Individual is not merely free to choose, she is forced to be free obliged to understand and live her life as an act of successive choices, each rationalized by the commitment only to increase the choices available to her. individual is free to choose but her only choice is to increase her range of choice every other choice is irrational, unauthentic, perverse. She must pretend that facticity, death and the unknown do not exist. This never ending pretense constitutes her becoming for the gilded chains of freedom can never be discarded. Every relationship, every social institution is transformed by post-modern liberalism into a market institution. The only identity actually available to individual in this prison of rights and choices, is the identity of the entrepreneur.
Post Liberalism is a coercive instrument which moralizes and normalizes individual’s life. They go to every mean to feel free.
Liberal (L) governmentality is also concerned with extending the realm of the political rule, is extended to order the affairs of a population to promote its well being. The state and its apparatus is concerned with inter relating the political spheres to the nonpolitical spheres in which the ‘political’ is grounded.
In this sense governmentality is transformed to constitute a set of activities which relate the spheres of the formation of consciousness to the spheres of dominance. Governmentaity is more than police. In eighteenth centuary France police implied complete documentation of society ‘L’ was to be made totally transparent, her scrutiny was to be perpetual and the ordering of her life, her thoughts and her desires was to be complete the dictatorship of the proletariat was an extension of the classical police regime.
Post Modern Liberalism (PML) as a mentality abandons this fantasy of a totally administered and planned society. Classical liberalism recognises the necessity of self governance of the entities it confronts. The sovereign does not exercise its totalising will across a national space ‘L’ is recognised to possess those inviolable individual and welfare rights which allows her to seek the maximisation of pleasure. Classical liberalism saw a society prior to the market which defined individual’s community conciousness defined the social constraints. This recognition of individual as an autonomous, self created and self oriented being required the recognition of the autonomy and self regulating legitimacy of the market and of society. The objects, instruments and tasks of liberal rule were formed, in accordance with the need to promote individual’s rights and the autonomy of the market and society. But the recognition of these rights and autonomy was to be reconciled with the perpetual domination of the liberal, state over, individual and over her society.
PML is concerned with the elaboration of theoretical systems but his self centeredness leads him to construct fragments of his own life into theoretical positions. It is never the theory and always the self his own self and no other which is the centre of his universe. It is this obsession with the death of the self
PML is freedom within the family, community and the market. But to make individual free in these spheres politician has to invent means for shaping and managing individual’s conduct and perceptions. individual’s “public” evaluations and conduct are evaluated by codes of orderliness, prudence, civility and consequentialism. Her “private” deliberations and behaviour are to be moulded by equipping her with languages and techniques and self understanding and self mastery. To be free individual must be taught to accept as natural and rational the pleasure/efficiency maximizing, conduct, characteristic of post enlightment libral society. Individual’s becomes free when she becomes a normal citizen of a liberal social order. Freedom is nothing else.
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