| Abstract: | This essay analyses the pervasive discourse of freedom mobilised by the US Administration of George W. Bush, locating its roots not only in post-1945 American foreign policy, but in powerful metanarratives of US exceptionalism and destiny and overarching Western concepts of enlightenment, sovereignty, historical progress, reason of state and secular modernity. Hence freedom is revealed not as a set of democratic liberties guaranteed and enabled by the state—as in familiar liberal-humanist accounts—but as a form of license, a series of capacities and powers to make, use and act without constraint. By tracing this onto-technology of freedom through US history, the Cold War and the War on Terror, and considering its functional mirroring by the Islamist threat of the new terrorism, the essay exposes the multiple dangers posed by the aggressive assertion of a simultaneously instrumental and universalising image of historical action and inevitability that rejects any restriction of its powers and any responsibility for their effect. It concludes by speculating upon a recuperated, and fundamentally social, concept of freedom characterised by interdependence, responsibility and contingent action, one that might one day return to freedom the honour of its name. |
