Freedom Beyond Sovereignty – Reconstructing Liberal Individualism - Hardcover

Krause, Sharon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022623469X ISBN 13: 9780226234694

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2015

Synopsis

What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one's actions. In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.

About this title

About the Author

Sharon R. Krause is professor in and chair of the Department of Political Science at Brown University. She is the author of Civil Passions and Liberalism with Honor.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Freedom Beyond Sovereignty

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

By Sharon R. Krause

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-23469-4

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction / Reconstructing Liberal Individualism, 
One / Non-sovereign Agency, 
Two / Agency, Inequality, and Responsibility, 
Three / Vitalities of Non-sovereign Agency, 
Four / What Is Freedom?, 
Five / Plural Freedom, 
Conclusions / Redeeming Freedom, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Non-sovereign Agency

To call human agency non-sovereign is to say that the exercise of agency regularly comes apart from intentional choice and consistently eludes individual control. It means that agency extends beyond the internal faculties of the person to include intersubjective exchanges, which makes other people integral to the agency of the individual. Individual agency is non-sovereign because it is a socially distributed phenomenon in this sense. Moreover, agency is materially distributed as well as socially distributed because bodies (both human and nonhuman) have a part in agency. This chapter elaborates the various ways that agency is non-sovereign, emphasizing both its socially distributed and its corporeal character. I highlight the fact that individual agency extends beyond the boundaries of the self but insist that personal identity is a crucial component of agency. In addition, although agency eludes control and often comes apart from intentionality, it is by no means ineffectual. On the contrary, the non-sovereign approach shows that our agency is far more potent than we often think—or may wish to believe. Understanding both the limits of human agency and its sometimes unexpected potency is crucial to making progress against enduring injustice and establishing conditions for the freedom of all.

The first part of the chapter gives a preliminary statement of what agency is and what it means to say that agency is non-sovereign, the second part explores Arendt's account of non-sovereign agency, and the final part engages the new materialist literature to illuminate the bodily dimensions of agency. Arendt's view is generative for theorizing the non-sovereignty of agency but it is troubled by difficulties in her accounts of personal identity and responsibility. In a similar way, although the new materialism helps us understand the corporeal dimensions of individual agency and clarifies some dynamics of domination and oppression that are otherwise difficult to see, it often denies the importance of individuated identities and undercuts personal responsibility. For these reasons, I go some distance with Arendt and the new materialists but not all the way. In particular, I insist upon the importance of an enduring, individuated, and norm-responsive self as a key component of individual agency even while acknowledging agency's socially distributed and corporeal dimensions.

The Two Sides of Agency

As the affirmation of an individual's subjective existence through concrete action in the world, agency has both a subjectivity or selfhood aspect, and an aspect relating to efficacy or impact on the world. In parsing agency this way, I draw inspiration from the work of Bernard Williams. Williams identifies "two sides to action," which he calls deliberation and result. His distinctive "two-sides" approach offers a valuable analytic framework for beginning to theorize the contours of agency, although it does not provide everything we will need to elaborate these contours fully. The deliberation side of action connects agency to what Williams refers to as character and what I am calling selfhood, or personal identity, or subjective existence. Agents act deliberately, meaning in a way that reflects the unique constellation of dispositions, desires, beliefs, abilities, and personal histories that establish their distinctive characters and make them who they are as individuals.

It is worth emphasizing here that while the selfhood that figures in agency is robust, it should not be understood as singular or fixed or essential. Every self is something of a plurality containing multiple strands, some of which may sit uneasily with one another. Moreover, because we exist in dynamic relationship with our social and material environments, we are all subject to change. None of us remains perfectly identical over time. And because our characters evolve in connection with our changing circumstances, it would be wrong to think that any particular feature of our subjective existence constitutes an a priori essence. Even our most intransigent qualities take on shifting significance for who we are as our lives unfold because how these qualities figure in the constitution of our subjectivity depends partly on how the social and material contexts shape our experience of them. Finally, the self's transformation over time is itself a part of agency because we sometimes become new to ourselves in important ways as a result of what we do. In this respect, subjectivity or selfhood has a plural, open-ended quality. We shall return to this point presently.

