Freedom and Modernity

Self-Authorship and the Burden of the Modern Soul

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

Freedom is among the oldest words in political and moral life, and the desire to escape domination is as old as domination itself. Slaves have always wanted release, conquered peoples have resisted their conquerors, and human beings have never accepted every authority peacefully. Yet the presence of resistance throughout history can obscure a more difficult truth: freedom in the distinctively modern sense is new. What is historically novel is not simply the wish to be left alone, the rejection of a cruel ruler, or the ability to participate in public life. It is the conviction that every individual possesses the right—and increasingly the responsibility—to determine who they are, which authorities they will recognize, what form their life will take, and what meaning that life will have.

This freedom is more than a political arrangement. It is an understanding of the person. The modern individual is imagined as existing, in some decisive sense, prior to the roles, traditions, institutions, and obligations that surround them. Those inheritances may influence the person, but they do not possess final authority. They must appear before the tribunal of individual conscience and justify themselves. Family, religion, community, vocation, sexual morality, political allegiance, and even the meaning of one’s own identity are increasingly treated as matters that the individual must examine and either choose or refuse. The modern person does not merely ask, “How may I live freely within this order?” The deeper question is, “By what right does this order determine who I am?”

This development is one of the great moral achievements of modernity. It made possible new forms of religious toleration, political equality, abolition, women’s emancipation, personal mobility, and protection against inherited domination. But it also produced a burden that modern culture has rarely understood. When the individual is released from an order that once assigned identity, purpose, and obligation, the individual does not become weightless. The authority that disappears from the world reappears within the self as responsibility. The person must now become the author, judge, and justification of a life whose decisive conditions they did not create. Modern freedom therefore possesses a double character: it is liberation from externally imposed necessity, but it is also exposure to an unprecedented field of possibility. It gives the person room to live while making the person responsible for discovering why their life should take one form rather than another.

Freedom Within an Order

The claim that modern freedom is new must be stated carefully. Ancient Greece and Rome possessed rich concepts of liberty, and ancient people understood the difference between freedom and enslavement with terrible clarity. Greek eleutheria referred both to the status of a person who was not a slave and to the independence of a city that governed itself. Roman libertas carried legal and republican meanings involving citizenship, protection from arbitrary power, and participation in public affairs. These were genuine forms of freedom, not primitive approximations of our own. Nevertheless, they did not ordinarily imply that each human being was entitled to construct an identity or choose the ultimate purposes of life.

Benjamin Constant gave the classic, if overly sharp, account of this difference in his 1819 lecture “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns.” Ancient liberty, he argued, centered upon sharing collective power, while modern liberty centered upon security in private life, freedom of opinion, property, movement, and association.¹ Constant’s contrast simplifies a far more complicated history, but it identifies an essential change. For the free citizen of the ancient city, liberty was a status and a mode of participation within an already meaningful civic and cosmic order. It was not a standpoint from which the person invented the good. Aristotle’s citizen deliberated about how the city should pursue human flourishing, but neither the citizen nor the city was thought to create the meaning of flourishing by choosing it.² Human beings possessed a nature and a proper end. Freedom was exercised within that structure.

The Stoics developed a powerful idea of inward freedom, and the writings of Epictetus demonstrate that even a person subjected to external domination could seek freedom through the governance of judgment, desire, and assent. Yet Stoic freedom was not self-creation. It consisted in bringing the will into accord with a rational order that the individual did not make. One became free by distinguishing what was within one’s control from what was not and by consenting to necessity without becoming inwardly enslaved by it.³ The Stoic did not demand that the cosmos validate a private identity. Freedom meant right relationship to the whole.

Medieval Europe likewise spoke constantly of liberties, but these were usually plural and particular: the liberties of a city, monastery, guild, estate, church, noble house, or corporate body. A person possessed rights and protections through membership in an order rather than as an abstract individual standing outside every order. These arrangements were often oppressive, and the stability they provided should not be romanticized. Birth could determine occupation, rank, marriage, legal standing, and religious belonging. The important distinction is not that premodern people enjoyed harmony while modern people suffer. It is that freedom was understood as a place within a structure of belonging. Modern freedom gradually became the authority to stand apart from such structures and ask whether they deserved obedience at all.

