Rethinking Autonomy – individual and collective

Recent developments challenge extant conceptualisations of autonomy - individual autonomy in liberal political theory, and analyses of collective autonomy based on identity in political sociology and social theory. This applies to three developments in particular – the greater prominence of national sovereignty as a form of collective autonomy in public debates in several European countries (including the UK - sovereignty has been a key argument for Brexit - Poland and Italy); Covid 19 restrictions on people’s private lives and government expectations that citizens would autonomously self-manage their behaviour to comply with the restrictions; and the increasing emphasis on collective (global) political agency in order to address the ecological and climate crises. These developments have given greater urgency to liberal political theorists’ core interests : the nature, extent and normative force of individual autonomy, its relation to individual freedoms and rights, and how the latter relate to collective autonomy. Public debates regarding these developments also use arguments disputing liberal individualist assumptions. Regarding Covid 19 restrictions, for example, it has been argued that that individuals should delegate the authority over their personal lives to government or scientists. Debates regarding national sovereignty have used the argument that personal identities are formed and sustained by collective, traditional affiliations rather than by individual autonomous agency and that these affiliations therefore have a superior normative claim. These arguments can be theorised using conceptualisations in political sociology and social theory. Elias’ power-ratio figurational sociology between structure and agency and his argument that socialized individuals are constituted by mediated ‘second nature’ dispositions, and Bourdieu’s habitus in the context of his field theory are among the theoretical tools available to bridge individual and collective autonomy. Both approaches – individual autonomy in liberal political theory and identity and collective autonomy in political sociology and social theory – have complementary theoretical resources which could address the new challenges. Yet dialogue between these disciplines is limited to date. Political theory approaches based on Kantian moral autonomy link individual and collective agency in their categorical imperative/veil of ignorance thought experiments, but the extent to which these approaches are capable of addressing the new challenges remains largely unexplored. Individualist conceptions of autonomy have been questioned in two approaches in political theory, the relational approach to personal autonomy (Diana T. Meyers’ ‘autonomy competency’ is a good example) and interpretations of Kantian autonomy from a republican perspective. The workshop seeks to bring these different approaches to autonomy together to address the recent challenges identified. The workshop would explore the following questions : To what extent 1. do the understanding and the normative claims of liberal individual autonomy need to be rethought ? 2. are thought experiments using Kantian moral autonomy still useful political theory techniques ? 3. do republican interpretations of Kant offer new insights into the relationship between individual and collective autonomy ? 4. does the relationship between, and the normative ranking of, individual and collective autonomy need to be re-conceptualised ?