Although personal identity is not strictly singular and is never fixed once and for all, it would be difficult to deny that we identify ourselves (and others) with particular characteristics. While most of us recognize the ways that we change over time—and it is not uncommon to feel disconnected from aspects of ourselves that were more prevalent in earlier stages of our lives—we generally experience from one moment to the next a sense of relatively unified subjectivity. When the teapot sings out, it is no mystery to me whether or not I was the one who set it to boil. There is an "I" who got out of bed this morning, made breakfast, and walked to work. This is the same "I" now seated before my computer. There is no confusion in my mind about who I am or how I got here, as there would have to be if nothing about us were continuous, if selfhood were thoroughly unstable. Other people perceive my selfhood, too. They address me by the same name each time they greet me; they expect me to remember the conversation we had yesterday. I have a friend who reminds me of my father. My partner, who knew my father well, agrees about the similarity. I do not doubt that the characteristic qualities in my friend that remind me of my father could change over time, or that they arose through a complex interaction of influences (i.e., I do not hold the qualities to be fixed or essential), but I would be very surprised—indeed, fundamentally disoriented—if the next time I saw him, none of the familiar features of his personality were on view.

The distinct selfhood that each of us has, which contains multiple strands and is always evolving but which is generally recognizable to ourselves and others as ours, is what Williams meant by character and what I mean by subjective existence, or selfhood, or personal identity. To define agency in terms of the affirmation of one's subjective existence implies that there is indeed something to be affirmed through one's actions, a self (however complex and evolving) that precedes any particular deed. It also implies a subject with sufficient reflexivity to be capable of recognizing herself—her character, her unique identity—in her actions and effects. Experientially speaking, this reflexive sense of self is crucial. Without it, the common experience that we all have of being agents, of seeing that the world is different because of something that we in particular have done, would be impossible. The reflexive self is not the sole source of agency, but it is an important part of the picture.

In addition to a sense of selfhood, agency involves deeds; the efficacy dimension of agency also is crucial. To be an agent is to have an impact on the world, and this generally involves more than mere willing; it involves real action and its effects. Significantly, however, one's effects can affirm one's subjective existence without bringing to fruition the specific intentions that motivated the action. We tend to assume that agency coincides with the exercise of intentional choice. Yet the effects of our actions frequently outrun or counteract our conscious intentions without thereby eradicating our agency. Greek tragedy dramatizes this dynamic. Oedipus, for instance, in no way intended to do the dreadful deeds that later brought him so much misery. Still, the reason for his misery is precisely that they were his deeds despite the fact that they were, in an important sense, unintended. We might also think of the ways that we unwittingly perpetuate norms of racism and sexism: a woman's excessive deference in the company of male colleagues; a white teacher's heightened scrutiny of the black student. Clearly, we can be agents of racism and sexism even when we do not set out to discriminate.

Oedipus's deeds and those of the unwitting sexist or racist reflect what Patchen Markell refers to as the "involvement" aspect of agency, the idea that when agency is in play "whatever it is that's happening" is "happening through you, through your activity." Markell distinguishes agency-as-involvement from agency-as-control, meaning action that is directly reflective of one's intentions. Even when agency-as-control is absent—when it is thwarted by domination, for instance, as in the case of slavery—agency-as-involvement may still be present. Slavery eradicates agency-as-control on the part of the slave. Yet the labor of slaves "though directed by others, nevertheless happen[s] through them, through their activity." Slave labor may serve the master's purposes, but it is still the slave's labor. As Markell points out, to identify agency exclusively with control or the exercise of intentional choice is to miss the very real, albeit limited, "agency of the oppressed." It leads us to underestimate the potentially vital agency of those on the losing end of prevailing power relations, to write them off as mere victims and implicitly deny them the grounds of personal responsibility. It also neglects the complexity of the agency of the oppressor, which is often unintentional and even unconscious in how it affects others. Agency is not "unidimensional," as Markell puts it, and not to be equated in any simple way with intentionality or control.

In showing how agency can persist even in cases where our intentions and our effects come apart, the notion of agency-as-involvement connects up with Williams's work on moral luck. Williams illustrates the idea of moral luck with the example of a truck driver who unintentionally runs over a small child in the street. Not only was the action unintended, as Williams tells the story, it was entirely blameless, at least on any reasonable account of moral responsibility. The driver had not been drinking; he was not speeding; he had not fallen asleep. He ran the child down through absolutely no fault of his own. He came around a corner, and seemingly from nowhere the child darted into the path of his truck. He slammed on the brakes but it was too late. The truck driver is bound to feel regret, Williams says, although no one could blame him for what he did. The driver feels regret because he reflexively recognizes his own agency-as-involvement in the deed, despite not having intended or controlled the outcome.

