Values and Identities Seminar: ‘Freedom as a Discourse Concept and its Implications for Free Societies’.

Oliver Milne, PhD candidate in Philosophy, NUI, Galway, will present a paper, ‘Freedom as a Discourse Concept and its Implications for Free Societies’, as part of the Values and Identities seminar series.

ALL WELCOME

Abstract: Freedom as a Discourse Concept and its Implications for Free Societies

In this talk, I make the case that the concept ‘freedom’ constantly evolves as part of an ongoing discourse (in Foucault’s sense) centred around the key question of democratic politics: ‘How best can we treat one another as free and equal individuals?’ This fact about the idea of freedom, I claim, is not incidental to it, but is a fundamental consideration for societies that would call themselves ‘free’.

After briefly defending the idea of the ‘key question’ (leaning on Anderson, 1999) I use examples from the history of feminism (Evans and Chamberlain, 2015; Mann and Huffman, 2005) to make plain the ubiquitous causes of the idea’s evolution, including both factors endogenous to the discourse (today’s discursive strategies are built on or react against yesterday’s, and tomorrow’s will do the same with today’s) and exogenous to it (social and technological changes continually force the core question of freedom to be asked in new contexts). Building on those examples, I argue that, regardless of whether the discourse has a theoretical endpoint, we are unlikely to ever be in a position to know that we’ve reached it, mandating an attitude of humility regarding the timeless perfection of our present conceptions of freedom. I also pay particular attention to Jacques Rancière’s characterisation of ‘the political’ as (to put it as crudely as possible) the renegotiation of the franchise by the excluded (Rancière, 2001), arguing that his claim can be read as saying that all the crucial action happens in wrangling over the scope of ‘we’ in the key question. My characterisation of the discourse of freedom, I suggest, is an illuminating extension of his concept of ‘politics’.

From there, I turn to the question of what it means for a society to be free in light of freedom’s evolving, discursive nature. My answer is that a free society is not merely a society that happens to embody present ideas of freedom, but one robustly capable of both sustaining the discourse of freedom and putting its changing products into practice. As a concrete example of this position’s distinctive character, I outline the way it recasts the social role of the academic humanities: they are, on this view, laboratories of freedom, in which new steps in the discourse are devised and assessed. Present attacks on these departments in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere, I argue, only serve to emphasise how significant this role is.

References

Anderson, E.S., 1999. What is the Point of Equality? Ethics 109, 287–337.

Evans, E., Chamberlain, P., 2015. Critical Waves: Exploring Feminist Identity, Discourse and Praxis in Western Feminism. Social Movement Studies 14, 396–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2014.964199

Foucault, M., 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge, World of Man: A Library of Theory and Research in the Human Sciences. Tavistock Publications Limited, Great Britain.

Mann, S.A., Huffman, D.J., 2005. The Decentering of Second Wave Feminism and the Rise of the Third Wave. Science & Society 69, 56–91.

Rancière, J., 2001. Ten Theses on Politics. Theory & Event 5.

Values & Identities