E-Book Overview
Is statecraft soulcraft? Should we look to our souls and selves in assessing the quality of our politics? Is it the business of politics to cultivate, shape, or structure our internal lives? Summarizing and answering the major theoretical positions on these issues, Peter Digeser formulates a qualified permission to protect or encourage particular forms of human identity. Public discourse on politics should not preclude talk about the role of reason in our souls or the importance of wholeness and community to our selves or the significance of autonomy for individuals. However, those who seek to place only their own conception of the self or soul within the reach of politics are as mistaken as those who would completely preclude such matters from the political realm. In proposing this view, Digeser responds to communitarians, classical political rationalists, and genealogists who argue that liberal culture fragments, debases, or normalizes our selves. He also critically analyzes perfectionist liberals who justify liberalism by virtue of its ability to cultivate autonomy and authenticity, as well as liberal neutralists who wish to avoid altogether the problem of selfcraft. All these, he argues, fall short in some way in defining the extent to which politics should be concerned with the self.
E-Book Content
OUR POLITICS, OUR SELVES?
This page intentionally left blank
OUR POLITICS, OUR SELVES?
LIBERALISM, IDENTITY, AND HARM
Peter Digeser
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Copyright 1995 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Digeser, Peter. Our politics, our selves? : liberalism, identity, and harm / Peter Digeser. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-03716-7 (cl: acid-free paper) 1. Liberalism. 2. Identity (Psychology). 3. Self. I. Title. JC574.D54 1995 320.5′1′019—dc20 94-23387 CIP This book has been composed in Baskerville Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America 10 9
8 7
6
5 4
3 2
1
For Beth
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
3
1. The Critics The Communitarians The Classical Political Rationalists Genealogical Perspectives Comparisons and Contrasts
8 12 23 38 58
2. The United, Unified, and Unitary Self Preliminary Considerations Communitarianism and Forms of Unity Uniting Self and Community The Unified Self The Unitary Self Identity and Time
61 61 69 69 77 79 83
3. The Well-Ordered, Reason-Governed Soul Nature and Reason Particular Souls and Knowing the Whole The Rule of Reason Intellectual versus Moral Virtue The City and the Soul
96 96 102 104 110 115
4. The Complex, Performative Subject Two Approaches Discipline Performatives and Citationality
131 133 135 150
5. Liberal Soulcraft: Autonomy, Authenticity, and Autarchy Formal Autonomy Authenticity and Individuality Fostering Autarchy
166 167 182 191
6. Cultivating Agency? The Self as an Exhibition of Intelligence Power, Resistance, and the Indirect Constitution of the Self The Direct Constitution of the Self Opacity
196 198 200 203 211
viii
CONTENTS
7. The Liberal Method of Avoidance Neutrality of Effect and Intent The Appeal to What Is Shared Rorty and the Preclusion