Freedom's Firmer Foundations
Announcing a new book deal
I am pleased to announce that I have a book under contract with Polity that aims to recover the role of ethical and social commitments for freedom. Rather than reducing freedom merely to the absence of constraints (“negative liberty,” in Isaiah Berlin’s phrasing), this book brings in other freedom traditions, such as freedom as inner ethical control and as participation in self-governance. Its narrative takes seriously John Donne’s claim that no person is an island in order to explore the way that various “liberal” practices (from democracy to the market) can be founded not on some ideology of radical autonomy but instead upon our commitments to other people. It will look at the stakes of freedom for everything from the philosophical question of the good to the challenge of preserving human dignity in the digital age.
I’ve been thinking about this project for a while, and themes of it can be seen in my writings here at this newsletter and elsewhere. Conceiving of freedom in this broader sense recasts contemporary political controversies; an impoverished language of liberty has worsened our increasingly sclerotic and vitriolic politics. But this enhanced picture of freedom can also complicate arguments about “liberalism,” “postliberalism,” and so forth. Our inherited liberties might be founded on something stronger than the atomistic joyless quest for joy. Recovering the reserves of solidarity and wonder in the modern world can realign our political and theoretical debates.
I’ll be sure to keep readers in the loop as this project progresses and will continue to have some material not directly related to the book (even if the book is a priority at the moment).
In the meantime, here are a few pieces that intersect with this project:
A two-part series on the “off-liberal” approach to politics for Genealogies of Modernity.
In extended podcast discussion of the off-liberal.
What the “Bronze Age” project misses about human vulnerability and virtue.
Why constitutional self-governance is pretty cool, actually.
Thanks, as always, for reading!