Autonomy Unbound

Paul Barry Clarke

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429863936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1999, this volume examines how the question of autonomy has come to be of recent interest in political theory. The author argues that autonomy goes deep into the Western consciousness and is a part of our very mode of being.He suggests that while autonomy is not universal, once tasted it becomes ineradicable. Autonomy runs deeper than is often thought and this book shows that while autonomy is unique to Western consciousness and to democracy, it raises and examines the question as to whether autonomy is either universally necessary or necessary to democracy.

PART I

AUTONOMY BOUND

1 A Confusion of Concepts

There is no clear and settled understanding of the meaning of ‘autonomy’: it is a contested concept. To be autonomous, auto nomos, is to give the law to oneself, to be self-governing. But this apparently innocent and uncomplicated formula hides considerable difficulties. The formula of giving the law to oneself might refer to external laws and empirical circumstances or it might refer to inner dispositions and mental states. To give the law to oneself might be taken in a way that concerns less the self than the law within which the self operates. Where the self is an independent variable it might concern the effect the law has on the self. Where the self is a dependent variable, it might concern the law that the self gives to itself, to its own governing principles or it might combine inner disposition and external circumstance as mutually interconstituting.

With such a complexity of possibilities, the path of the idea of autonomy is bound to take many twists and turns. The basic distinction found in the very idea of the concept is between the inner and the outer and it is these different dimensions to autonomy that hold the concept in tension or even pull interpretations of it in completely different ways. When pulled inward the emphasis is frequently on the self, when pushed outward the emphasis is frequently on external circumstances. When held in tension the form, nature and aspects of the tension are sufficiently variable and varied as to produce a multitude of different possibilities. It is these possibilities that form the major part of the contestability endemic to the concept of autonomy.

Related to, but not entirely the same as autonomy, are the concepts of freedom and liberty. Generally there is an overlap between these concepts but there are circumstances in which they might pull in different ways. They might separate completely where there is a complete absence of law, Hobbes’s state of nature for instance. Similarly, in a situation where the law is entirely given by others, but where there are areas untouched by law that permit a good degree of self-governance. Again Hobbes is the guide with his model of liberal absolutism. Nonetheless the concepts generally overlap to some degree and to pull them apart completely is to risk damage to one or the other. There is a well-known argument against the Hobbesian view that a condition without any law is not a state of freedom at all. ‘Liberty is not licence’ is the formulation provided by Locke and repeated by countless others. Liberty requires law. However, as Rousseau suggests and Kant makes clear, a law given by others, removes freedom, morality, and the possibility of rationality. Without these characteristics autonomy would not be possible for Rousseau or for Kant who valued rationality as a fundamental condition.

What Rousseau and Kant both do is tie freedom and autonomy closely together, so much so that, for Kant, full freedom requires autonomy of the will. Here it is the will that gives the will to itself, it is the will that is free. Effectively it is the will that is the lawgiver to itself. It may be the case, Lockean fashion, that freedom requires law but it does not follow from such a requirement that others should give the law or that it should be external to the self. Self control and self-restraint is an important part of some conceptions of autonomy and for some this requires freedom of the will. So for Rousseau’s Savoyard Priest, freedom of the will is a central part of his creed. In another account, the lapsarian account of the growth of inequality, it was, for Rousseau, freedom of the will that was the hallmark of humanity. It was freedom of the will, the faculty of free agency, that distinguished that which was human from that which was animal. Kant, followed this in all fundamental respects but cast the net wider attempting to catch not just those who are human but all rational creatures. Kant (1960) leaves us in no doubt that all rational creatures acting freely have and exhibit the capacity of autonomy of the will. This idea of a will giving the law to itself, is sufficiently complex that Kant was required to modify his original position and introduce two concepts of will, mile and willkur.

By contrast to the relation between freedom and autonomy of the will found in Rousseau and Kant, the liberal tradition generally denies the faculty of free will or, even if it fails to deny it completely, certainly sets it aside. So Hobbesian liberal absolutism is consistent with determinism and John Stuart Mill’s essay ‘On Liberty’ begins by making it clear that he was not interested in the doctrine of philosophical necessity but in social or civil liberty. The disinterest in the idea of the autonomy of the will is not confined to Mill, it finds numerous contemporary expressions. So we find the sentiments expressed by Bay (1965, pp.22-3) characteristic of much liberal thinking.

