Liberal Self Research Articles

Michel Foucault and Michael Oakeshott: The Virtuosity of Individuality

In this paper, I reinterpret Michael Oakeshott’s idea of a liberal self through the conceptual framework of Foucault’s theory of the aesthetics of the self. Oakeshott believes that agents can create themselves as a “style” or a distinctive shape. This style is a “virtuosity,” an artistic achievement that is also an “excellence” in itself. Oakeshott’s liberal version of the aesthetics of the self is a new way to think about what Foucault’s argument might mean. Oakeshott’s theory is an internal challenge to liberalism insofar as liberalism is purportedly a theory of individuality and the unalienable worth of each person; but for Oakeshott, this individuality pertains to the agent gaining a distinctive style, sustaining “distinctness,” not achieving “distinction.” Oakeshott draws our attention to how distinctness is undermined by the forces of conformity and “normality” in existing liberal society. I also argue that the purportedly “radical” social policy of the basic income, which, while in tension with parts of Oakeshott’s theory, provides all citizens the opportunity to enjoy his particular idea of the self.

The Emerging Neocommunitarianism

The financial crisis which began in 2007 has been widely interpreted as a crisis of neoliberalism, akin to the crisis of Keynesianism of the 1970s. But there is little sign of a major paradigmatic alternative, either in theory or in practice. This article looks at how the crises and failures of neoliberalism are occurring at a micro‐policy level, where they are interpreted in terms of the fallibility of individual rational choice. Policy responses to this crisis, drawing on more psychologically nuanced accounts of economic behaviour, can be described as ‘neocommunitarian’, inasmuch as they echo the communitarian critique of the liberal self. Where neoliberalism rests on a vision of the individual as atomised and rational, neocommunitarianism treats individuals as governed by social norms and incentives simultaneously. And where neoliberalism subjects individuals to periodic audit organised around targets and outputs, neocommunitarianism conducts a constant audit of behavioural fluctuations in real time.

The emergence of the other sexual citizen: orientalism and the modernisation of sexuality

Guided by the claims of the feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social movements and international human rights agendas, governments in late modern democracies have been implementing (or pressured to implement) new juridical frames to recognise sexual diversity. As a result, in the last two decades, gendered and sexual ‘others’ have been ‘included’ in citizenship leading to the formulation of what has been called ‘sexual citizenship’, propounding the formation of new sexual rights-bearing subjects. However, this seemingly respectable and progressive contemporary sexual citizen has become the benchmark against which all sexual subjects are measured, and involves a particular liberal self that has been constituted against a myriad of ‘others’ marked by cultural, religious and racialised differences. How has this ‘sexual citizen’ been constituted and how does it operate within the political field of struggles over sexual freedom and justice? This article explores to what extent the sexual citizen has been configured in Euro-American terms within political liberalism, and how colonial and orientalist ideas about sexual citizenship and democracy follow on from this restricted notion of the subject of rights.

Beyond the Liberal Self

In the following short essay I set out the key insights and main arguments by chapter of Alison Assiter's Kierkegaard. This text is an important contribution to the general subject matter of realizable well-being. In a final section I discuss possible elaborations and limitations and challenges to the problem of morals and ethics that can and are developed from a metaphysic of the person.

Not-/Unveiling as An Ethical Practice

The practice of Islamic veiling has over the last ten years emerged into a popular site of investigation. Different researchers have focused on the various significations of this bodily practice, both in its gendered dimensions, its identity components, its empowering potentials, as a satorial practice or as part of a broader economy of bodily practices which shape pious dispositions in accordance with the Islamic tradition. Lesser, however, has this been the case for the practice of not veiling or unveiling. If and when attention is accorded to the latter, it is often grasped as a product of integration or an effect secular governmentality, but only rarely as a bodily practice. Drawing on narratives of second generation secular and religious Maghrebi Muslims in Belgium, this paper pursues this second perspective by examining to which extent not-veiling can be understood as a technique of the self (Foucault) that is functional to shaping a liberal (Musilm) subject. While a first part of this article will unpack the ethical substance of such discursive interrogations and point to the ways in which they are intertwined with the enactment of a liberal self, the second part will examine the embodied contours of this problematization, which appeared through the labour upon one's affect and bodily dispositions that this refusal of the hijab, or the act of unveiling, implies.

