Chapter 11 - Beyond Positive and Negative Liberty

Summary

Within the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth propose intersubjectivist conceptions of freedom, in which the freedom of individual human subjects develops adequately only in relationship with other human subjects. Their conceptions incorporate intuitions central to conceptions of negative as well as positive liberty, while moving beyond either of these traditions of thinking about freedom.In Part One of my contribution to this volume I argue that Habermas’ and Honneth’s conceptions of freedom should be viewed as a “paradigm shift” in the Western modern tradition of thinking about freedom. Their decisive move is to conceive of individual freedom as constitutively intersubjective – as a mode of human being in the world that comes into existence and develops only in certain kinds of relationship with other humans. With this, they destabilize once and for all the polarity between negative and positive freedom. I see this as an important and valuable move. However, in Part Two I argue that the constitutively intersubjective accounts of freedom offered respectively by Habermas and Honneth are, in different ways, unsatisfactory. In Part Three I propose an alternative constitutively intersubjective account of freedom.