For purposes of political theory even when the task is to discuss “freedom” it is unnecessary to take a stand on the free-will issue. What matters in politics is not to discover whether man is or is not free in an ultimate sense where it is of no demonstrable factual consequence which answer is affirmed. For purposes of political analysis a freedom concept with clear behavioural implications is needed, a concept of empirical rather than transcendental freedom.

Perhaps so, but in such a case, where empirical freedom is asserted independently of freedom of will, meaningful concepts of autonomy might turn out to be quite restricted, or even incompatible. Again Bay (1965, p. 97) shows the problem, using Reisman’s words, he defines the autonomous as those

who on the whole are capable of conforming to the behavioural norms of their society... but are free to choose whether to conform or not... The person here defined as autonomous may or may not conform outwardly, but whatever his choice, he pays less of a price, and he has a choice; he can meet both the culture’s definitions of adequacy and those which (to a still culturally determined degree) slightly transcend the norm for the adjusted.

In spite of Bay’s earlier attempts to avoid the inner and the outer in his treatment of freedom the inner dimension comes to the fore in his treatment of autonomy. The choice of conforming outwardly, or not, implies an inner dimension that can make that choice. Further, the very point of conforming outwardly implies the existence of an inner aspect to action. It is the inner aspect that makes the conceptualisation of the outer aspect meaningful. Without the one the other is but an empty phrase. But one, the inner dimension, is admitted. It becomes less amenable to empirical scrutiny. It may even be beyond the reach of such scrutiny. It may even imply, if not a transcendental component, at least a component that heads in that direction.

Even Raz, who is certainly sympathetic to the personal dimension to autonomy and has made it the basis of a contemporary argument for perfectionist liberalism, seems unwilling to engage in the deeper aspects of the mind. So we find that ‘autonomy [is] a life freely chosen’ (1988, p.371) and that this requires mental abilities. These include the abilities to

form intentions of a sufficiently complex kind, and plan their execution. These include minimum rationality, the ability to comprehend the means required to realise his goals, the mental faculties to plan actions, etc. (1988, pp.372-3).

This is quite distinct from self-realisation, for a life of self-realisation might be stumbled into or otherwise found in some way that is inconsistent with autonomy. Raz avoids the problem of freedom of the will and the problem of the self that are characteristics of Rousseau’s claims to humanity and Kantian morality. In that he follows, but modifies, a long tradition of liberal thought.

Contestable concepts, as Gallie (1964) pointed out when he introduced that idea, arise because of, among other things, appeals to exemplars that can either be interpreted differently or just are different. There are no innate ideas and no powers or knowledge independent of experience. The passivity is sufficiently marked that Hobbes regards freedom of will as impossible as a contradiction in terms.

Whereas Hobbes takes it that free will is a contradiction in terms, Descartes takes it that action is the outcome of willing, a faculty that he says is distinctive of humanity and the source of his greatest contentment. The thinking T is not merely a substance divorced from the material world it is a substance that can affect the material world. It can be the cause of an action, even while it is not itself caused. In later hands this became the idea of the autonomous will.

On the face of it there is no reconciliation to be made between Hobbes and Descartes. Their outlook rests on premises that are so fundamentally different as to defy any kind of reconciliation. Hobbes is a monist, a materialist and a determinist. Descartes is a dualist, claims that matter and mind are substances, and advocates the power of free will. In certain respects, therefore, their philosophical foundations are incompatible.

Given the differences in the fundamental ontological outlook found at the outset of the development of the modern conception of autonomy it would certainly be an appealing option to throw in the towel at this point and merely remark that little can be said beyond the observation that the concept is used in a variety of ways. Given also that variety, one might take the line that little more can be said. Such a move is appealing and seems indeed to have had its appeal, it would also I think be mistaken. The distance between Hobbes and Descartes is great and the distance between those that have followed is as great if not greater. So the modern concept of autonomy as expressed in liberal theory takes little account of the workings and power of the self. Those theories that have taken some account of the workings and power of the self have found this so difficult to deal with that they have diminished or ended the concept of autonomy and often the idea of liberalism as well. Indeed there is a perfectly reasonable way of reading the liberal- communitarian debate as an instance the divisions caused at the outset of modernity.