Independent Travel: Colonialism, Liberalism and the Self

Independent travel is constructed by its adherents as a more benign form of travel than mass tourism. Yet this alternative form of travel remains implicated in colonial legacies through its adherence to the liberal project of self-development. Through voluntarily undertaking hardship and narrating their experiences to other travelers and broader audiences, independent travelers depend upon the very same structural inequalities they seek to overcome in order to construct the liberal self, which is itself implicated in colonialism.

Liberalismus und Wohlfahrtsstaat

Abstract This paper elucidates several aspects of the liberal discourse concerning the welfare state. It is argued that the basic principles of liberalism (the ahistorical economic concept of the self, the fallacy of a naturalistic notion of competition and a state without the foundation of a sovereignty of the people in the tradition of Immanuel Kant) have to be questioned. Thus, a historical- epistemological consideration of the liberal discourse might attaina richer and more meaningful explanation regarding the difference between liberalism and the welfare state. So the liberal self and its desire for competition are normative imperatives and have to be enlarged in respect of a categorical imperative as the basic principle of the welfare state.

DEVELOPMENTAL LIBERALISM

Abstract In this essay, Randall Curren identifies a type of liberalism that incorporates empirical claims about the development of agency and rationality, and responds to the criticism that liberalism rests on an incoherent conception of autonomous agency. He argues that moral agents did indeed “become ghosts” somewhere en route from Aristotle to Kant, but not for the reasons supposed, nor with the consequences for liberalism alleged by its critics. Curren concludes that an Aristotelian form of developmental liberalism, resting on a conception of rational agency as embodied, incremental, and developmentally contingent on social and circumstantial factors, can survive the familiar critiques of the “liberal self” and enable the liberal tradition to further expand the range of educational matters it can fruitfully address.

Sam Shepard's Anti-Western Silent Tongue as Cultural Critique

In 1993, hard on the heels of Dances with Wolves, Sam Shepard's small budget Western, Silent Tongue, made a fleeting appearance in art-house movie theatres. The film received appreciative coverage in those publications for which paying attention to offbeat, slightly avant-gardist cultural manifestations is part of their liberal self- image, but not unexpectedly, mainstream media took no heed. Instead, Dances with Wolves was heralded as a culturally authentic, politically correct, revisionist Western.

Sam Shepard's Anti-Western Silent Tongue as Cultural Critique

In 1993, hard on the heels of Dances with Wolves, Sam Shepard's small budget Western, Silent Tongue, made a fleeting appearance in art-house movie theatres. The film received appreciative coverage in those publications for which paying attention to offbeat, slightly avant-gardist cultural manifestations is part of their liberal self- image, but not unexpectedly, mainstream media took no heed. Instead, Dances with Wolves was heralded as a culturally authentic, politically correct, revisionist Western.

Mapping Democracy: Racial Identity and the Quandary of Political Representation

In a series of lawsuits during the 1990s, federal courts in the United States rejected congressional election districts that had both extremely irregular boundaries and nonwhite majorities. In particular, courts ruled that the shape of these districts–which they characterized as ‘bizarre’ and noncompact–demonstrated that states had unconstitutionally classified voters by race. These legal cases reflect a fundamental tension in American political culture between universalistic citizenship and particularistic racial identity. Universalistic concepts that embrace numeric political representation, geometric standards of shape, and the ‘liberal self ’ share an understanding of the individual as the basic unit of political representation and define this individual by the ability to make rational choices. In contrast, concepts of particularistic identity that emphasize the importance of ‘regional community representation,’ informal visual standards of shape, and place-based or regional attachments view communities as the basic unit of political representation, and believe that individual identity is primarily constituted by membership in communities. Although some participants in the redistricting litigation have advocated notions of community based on racial solidarity, federal courts have only recognized such claims to the extent that these communities are defined by regional attachments. This suggests that the importance of regional attachments remains firmly entrenched in the American political system, despite the ascendance of ‘placeless’ numeric representation. Notwithstanding the impassioned rhetoric on both sides, the effect of these cases is ambiguous for two reasons. First, the creation of nonwhite majority districts is a problematic strategy of political empowerment; second, the decisions do not directly address the underlying issues of segregation and racial inequality.

