What does autonomy mean today? Is the Enlightenment understanding of autonomy still relevant for contemporary challenges? How have the limits and possibilities of autonomy been transformed by recent developments in artificial intelligence and big data, political pressures, intersecting oppressions and the climate emergency? The challenges to autonomy today reach across society with unprecedented complexity, and in this book leading scholars from philosophy, economics, linguistics, literature and politics examine the role of autonomy in key areas of contemporary life, forcefully defending a range of different views about the nature and extent of resistance to autonomy today. These essays are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the predicament and prospects of one of modernitys foundational concepts and one of our most widely cherished values.
Chapter 5.6 and 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [ Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
To what extent is autonomy under threat today and how should these threats to autonomy be analysed? The essays in this book range over economics, politics, technology, philosophy, feminism and literature to assess the present state and future prospects of one of modernitys foundational concepts and one of our most cherished values.
List of Contributors
Christopher Watkin, Introduction: The Ends of Autonomy
Part I: Autonomy, Philosophy and Politics
1. Nick Hewlett, Karl Marx and the concept of freedom
2. Peter Hallward, A law unto ourselves: reclaiming autonomy as mass
sovereignty
3. Taylor Lau, Against the economic view of time: the claim to free time
Part II: Autonomy, Technology and Pharmacology
4. Tim Christiaens, Convivial autonomy in platform capitalism
5. Oliver Davis, Autonomy and autoheteronomy in psychedelically assisted
psychotherapy
6. Simon D. Angus, How liberating is liberation technology?
Part III: Autonomy, Climate and Capacity
7. Ash K. Stokoe, Crip autonomy and external limitations: the impact of the
Coronavirus pandemic and governmental pandemic management measures on
disabled people in the United Kingdom
8. Graham Wood, Sustainable freedom
9. Dan Taylor, Climate anxiety, fatalism and the capacity to act
Part IV: Autonomy, Language and Power
10. Jeremy Ahearne, World Lingua Franca Regimes and Real Freedoms
11. Ali Alizadeh, Freedom to Live: Robespierre, Marx and Social Liberty
12. Felicity Chaplin, "Liberty leading the people"? Dress liberty in
Post-#MeToo France
Index
Christopher Watkin is Australian Research Council Future Fellow in European Languages at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His recent books include French Philosophy Today (2016), Michel Serres: Figures of Thought (2020) and Biblical Critical Theory (2022). You can find him on the web at christopherwatkin.com, and on Twitter @DrChrisWatkin.
Oliver Davis is Professor of French Studies at Warwick University, UK. He is the author of Jacques Rancičre (2010), editor of Rancičre Now (2013) and co-author, with Tim Dean, of Hatred of Sex (2022), among other works. He serves as Executive Editor of Modern & Contemporary France. He is currently researching the political stewardship of psychedelics.
