Abstract
Recent theoretical debates over political liberalism address a wide variety
of issues, from citizenship and minority rights to the role of constitutional
foundations and democratic deliberation. At stake in virtually all
of these discussions, however, is the nature of the autonomous agent,
whose perspective and interests are fundamental for the derivation of
liberal principles. The
... read more
autonomous citizen acts as a model for the basic
interests protected by liberal principles of justice as well as the representative
rational agent whose hypothetical or actual choices serve to
legitimize those principles. Whether implicitly or explicitly, then, crucial
questions raised about the acceptability of the liberal project hinge
on questions about the meaning and representative authority of the autonomous
agent. Similarly, in the extensive recent philosophical literature
on the nature of autonomy, debates over the content-neutrality of
autonomy or the social conditions necessary for its exercise ultimately
turn on issues of the scope of privacy, the nature of rights, the scope of
our obligation to others, claims to welfare, and so on – the very issues
that are at the heart of discussions of liberalism regarding the legitimate
political, social, and legal order.
Despite the conceptual and practical interdependence of liberalism
and autonomy, however, the recent literature on liberalism has developed
without much engagement with the parallel boom in philosophical
work on autonomy, and vice versa. This book serves as a point of intersection
for these parallel paths. The chapters connect the lines of inquiry
centering on the concept of autonomy and the self found in relatively less
“political” areas of thought with the debates over the plausibility of liberalism
that have dominated political philosophy in the Euro-American tradition for some time. While the main focus of the collection is to
explore the intersection we are describing, the chapters also represent
efforts to make free-standing contributions to debates about autonomy
as well as to the foundations and operations of liberal justice itself.
In what follows, we begin by outlining the recent debates over autonomy,
before noting some of the challenges to liberalism that have motivated
current rethinking within political theory. We then discuss four
key themes at issue in both the debates over autonomy and the debates
over liberalism: value neutrality, justificatory regresses, the role of integration
and agreement, and the value of individualism. This is followed,
by a summary of each of the chapters, with a brief discussion of how the
individual essays create a dialogue among themselves concerning these
broad and fundamental issues of political philosophy.
show less