There are a variety of solutions to an impasse of this kind. The one I propose to take is to find what, if anything, the apparently incommensurable outlooks represented by Hobbes and Descartes have in common. The differences between Hobbes, and the bulk of English liberalism that followed, and Descartes and the concerns that followed are great. The exemplars too are different at crucial points. Some of those points are incompatible, for instance the conflict between monism and dualism and between determinism and free will. Clearly it is not possible to be a monist and a dualist simultaneously of the same objects. Similarly one cannot be simultaneously a determinist and a non-determinist with respect to actions of the same kind and the same scope at the same point in time. In other respects they are incommensurable, a slightly different idea, as for instance in the difference between the third and first person accounts which form an integral part of their outlook and methodology. In other respects they are commensurable as, for instance, in their emphasis on the individual.

Whatever the differences between Hobbes and his successors and Descartes and his successors might be, what they tend to share is an initial concern with the individual. This is no mere accident. Both Hobbes and Descartes were writing at a time when the individual was emerging as a clear consequence of the breakdown of the medieval order. What they and their successors held in common was the phenomenon of individualism and consciously or unconsciously (probably the latter) a need to explain what Maine was later to call the shift from ‘status to contract’. Hobbes and Descartes may have differed in fundamental respects about what counted as an individual, and about what powers the individual did, or did not have, but what they agreed upon, it seemed was that there were individuals and that they counted in some significant social and political senses.

It certainly seems to be the case that standard accounts of autonomy require individuality. It is therefore, a legitimate task to examine some of the objections to individuality and show that there are a variety of ways in which individuality can be construed, constructed and even reclaimed: the structural similarity between this kind of question and the question raised by the communitarian is clear. They may appear to come from different traditions or different aspects of the same tradition, but the overall point is similar. The communitarian argument, in its most general form, depends on the assumptions that the individual is, in significant ways, the outcome of social forces and not a major producer of those forces. The individual, in so far as one can talk about such beings is, therefore, to be explained, finally, in social terms. The individual is an historical being rather than an a-historical being and is not, therefore, some fixed and a-historical entity having either a final ontology prior to society or a set of causal powers prior to society. In some, more extreme versions, individuals are mere ciphers of society, cannot be individuated distinctly from their social and historical locations and have no ontological status at all or causal powers.

Autonomy may be an expression of recent times but underlying it is a deep history and a deep set of concerns. The way in which the concept of individuality is used reveals the basis of some fundamental concerns and expressions of the perception of the contemporary capacities of humanity. Unravelling that is to begin to unravel the confusion of concepts surrounding the idea of autonomy.

I Autonomy and Individuality

Autonomy is always an account of something done by some identifiable and distinct doer; there can be no account or assumption of that which is autonomous without some account, or assumption, of that which is individual. Individuality is the basis of autonomy and the individual might be a state, group, organisation, or human individual. Individuality is tied to the notion of subjectivity. Human individuality without some account of subjectivity could not provide an account of autonomy. In the language of post-modernism, without subjects there can be no autonomy.¹ Without either individuals or subjects there can be nothing to be identified or re-identified as the source of the autonomy. If there is no source there is no identifiable action, and if no action there is nothing subsequent to it.

To extend the implications of this, a subject without a subsequent is nonsense, as is an actor without actions and an act without consequences. Both subjectivity and autonomy require a presumption of, and an account of, presence; of someone or something, that can act into the world. There is a sceptical perspective within which presence, subjects, actors, agents, do not exist, do not have independent causal powers with which they could act into the world, and are not, in any case, distinct from the world in a way that would allow a putative independent agent to act into the world. I will deal with this in due course but for now I want to set it aside.

It is clear that the appeal to individuality goes deep.² So both classic, and to some extent more recent and reconstructed liberal conceptions of freedom and autonomy depend on, at least, some conception of individuality. The operative concept here is ‘some’ conception of individuality and it is around this that most arguments hinge. The limit point at the individual end is found in the view that society is the product of individual actions. The extreme form of this kind of argument is exhibited most clearly in Hobbes’s conception of individuals as standing logically, if not historically, prior to the society of which they are the nominal constructors (1946, pp.183-228). To a lesser extent a similar argument to individuality is found in Locke,³ and in Rawls. It turns up in a slightly reconstructed form in Mill,⁴ who does move from an initially unremitting individualism to a view that reconstructs that position, to a point that he seemed to regard as a kind of qualified socialism. In any case the argument to individuality exists in some form or other in all such arguments, and it exists not as mere decoration but is important to the force of the argument, and to the general position.

The point can be generalised to most, if not all, social contract theories. Such theories do assume at least some priority to the individual, no matter how this priority might subsequently be modified. There...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction: Whither Autonomy
• Part I: Autonomy Bound
• Part II: Bounded Autonomy
• Part III: Autonomy Unbound
• Bibliography
• Index