Sovereignty and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination by Scott G. Nelson

Author:Scott G. Nelson [Nelson, Scott G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, History & Theory, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781135261740
Google: hVKOAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17513126
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

Foucault explained that what was unique about the Aufklärung for Kant was a kind of speculation about how one belongs not to a tradition, custom or divine doctrine, but how one belongs to a certain “present,” a “time,” a human community that could only arise in time. In Kant’s reflection on the Enlightenment Foucault saw a unique analytics that questioned “how one belongs to a certain us, to an us that concerns a cultural totality characteristic of one’s own time.” According to Foucault, “the philosopher can no longer avoid the question of the specific way in which he belongs to this ‘us’” (ibid.). What so interested Foucault in this “us” was both its historical and geographical particularity as well as its altogether ambiguous genesis (and historical rarefaction) in a time and a place. People may not have understood the real nature of this “us,” but there was a growing inclination to accept it. It was accepted as an inevitable part of humans’ lives – a way of relating to themselves, to an “us” to which they increasingly felt themselves attached.

One could make the case that it was Machiavelli who initiated this philosophical turn. There is evidence that Foucault would have agreed.29 But I think Foucault saw a particular payoff in locating a crucial tension in Kant between, on the one hand, a desire to elaborate an unquestionable metaphysical ground for morality, and on the other, his acknowledgement that a community of free-thinking persons working from such a premise can only be brought about when and where the liberal ideals of right, freedom, and autonomy prevail. Not all societies can reach Enlightenment, but some can do so if the right conditions for freedom’s exercise are available.

Foucault thus wanted to draw out the implications of the advent of philosophy’s “self-critical” project. They consist in a manner of intellectual interrogation that envisages the present, a time, as a field of possible experiences, as a time brought about through the negotiation of meaning and value that is always differentially effected by the manifold practices of power (what Foucault came to term “governmentalization”) through which humans move. At this moment philosophy recognizes that it belongs to nothing but the present; furthermore, it recognizes that its task is to give a name, an identity to that present; its task is to give people over to a belief in an unambiguous “us.” Identity can only be given in reference to a human community that articulates an account of the purposive and integrative, an account to which it appeals as nothing more than a most general “us,” an “us” that is accepted as a simple historical inevitability. Philosophy’s job is to find within this “us” the justification for what it can say, the conditions for what it can do. Indeed, it is philosophy’s job to do more than that: it must locate within community what philosophy, and hence what government, must say, what it must do.

For Kant, it was philosophy’s job to specify the limits that knowledge must

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.