual development throughout the week in terms of specific features becoming ‘stronger’ or exerting more influence towards the middle of the course and fragmenting after that. Analyses were able to show which participants correlated most closely with the hypothetical ideal within the community of practice. Concerning this community of practice, the interrelationships within the community are determined using a social mapping exercise moving from the individual consciences to a particularised collective conscience.

An Anthropological-Institutional Overview of Communism and Political Pluralism in Albania

Abstract The individual in communism was deformed from extreme collectivism and sterilizing ideology! The service toward the cause of communism on this individual was engrafted with a feeling of love for the regime. In these circumstances was created “idol-ideology” and “idol-leadership.” This kind of morality and education shaped and mal-nurtured the isolated and submissive individual, a politicized one; the individual that considered himself as a member of the armada with epochal historical mission. The communist system of “Popular Democracy,” resurrected the ancient feature of our anthropology built during the ruling of the Ottoman Empire period: “serving and being under command!” So much as the individuals entered into a race with one-another to serve the Party, and in hierarchic order from bottom-up, to serve directly the leadership, even more the main leader. This type of competition was complete with the vice, because of the cultural differences, the routine part of anthropology acted upon the lead of a negative energy, materialized through: lies, slander, intrigues, traps, unfaithfulness, and hate. Serventhood reawakened the ottoman mechanism of serving and faithfulness on family basis, family heritage, on kinship, regionally and nepotistic relationships. The long absence of freedom, as a natural social breathing, as a co-existential instrumental mechanism that widens the spectrum of legal action, the purpose of which is the respect for human rights and their realization with main feature the human dignity and prosperity, nevertheless could not have left traces upon the individual and collective conscience. The elongated historical authoritarianism and the permanent absence of democratic system, the fearful isolation in communism, the absence of any private property, the absence of the freedom of speech: including the religious one, had shaped the Albanian anthropologic-individual deeply deformed and totally unprepared for liberal democracy. All of this situation made the anarchy to be displayed as form of weakness to be oriented. Anthrop-anarchy was created as a transitional form of anthropological groups, which left behind the classical and ideological forms of the organization in communism, and in contact with the free-market economy, with the freedom of movements, with the open society for change; being an unprepared anthropology and lead by incompetent policy-making, occurred that these anthropological groupings to take intermediate forms, illusive traits, unstable structures. Anthrop-anarchy entered in a battle to be legalized by bending the state in its knees, which by its decisions legalized the informality: property and economic wise. So, the footpath was opened for the anarchic individual, who appeared as promoter of the Albanian society in transition. Politics accepted this pressure, because they continue to count their votes. Differently from all of the former Eastern Communist countries, Albania is the only one that has informal property problems in national level. The authoritative power has more dispositions to legalize the informal properties, rather than support by law the legal owners. There are more than 300,000 informal buildings that have been included in the legalization process. This informal reality with national dimensions, shows that in Albania still it is not understood that private property is 9/10 law and 1/10 asset. This is an assassination against the legal statehood. This situation helps to understand why the “democracy through law” does not function. The political parties have morphed in market accessories. Even worse, this mechanism has changed into a system, therefore in Albania there are no poor politicians. Another feature of political party pluralism is the absence of political relativism. The parties sell their ideas and programs as an absolute truth. In these political climate is impossible the function the cultural political pluralism. This is why, the democracy in Albania cannot be considered as functional or simply fragile one. That is an authoritarian democracy that is fed by the exclusiveness philosophy, and that creates conflictual actions, that often end “beheaded” by Ottoman style! It is necessary that the change to create a liberal democracy system must start from education on law, rules, and constitutionality. We must cross the bridge from an Oriental inherited education to a Western Civilization one!

