Farewell to Freedom
A Western Genealogy of Liberty
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Author(s)
Baldissone, Riccardo
Language
EnglishAbstract
Understandings of freedom are often discussed in moral, theological, legal and political terms, but they are not often set in a historical perspective, and they are even more rarely considered within their specific language context. From Homeric poems to contemporary works, the author traces the words that express the various notions of freedom in Classical Greek, Latin, and medieval and modern European idioms. Examining writers as varied as Plato, Aristotle, Luther, La Boétie, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Stirner, Nietzsche, and Foucault among others, this theoretical mapping shows old and new boundaries of the horizon of freedom. The book suggests the possibility of transcending these boundaries on the basis of a different theorization of human interactions, which constructs individual and collective subjects as processes rather than entities. This construction shifts and disseminates the very locus of freedom, whose vocabulary would be better recast as a relational middle path between autonomous and heteronomous alternatives.
Keywords
individual; theology; mastery; liberty; autonomy; freedom; Aristotle; PlatoDOI
10.16997/book15ISBN
9781911534600; 9781911534624; 9781911534631Publisher
University of Westminster PressPublication date and place
2018Classification
Language: history & general works
Classical history / classical civilisation
History of Western philosophy
Social & political philosophy
Political science & theory
Political control & freedoms