#chris andersen

chris andersen 🤝 juliette nichols 🤝 the biologist

Hindess offers a second key insight: liberalism’s authoritarian elements (what he terms its “unfreedom”) cannot be understood as contradictory or aberrational to an otherwise enlightened form of rule. Rather, they speak centrally to its developmentally based notion of human capacity: government works best by making use of these capacities, and, as such, liberal authority required the discretion “to distinguish between what can be governed through the promotion of liberty and what must be governed in other ways”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, early liberal theorists positioned Western civilization, with its form of civil society and exchange-based market economy, as most likely to foster the natural capacities of liberal subjects. As such, it was thought to represent the apex of civilized society.