Moralizing Liberty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralf M. Bader
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Z Parameter

This chapter argues in support of moralized conceptions of liberty on the grounds that distinguishing between liberty and license allows us to develop a theoretically fruitful notion of freedom that is intrinsically normatively significant and that can play a substantive role in political philosophy. Section 2 argues that the contrast between liberty and license is to be understood in terms of a moralization of the z-parameter, whereby the domain of this parameter consists of permissible courses of action. Section 3 defuses the prisoner objection, which is frequently taken to be one of the primary reasons for rejecting moralized accounts. Section 4 argues that only moralized conceptions of liberty can underwrite the presumption of liberty by providing us with a notion of freedom that is intrinsically normatively significant.

The Open Society and the Democracy to Come: Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Baugh
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The State ◽  
Open Society ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come ◽  
Polar Opposite ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Gain Access

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms (of ethnicity, race, religion and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’.

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