The Outer Limit of Freedom

Abstract

This chapter draws on G. W. F. Hegel and John Rawls to develop a novel account of freedom that shows how many people can see themselves as having an interest in resisting unjust institutions. Taking seriously the effects that social and political institutions have on people before they could ever choose them means that freedom has an essentially retrospective element; a key experience of freedom is the recognition that the institutions which have shaped individuals are ones that could have been freely chosen. Rawls calls this “the outer limit of freedom” and says it is expressed in the dispositions that are acquired from just institutions. In a well-ordered society, citizens both meet their political obligations and express their freedom when they are disposed to reciprocity with each other. Highlighting these Hegelian dimensions of Rawls’s thought shows how egalitarian liberals can be part of a broader egalitarian coalition.

Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

“…Political theorists interested in justice and responsibility have focused on the unjust relations of production, trade, and consumption structured through the global commodity chains brought about by neoliberalism (McKean 2020; Wenar 2016; Young 2004a). When considered through a framework of self-and-other-determination, however, commodity chains look a lot like updated structures that cater to privileged western consumers while still relying on racialized schemes of dominion and expropriation (i.e., through off-shore export-processing zones and exceptional regimes of labor and taxation).…”

“… 18 An existing literature considers the orientations of western citizens necessary for overcoming relationships of injustice (Young 1997, 2004a). However, the characterization of the political ground in which these desirable orientations can take root depends on understanding how existing orientations sustain—through disavowing narratives—unjust commodity chains, something that Benjamin McKean (2020) does in his work, though with a focus on neoliberal, rather than racialized, imperial attachments. …”

Could commodities themselves speak? An introduction to the agnotology of the spectacle

“…Amidst such a field of disinformation and disassociation in which it is not clear what is true nor false, disinformation itself becomes a spectacle, one in which ‘false news’ is reported because the uncanny experience it produces is itself an attractive experience for readers. Even if we are certain the letters are not hoaxes, such certainty hardly dispels the uncertainty they raise, because the extensive violence and injustice within supply chains remain unknowable (McKean, 2020: 55). In the integrated spectacle, ‘no one ever knows the real cost of anything which is produced: actually, the most important part of the real cost is never calculated; and the rest is kept secret’ (Debord, 1992: 58).…”

“…This letter has a precedent in one that Chen Pokong, a political prisoner in a Chinese labour camp, had smuggled out of prison in 1994 and which acted as evidence of human rights violations in Chinese prison at the US House of Representative and at the UN (Pang, 2021: 123, 250–253). However, we should also be aware that greater knowledge of abuses taking place in supply chains may not always correspond to social action (McKean, 2020: 55). It is also far from given that the public are actually opposed to the exploitation of subaltern labourers (Walters, 2015: 289).…”