Moral Theology, Culture of Counsel, and the Society of Jesus in the Seventeenth Century

This paper explores the connection between the early modern debates over Probabilism and political counsel. It argues that the issue of counsel was important in the polemics against Jesuit moral theology. Theological challenges to Probabilism clearly show that many intellectuals were worried it could lead political counsellors astray and encourage them to defer to the whims of political authorities. This was not merely a theoretical issue. Three French cases evidence the fact that political counsellors could claim an obligation to put obedience to their sovereign before obedience to religious authority—the pope in particular—on religious grounds. The discussion between anti-probabilists and probabilists during the second half of the seventeenth century shows the degree of unrest among theological and ecclesiastical authorities confronted with the demands of the state on individual conscience, and on the conscience of counsellors in particular.

A Relation between Objectivity and Subjectivity in the Moral Reflection of Gabrielė Petkevičaitė during World War I

It is considered that conscience embraces dialectic relation between objectivity and subjectivity. The conviction of an individual conscience is mere subjective conviction so it should satisfy objective moral norms. This article discusses how conscience, as the source of inward responsibility, and objective order of moral rules correlate between each other. Wartime is the limitary situation when the conflict between subjective convictions and objective occasions comes out dramatically clear. In the article it is made attempt to assess how the Lithuanian writer Gabrielė Petkevičaitė authorizes her understanding of right and justice during World War I even if it does not satisfy requirements of objective good. G. Petkevičaitė wrote all reflections of her experience in the diary named Karo meto dienoraštis (The Wartime Diary) in 1914–1919. There is presented Lithuanian writer’s attitude towards prevailing opinion that some of the unwarrantable (sometimes even criminal) actions and behavior are justifiable during such hard limitary times. The texts of the diary reveal the fact that, despite complicated situations, the Lithuanian writer remained true-hearted to humanism ideals and the truth.

Las intimidades colectivas de la Clase Obrera. Vida urbana y cultura popular en las ciudades de principios del siglo XX

A menudo se habla en referencia a la clase obrera de una cultura de resistencia traducida en procesos de reapropiación. Una cosa es cierta: de una forma o de otra, el obrero reelabora con otras finalidades las estructuras y las normas sociales que le son impuestas. Pero el paso al acto de autonomía como viene a significar esa reapropiación está en función de los recursos de que dispone y varía según la conciencia individual, el grupo familiar o la organización política de la cual el individuo puede formar parte. Se hace patente, pues, un nivel de autodeterminación, como margen para la libertad individual, que permitiría una tipo de “cambio interior” y que haría posible a cada cual resistir las normas y regular la intensidad y la combinación entre el ámbito de lo colectivo y el ámbito de lo privado. La moral colectiva se construye en este entorno en que el imaginario social articula todo un entramado de representaciones autónomas.

Los interpretantes mediáticos de Elisabeth Käsemann. La ley normalizadora de las representaciones

This article tackles the description of the scenario in which the debate on the role of individual conscience, law and weather takes place in Peirce's semiotics. Assuming a nonconstructivist perspective peirceanian, we repair in media interpretations of Elisabeth Kasemann as an example that comes to clarify the relationship between events of signs and over time in the process of signification and allocate a place to remember and expectations. The whole truth dwells in each of its delays and the truth of memory is given by the truth agreed by the memories that mean to infinity. The positivity of the sign chain solves the precarious truth of representations but does not solve the precariousness produced by the new absences and the corresponding expectations.

