Radical Philosophy Review

published on March 4, 2016

Freedom Is Not a Thing
Toward a Theory of Liberation for the Twenty-first Century

Beginning from a critique of neoliberalism, and in particular of its concept of freedom, I develop an alternative notion of freedom as love. In order to escape the current neoliberal hegemony, I argue that we must reconnect with the radical traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I thus take as my starting point the debate between Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm over the nature of freedom that took place in the pages of Dissent in the mid-1950s. Building on their work I construct a theory of freedom as “connective expression.”