True, the driver's responsibility in this instance is different than it would be if he had run down the child on purpose. Yet the absence of malicious intent does not let him off the hook entirely, either in his own eyes or in ours. His regret is natural, even salutary. Indeed, Williams insists that "it would be a kind of insanity never to experience sentiments of this kind." It would be insane because we know (however inchoately) that agency is more than the enactment of our intended projects. The reason we can relate to the truck driver's regret and to tragic heroes such as Oedipus is that we understand, as Williams puts it, "that in the story of one's life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally done."

Tragedy is not the only way that we experience the non-sovereignty of our agency either. For example, I am my sister's "Rock of Gibraltar," or so she tells me, although this is not anything I ever set out to be. The effect that I have on her in this regard does not embody my will exactly but it does manifest something distinctive about me. No one else in her life has this effect; it results from the specific combination of qualities and ways of being that uniquely defines my personal identity in the context of my relationship with her. Consequently, although I never intended to be her Rock of Gibraltar, on reflection I can see that this is a label that fits. I can identify with the acts that have had this effect on her; they have indeed manifested my subjective existence concretely in the world.

Consider again the ways that our actions frequently operate to reinforce racial hierarchies in society—hierarchies that reflect deeply ingrained self-understandings—even when we do not set out to discriminate. Imagine a white business owner interviewing candidates for a job in her company. She is a good person, let us say, who is committed to the principles of liberty and justice for all. She prides herself on being fair-minded, and she harbors no conscious ill will toward people of other races. Yet like most individuals living in societies that are as racially stratified as the United States, her perceptions of others and her responses to them are affected, however unwittingly, by implicit bias in the form of racially tinged misunderstanding, suspicion, and stigma. Sure the black candidate looks good on paper, but can he really do the job? Will he fit in? Can he be trusted? As commonly happens, she may be more apt to notice the weaknesses in his record than the equally significant weaknesses in the records of the white candidates. She may find that his lack of outward self-assurance makes her doubt his abilities. When she decides not to hire him, it may not be fair to accuse her of intentional discrimination. Yet if he was indeed qualified for the position, this decision surely makes her an agent of racial injustice.

Her agency in this regard does not exactly track her will because she never set out to unfairly exclude or obstruct, despite the fact that this is indeed the effect she has had. Yet if this effect does not track her will, it does manifest something fundamental about her identity, for who she is reflects how she sees and responds to the world. Indeed, the fact that she remains unaware of the unintentional racism that permeates her deliberation is a mark of how deep white privilege runs within her identity. Her impact on the world can affirm key features of her identity even when it does not reflect her will. Agency is nonsovereign in part because our effects frequently diverge from our intentions. In this sense, the non-sovereignty of human agency makes it more potent than we often realize, or potent in ways that we are not accustomed to acknowledge. As we shall see, coming to terms with the non-sovereignty of our agency in this regard means recognizing a significantly wider scope for individual responsibility than we typically assume.

If these examples illustrate how agency can come apart from intentionality, they also demonstrate the important connection within agency between efficacy and identity. Markell's notion of the involvement aspect of agency implicitly puts a premium on personal identity, although he resists this association. To say that the labor of a slave reflects his involvement even when it transpires under conditions of domination, as Markell (quite rightly) does, is to assume the subjective existence of a "him." Likewise, Oedipus can recognize himself in his tragic deeds only because he has a sense of selfhood that reflexively connects the effects he has had on the world to himself, to his own identity or subjective existence. The effects I have on my sister similarly count as instances of my agency because they manifest me rather than someone else or the random influence of chance.

If the involvement aspect of agency necessarily brings personal identity into the picture, however, it does so in a way that distinguishes identity from will and selfhood from sovereignty. Although we have a tendency to conflate identity and will, they are not the same thing. They are linked, to be sure, as the exercise of will both reflects and shores up the enduring (though never fully fixed) collection of dispositions, desires, beliefs, abilities, and personal history that comprises one's identity. But we are more than our wills, and the exercise of will does not exhaust personal identity. Consequently, to say that individual agency consists in the affirmation of one's subjective existence through action in the world is not to equate agency with the exercise of will. The distinction between identity and will is a crucial piece of the non-sovereign model of human agency. Likewise, selfhood is not the same thing as sovereignty. The self that sustains Oedipus's agency-as-involvement is not a self that is fully in control of its effects. The selfhood that figures in human agency is itself non-sovereign. We shall have more to say about personal identity later in this chapter and in the next one. For now, it is enough to note the difference between identity and will, and between subjectivity as the experience of reflexive selfhood and sovereignty as the experience of control.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Freedom Beyond Sovereignty by Sharon R. Krause. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022623469X
• ISBN 13: 9780226234694
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272