Autonomy, Freedom and Rights: A Critique of Liberal Subjectivity / Edition 1

Santoro (history and theory of law, U. of Florence, Italy) finds some difficulties with the fact that most legal and political philosophers ground liberal political theory, as well as anchor basic rights, in the value of individual autonomy. He begins his account by reviewing the debate around the notion of individual autonomy that took place in the 1970s and 1980s, especially among English speakers. Then he uses a genealogical approach to argue that the hierarchical-dualistic model is the anthropological premise of contractarian liberal theories. He concludes that a liberal theory based on individual autonomy requires giving up the anthropological model of the owning individual, which was borrowed from 13th-century Franciscan voluntarist theology. He does not index subjects. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR