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THE BONDAGE OF THE AUTONOMOUS SELF “Liberty” is a word of ancient lineage, yet liberalism has a more recent pedigree, being arguably only a few hundred years old. It arises from a redefinition of the nature of liberty to mean almost the opposite of its original meaning. By ancient and Christian understandings, liberty was the condition of self-governance, whether achieved by the individual or by a political community. Because self-rule was achieved only with difficulty—requiring an extensive habituation in virtue, particularly self-command and self-discipline over base but insistent
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The same dynamic is seen in the economic realm: fulfilling the sovereignty of individual choice in an economy requires the demolition of any artificial boundaries to a marketplace. The market—once a defined and limited space within the city—must ultimately become borderless. The logic of liberalism thus demands near-limitless expansion of the state and the market. A massive state architecture and a globalized economy, both created in the name of the liberation of the individual, combine to leave the individual powerless and overwhelmed by the very structures that were called into being in the
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We should finally not be surprised that even a degraded citizenry will throw off the enlightened shackles of a liberal order, particularly as the very successes of that order generate the pathologies of a citizenry that finds itself powerless before forces of government, economy, technology, and globalizing forces. Yet once degraded, such a citizenry would be unlikely to insist upon Tocquevillian self-command; its response would predictably take the form of inarticulate cries for a strongman to rein in the power of a distant and ungovernable state and market. Liberalism itself seems likely to
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