Dirk Schuck

Dirk Schuck studierte Philosophie, Soziologie und Politologie in Frankfurt am Main. Seine Hauptforschungsinteressen liegen in der Geschichte bürgerlicher Subjektivität, den Regierungspraktiken des Neoliberalismus, sowie in der kritischen Methodologie von Gesellschaftstheorie.

Email: dirk.schuck(á)uni-leipzig.de

Titel: Liberal governing and internalization

Abstract:
Regarding the question of how our late western societies can best be criticized it is important to have an eye for the early development of indirect techniques of governing by framing someone's possibilities to do something. This way of government is genuinely liberal in the way that it governs with the freedom of someone, and not against it. Mainly british moral philosophers like Locke, Hume and Smith developed this way of guiding the individual's thoughts, feelings and actions by embedding him or her in a social network of acknowledgement and recognition.
But as for those classic liberal thinkers the concept of freedom referred to a mental state, that someone first had to achieve through a long and thorough process of bourgeois education, for the neoliberal concept of freedom just the opposite is true. It can no longer be regarded as the product of a process of internalizing moral standards, but as a form of avoiding them in the way that the individual should be as flexible as possible in its own inner qualities. One should not depend on his or her own conscience, because it can restrain you from fulfilling the requirements for the labour market.
Although this ambivalence can be traced back to the beginning of liberal governing, the radicalization in the neoliberal concept of freedom can somehow be regarded as the end of the liberal concept of freedom. Even if the diagnosis of a complete transformation of bourgeois subjectivity from an innerdirected notion of the individual, that is guided by its own conscience, into an other-directed notion of the individual, that resembles a flexible surface-structure, might be too harsh, it is crucial to see the present change in the notion of freedom for understanding the changing relation between the individual and society.

Buchpublikationen

Das Phänomen der Verdinglichung bei Georg Lukács und Theodor W. Adorno. Einführung mit ausführlichen Darlegungen zu Weber, Marx, Simmel und Freud, Saarbrücken 2010