Theodicy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Throughout all of Rousseau’s works there is tension between argumentation and feeling, speculation and intuition, reason and conscience. Reason binds men when they think correctly, but divides them and opposes one to the other when they place it at the service of self-interest, of ambition and of the will to prevail. Conversely, the universality of conscience is immediate and transparent: it transmits the truth of the existence of God, of the freedom of men, of the distinction between good and evil, as well as of the universal principles that are at the roots of human action and of the virtues honoured by all human societies, despite the differences of particular legislations. Mankind possesses an innate and intuitive conscience of the fundamental principles by which its conduct must be inspired. Were we to consider human actions only according to the criterion of physical need, of causality and of movement, vices and virtues would disappear and terms like morality and honesty would have no meaning. But each one of us perceives from within that this is not the case. We feel that moral good and evil are more real than anything else, without any need whatsoever to prove it. To obey the conscience one has of good and of evil without human mediation means to reject the dogmatic formalism of religions as well as the vanity of philosophical disputes. Every human being, however, is inserted into a national community. What should the state’s attitude be vis-à-vis religion? Rousseau indicates two paths. The first consists in establishing a purely civil religion that admits only those dogmas that are truly useful to society. Rousseau highlights the contradiction of a Christian religion that, although it is the religion of peace par excellence, fuels continuing bloody clashes among men due to a dogmatic theology that is totally alien to the essence of the Gospel and extremely hazardous for the life of the State. The second path consists in allowing Christianity to retain its authentic spirit, its freedom from any material constraint, without any obligations other than those of individual conscience. The Christian religion has such a pure and noble moral that it cannot but benefit the State, as long as one does not expect to make it part of the constitution.

Paths of Glory and the Tyranny of the Greater Good

In Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957) the individual's moral intent is distorted, compromised, and eventually co-opted by the overriding utilitarian ethic of ensuring the survival of the system – the ultimate ‘greater good’ – at all costs. The individual may challenge the system in a noble quest for justice, like Dax. He may hypocritically seek professional advancement from striving to serve it, like Mireau. Or he may cynically manipulate it for political purposes, like Broulard. In each case, the consequences are ultimately the same – the individual is forced to align his particular moral vision, however noble or ignoble, with the imperative of the greater good. The individual may resist or affirm the system and achieve some level of moral consistency and purity, but only momentarily and with limited success. In the end, whatever the value or relevance of the individual conscience to a particular situation, it is overridden by the demands of the greater good.

Professionally responsible for counseling Pregnant Women about Abortion and Feticide

ABSTRACT We provide comprehensive, practical guidance for physicians on when to offer, recommend, perform, and refer patients for induced abortion and feticide based on the professional responsibility model of obstetric ethics. We begin by defining clinical terminology and elucidating autonomy-based and beneficencebased obligations as well as professional conscience and individual conscience. The obstetrician's role in counseling the pregnant woman about abortion and feticide should be based primarily on professional conscience, which is shaped by autonomy-based and beneficence-based obligations of the obstetrician to the pregnant and fetal patients, with important but limited constraints originating in individual conscience. How to cite this article Chervenak FA, McCullough LB. Professionally responsible for counseling Pregnant Women about Abortion and Feticide. Donald School J Ultrasound Obstet Gynecol 2016;10(3):321-325.

Honorary authorship and symbolic violence.

This paper invokes the conceptual framework of Bourdieu to analyse the mechanisms, which help to maintain inappropriate authorship practices and the functions these practices may serve. Bourdieu's social theory with its emphasis on mechanisms of domination can be applied to the academic field, too, where competition is omnipresent, control mechanisms of authorship are loose, and the result of performance assessment can be a matter of symbolic life and death for the researchers. This results in a problem of game-theoretic nature, where researchers' behaviour will be determined more by the logic of competition, than by individual character or motives. From this follows that changing this practice requires institutionalized mechanisms, and change cannot be expected from simply appealing to researchers' individual conscience. The article aims at showing that academic capital (administrative power, seniority) is translated into honorary authorship. With little control, undetected honorary authorship gives the appearance of possessing intellectual capital (scientific merit). In this way a dominant position is made to be seen as natural result of intellectual ability or scientific merit, which makes it more acceptable to those in dominated positions. The final conclusion of this paper is that undemocratic authorship decisions and authorship based performance assessment together are a form of symbolic violence.

Between thinking and action

Within contemporary debates on civil disobedience, Hannah Arendt’s work offers an alternative to both moral and legal approaches by offering a political view of disobedience based on what she terms a principle of dissent at the heart of constitutional democracies. In this sense, she separates disobedience from the moral claims of individual conscience as well as the restrictions imposed by legalistic conceptions. In this article, I first consider Arendt’s views on conscience and the arguments she makes for a Socratic notion of conscience understood as a by-product of thinking, as well as her arguments against conscience-based versions of disobedience such as that developed by Kimberley Brownlee. Second, I consider Arendt’s defence of a political notion of disobedience and her arguments against legal approaches such as those advocated by John Rawls and William Scheuerman.

