Freedom of the Encumbered Self: Michael Sandel and Iris Murdoch
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Freedom of the Encumbered Self: Michael Sandel and Iris Murdoch C. Fred Alford Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA. E-mail: [email protected]
The debate over encumbered versus unencumbered selves that characterized the dialogue between liberalism and republicanism did not end well. Neither side seemed enlightened by its encounter with the other, as it became increasingly difficult to pin down the differences between the sides, never more so than when Michael Sandel was violently agreeing with Richard Dagger. Drawing on the work of novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, this essay argues that Sandel could have made a much stronger argument for his view than he did. Sandel need not have conceded or concluded that encumbered selves are unable to choose freely. Freedom is a more subtle and complicated concept that either Sandel or Dagger recognize. Contemporary Political Theory (2005) 4, 109–128. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300106 Keywords: freedom; Sandel; Murdoch; self; liberalism; republicanism
The debate over encumbered versus unencumbered selves that marked the dialogue between liberalism and republicanism did not end well. Neither side seemed enlightened by its encounter with the other, as it became increasingly difficult to pin down the differences between them, never more so than when Michael Sandel (1999) was debating Richard Dagger (1999). Violently agreeing with Dagger that the self is constituted by its ‘more or less enduring attachments and commitments that, taken together, partly define the person I am,’ Sandel has never said much about the other part of the self, that part that presumably was not defined by its attachments and commitments (Sandel, 1992, 23; 1982, 161). One peculiar aspect of this debate was anticipated by Nancy Rosenblum and Sheery Turkel (1989) in ‘Political Philosophy’s Psychologized Self,’ where they argue that political philosophers have recently written less about citizens, and more about selves, such as the liberal self, or the socially encumbered and constituted self. Such a view seems to assume, they suggest, that attachment is good in itself, or at least that attachment is the issue. What if that’s the wrong issue? What if the focus on the self participates in this depoliticization of political theory, turning citizens into selves?
C. Fred Alford Freedom of the Encumbered Self
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As trenchant as their argument is, I believe that Rosenblum and Turkel are mistaken, or at least misdirected. The problem is not that communitarians, liberals, and republicans talk about selves and their attachments. The problem is that selves and their attachments are read off of theories that are insufficiently psychologically sophisticated. The theories are unsophisticated because they are not psychological theories in the first place. They are political theories. To derive various selves from these theories puts too much of a burden on them, a burden these theories were not designed to carry, as Charles Taylor (1979), among others
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