Reading the Small Print in Global Civil Society: The Inexorable Hegemony of the Liberal Self

Reading the Small Print in Global Civil Society: The Inexorable Hegemony of the Liberal Self

From Hippolyta to Hu: Colonization, appropriation, and the liberal self

(1997). From Hippolyta to Hu: Colonization, appropriation, and the liberal self. The European Legacy: Vol. 2, No. 7, pp. 1115-1136.

Yet Another Liberal Self

Yet Another Liberal Self

Philosophy and Racial Identity

In the 1993 film, Map of the Human Heart, an Inuit man asks a white engineer who has come to northern Canada to map the region, Why are you making maps? Without hesitating, the white man responds They will be very accurate. Map-making and race-making have a strong historical as well as conceptual relationship. The ordering and labeling of terrain, the classifying of types, and the typologies of natural races emerged simultaneously in what Foucault called the Classical episteme. Arguing via Foucault, both Cornell West and David Theo Goldberg have attempted genealogies of modern racism-meaning here not contemporary racism so much as the racism of modernism genealogies that link the Western fetishistic practices of classification, the forming of tables, and the consequent primacy of the visible with the creation of metaphysical and moral hierarchies between racialized categories of human beings.1 Given this genesis, the concept of race and of racial difference emerges as that which is visible, classifiable, and morally salient. West argues that the application of history techniques to the study of the human species yields a comparative analysis based on visible, especially physical, characteristics. . . [which] permit one to discern identity and difference, equality and inequality, beauty and ugliness among animals and human bodies.2 Goldberg argues that the universal sameness that was so important for the Liberal self required a careful containment and taxonomy of difference. Where rights require sameness, difference must be either trivialized or contained in the Other across a firm and clearly visible border. The result of these classification practices juxtaposed with liberal ideology is a paradox wherein Race is irrelevant, but all is race.3 Visible difference is the route to classification and therefore knowledge, and yet visible difference threatens the security of claims to know by challenging universal applicability and invoking the spectre of relativism. Classification systems can contain this threat and impede relativism by enclosing the entirety of difference within a taxonomy organized by a single logic. In this way the continuing hegemony of liberal discourse is ensured. But the resultant juxtaposition between universalist legitimation narratives that deny or trivialize difference and careful delineations of supposedly morally relevant phenotypic human difference is one of the greatest antinomies of modern discourse. We have finally come to recognize and acknowledge this paradox, but we have not yet solved or moved beyond it. Today the naturalistic classification systems that would reify human variability into moral categories, the Eurocentric teleologies that would excuse if not justify colonialism, and the phallogocentric binaries that would obscure relations of domination by presenting them as separate spheres, have been largely exposed as specious. And the realm of the visible, or what is taken as self-evidently visible (which is how the ideology of racism naturalizes racial designation), is recognized as the product of a specific form of perceptual practice, rather than the result of human sight. Thus Foucault claims that: the object [of discourse] does not await in limbo the order that will free it and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity; it does not preexist itself, held back by some obstacle at the first edges of light. It exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of relations.4 His central thesis in The Birth of the Clinic is that the gaze, though hailed as pure and preconceptual, can only function successfully when connected to a system of understanding which dictates its use and interprets its results. What defines the act of medical knowledge in its concrete form is not . . . the encounter between doctor and patient, nor is it the confrontation between a body of knowledge and a perception; it is the systematic intersection of two series of information. …

First amendment theory and conceptions of the self

Free speech theory is built upon certain notions of the individual person and his or her rights that derive from early expositors of liberalism. This picture of the human person—the “liberal self—has come under attack from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including communitarians, feminists, literary theorists, and critical legal studies scholars. This article examines the rival conceptions of the self and analyzes the possible effects on First Amendment theory of these critiques of the liberal self.

Liberalism and Moral Selfhood

Historically, liberal theories of justice have presupposed certain metaphysical assumptions concerning the self that increasingly and rightly are falling into disfavor in many contemporary philosophical circles. The human subject has traditionally been conceived by liberals as possessing an underlying and determinate nature-a deep core of being-that is describable in the language of either materialist or idealist metaphysics. Whether conceived as the transcendental subject of Kantian idealism or the materialistic homo economicus of contractarian and utilitarian accounts, the liberal self has been held to be ontologically prior both to the practices and forms of life characteristic of the community to which it belongs, as well as to its own autonomously chosen ends. Liberalism's traditional conceptions of subjectivity are thoroughly metaphysical and essentialist in a time when essentialist theories of the self increasingly are on the wane. 1 While some of its proponents periodically have sought to rid liberalism of its more dubious metaphysical underpinnings, critics of liberalism (in particular those on the Left, including a wide variety of Marxists, socialists, feminists, and communitarians) have often been inclined to suppose that rejecting classical liberal conceptions of the self entails a further renunciation of liberalism in its entirety, including its chief doctrine concerning the primacy of justice, or the priority of the right over the good. Liberal justice, it is often alleged,2 is logically wedded to particular conceptions of selfhood which can no longer be taken seriously, thus entailing that liberal morality must either be wholly rejected or, at the very least, radically overhauled. Theories that underscore the social character of the self have essentially carried the day in recent years, forcing liberalism to modify much of its classical posture and to concede either a total or partial victory to the Left, which so often is thought to be alone in awarding proper recognition to the factical and social character of the self. Taking a broadly Hegelian stance, liberalism's critics frequently take it to task both for overemphasizing the antagonism between individuals (as well as that between the individual and the state) and for ignoring the pervasiveness in subjectivity of intersubjectivity. Authors from Martin Heidegger to Michael Sandel have viewed the self as an inheritor of a wide variety of social involvements and conditions, including everything from its tacit understanding of the world to the practices and roles it takes up, the values and moral categories that it appropriates, the practices, customs, and relationships that are all constitutive of moral identity. The self, it is rightly argued, is a social being not only in the sense that it is not self-sufficient, and must form associations within a community in order to meet many of its basic needs, but more fundamentally in that the identity of the self, including its identity as a moral agent, is inseparable from its participation within a network of social practices, traditions, and communal associations. Such considerations are central to the manner in which we understand ourselves as subjects of moral action and as persons in the most fundamental sense. Our moral being-not only the values and principles that we explicitly hold, but our fundamental mode of comportment as moral agents-is in large part an inheritance from a particular historical community. Intending this view as a key premise in the critique of liberal morality, it is frequently maintained that properly acknowledging the social character of the self requires not only that we renounce classical liberal theories of subjectivity, but further that we must reject the theory of justice with which they have been traditionally aligned. Accordingly, liberals who wish to preserve commitments to the primacy of justice, state neutrality, and the full range of individual freedoms that liberals have traditionally defended will need to confront directly the question of whether the failure of metaphysical essentialism (notably in its more individualistic forms) undermines liberalism as a theory of justice, or whether the latter is amenable to a reformulated conception of subjectivity. …

Making Sense of Mill

Wendy Donner'sThe Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophyis an important and thought-provoking addition to the growing body of literature seeking to rescue Mill's practical philosophy from the rather lowly place it occupied in the estimation of many philosophers earlier this century, and to present him as a philosopher whose views form a coherent, systematic whole that can still contribute significantly to numerous moral and political debates. The book proposes an interpretation of the whole of Mill's practical philosophy, and attempts to reveal how aspects of Mill's thought, hitherto considered incompatible, actually mutually support one another. At the same time, Donner sets many of Mill's positions in the context of contemporary moral and political philosophical debates, and finds that on a number of important issues, his thought stands up rather well against more recent work.

The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy.

Wendy Donner contends here that recent commentators on John Stuart Mill's thought have focused on his notions of right and obligation and have not paid as much attention to his notion of the good. Mill, she maintains, rejects the quantitative hedonism of Bentham's philosophy in favor of an expanded qualitative version. In this book she provides an account of his complex views of the good and the ways in which these views unify his moral and political thought.

Book Reviews: A History of Modern Political Thought: Major Political Thinkers from Hobbes to Marx, beyond Individualism: Reconstituting the Liberal Self, Solidarity and Schism: ‘The Problem of Disorder’ in Durkheimian and Marxist Sociology, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, The Politics of Social Policy, Parliamentary Questions, The House of Lords at Work: A Study

Book Reviews: A History of Modern Political Thought: Major Political Thinkers from Hobbes to Marx, beyond Individualism: Reconstituting the Liberal Self, Solidarity and Schism: ‘The Problem of Disorder’ in Durkheimian and Marxist Sociology, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, The Politics of Social Policy, Parliamentary Questions, The House of Lords at Work: A Study