Democratizing civil disobedience

The goal of this article is to show that mainstream liberal accounts of civil disobedience fail to fully capture the latter’s specific characteristics as a genuinely political and democratic practice of contestation that is not reducible to an ethical or legal understanding either in terms of individual conscience or of fidelity to the rule of law. In developing this account in more detail, I first define civil disobedience with an aim of spelling out why the standard liberal model, while providing a useful starting point, ultimately leads to an overly constrained, domesticated and sanitized understanding of this complex political practice. Second, I place the political practice of civil disobedience between two opposing poles: symbolic politics and real confrontation. I argue that the irreducible tension between these poles precisely accounts for its politicizing and democratizing potential. Finally, I briefly examine the role of civil disobedience in representative democracies, addressing a series of recent challenges made in response to this radically democratic understanding of disobedience.

A Place for Shame in Religious Education

An 18th-century parable based on the Adam story offers a model of moral education rooted in communitarianism. Individual conscience arises from social norms, with a vital role for shame and pride. Emphasizing the nobility of being created in the divine image, this model overcomes shortcomings of rationalist, Enlightenment education. Moreover, the parable reads the political setting of Exodus as an antidote to the individualist failings of Genesis. The social framework enables mechanisms like conscience and cognitive dissonance to function. The model challenges some current conceptions of moral education, seeing empathy as the result, rather than the cause, of moral behavior.

Screening Out Controversy: Human Genetics, Emerging Techniques of Diagnosis, and the Origins of the Social Issues Committee of the American Society of Human Genetics, 1964-1973.

In the years following World War II, and increasingly during the 1960s and 1970s, professional scientific societies developed internal sub-committees to address the social implications of their scientific expertise (Moore, Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945-1975. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). This article explores the early years of one such committee, the American Society of Human Genetics' "Social Issues Committee," founded in 1967. Although the committee's name might suggest it was founded to increase the ASHG's public and policy engagement, exploration of the committee's early years reveals a more complicated reality. Affronted by legislators' recent unwillingness to seek the expert advice of human geneticists before adopting widespread neonatal screening programs for phenylketonuria (PKU), and feeling pressed to establish their relevance in an increasingly resource-scarce funding environment, committee members sought to increase the discipline's expert authority. Painfully aware of controversy over abortion rights and haunted by the taint of the discipline's eugenic past, however, the committee proceeded with great caution. Seeking to harness interest in and assert professional control over emerging techniques of genetic diagnosis, the committee strove to protect the society's image by relegating ethical and policy questions about their use to the individual consciences of member scientists. It was not until 1973, after the committee's modest success in organizing support for a retrospective public health study of PKU screening and following the legalization of abortion on demand, that the committee decided to take a more publicly engaged stance.

FREEDOM, JUSTICE, AND THE POWER OFADAB

AbstractThis article analyzes in depth four main writings by the pioneeringnahḍaintellectual Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi, who drew on classical kinds ofadabto articulate new kinds of political subjectivities. He especially draws on the image of the body politic as a body with the king at its heart. But he reconfigures this image, instead placing the public, or the people, at the heart of politics, a “vanquishing sultan” that governs through public opinion. For al-Tahtawi,adabis a kind of virtuous comportment that governs self and soul and structures political relationships. In this, he does not diverge from classical conceptions ofadabas righteous behavior organizing proper social and political relationships. But in his thought, disciplinary training inadabis crucial to the citizen-subject's capacity for self-rule, as he submits to the authority of his individual conscience, ensuring not only freedom, but also justice. These ideas have had lasting impact on Islamic thought, as they have been recycled for the political struggles of new generations.