Christianity and the Interiorization of Freedom

Christianity transformed this inheritance without yet producing modern autonomy. It addressed each person as a soul standing before God, deepened the moral significance of intention and conscience, and gave the drama of the will a new interior intensity. The slave and the ruler, the woman and the man, the Jew and the Gentile were placed within a universal history of creation, fall, judgment, and redemption. This did not immediately dissolve social hierarchy, but it established a spiritual equality capable of judging every earthly rank. The poorest person possessed a soul no emperor could own.

Christian freedom, however, was not the right to create one’s own good. Paul’s language is revealing. The Christian is liberated from the dominion of sin, death, and the condemning power of the law, yet this liberation culminates not in sovereignty but in service: “by love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13). Freedom becomes the capacity to answer the divine call and to love what disordered desire had made the person incapable of loving. Augustine intensified this understanding by distinguishing the mere capacity to choose from genuine liberty. A will divided against itself may possess choice while remaining enslaved. True freedom requires the healing and reordering of love through grace.⁴ The free person is therefore not the person without bonds but the person bound to the good rather than mastered by appetite, pride, or fear.

This Christian development is indispensable to the genealogy of the modern self. Christianity did not simply suppress an already existing autonomous individual. It helped produce the interior person who would later claim autonomy. Confession, conversion, examination of conscience, the inward consent of faith, and the responsibility of the will all intensified the idea that the decisive human drama takes place within each soul. Charles Taylor has shown how the modern identity emerged through a long transformation of moral inwardness rather than through a sudden rejection of religion.⁵ The Reformation accelerated this process by challenging inherited mediations and placing extraordinary weight upon conscience, scripture, and personal faith. Yet the Reformers’ conscience was bound before God; it was not an authorization to manufacture private truth. Luther’s Christian was inwardly free precisely because faith had made the Christian a servant of God and neighbor.

Modern freedom arose when this interior responsibility gradually outlived the theological order that had given it direction. The court was not abolished; the judge and the accused moved inward. The individual retained the obligation to account for a life, but the transcendent source before whom the account had once been rendered became less publicly authoritative. This should not be described as a simple secular theft from Christianity. Hans Blumenberg was right to resist genealogies that reduce modernity to disguised theology; modernity also developed new answers to crises that the older order could no longer resolve.⁶ Nevertheless, the structure of responsibility persisted. The soul that had once searched itself before God increasingly searched itself before itself, society, history, and the imagined judgment of a life successfully realized.

The Autonomous Individual

The political philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave this emerging person a new conceptual form. Hobbes and Locke imagined human beings in a state of nature prior to established government and asked how political authority could become legitimate to individuals who were naturally free. Their answers differed profoundly, but both made the person conceptually prior to the political order. Government could no longer justify itself merely by antiquity, inheritance, or divine placement. It required authorization from those it governed.⁷ Locke did not envision a self that could invent moral truth at will; natural law and divine authority still constrained legitimate choice. Yet the architecture had changed. The individual now possessed rights that society was formed to protect rather than an identity bestowed entirely by society.

Kant gave autonomy its most rigorous philosophical expression. Enlightenment required human beings to emerge from “self-incurred immaturity” and to have the courage to use their own understanding.⁸ Moral autonomy did not mean following appetite or treating preference as truth. It meant that rational persons could recognize and legislate a universal moral law rather than obey commands merely because an external authority issued them. Kantian freedom was demanding precisely because it subjected the individual to a law reason could will for everyone. Even so, the decisive reversal had occurred: legitimate authority must now be capable of justification before the rational subject. The order does not simply assign the person a place; the person evaluates the order’s claim.

This ideal appeared while modern societies continued to practice slavery, colonial domination, property restrictions, the political exclusion of women, and severe class hierarchy. Modernity did not suddenly become free. Its novelty lay partly in producing a universal language whose implications exceeded the intentions of many who first employed it. Once freedom was declared a natural or human right, every exclusion became vulnerable to criticism from the principle itself. The formerly excluded could demand not a special favor but the fulfillment of modernity’s own claim. The history of modern freedom is therefore not a clean progression from darkness to light. It is the history of an ideal repeatedly used to expose the societies that proclaimed it.

When a Right Becomes a Command

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, freedom moved beyond political consent and legal protection into the intimate formation of identity. Romanticism gave new authority to the singular inner voice. John Stuart Mill defended individuality and “experiments in living” not merely because private choice should be protected, but because diverse forms of life were necessary to human development.⁹ In the modern ethic of authenticity, the individual is expected to discover a way of being that is genuinely their own. Charles Taylor has emphasized both the moral seriousness of this ideal and the danger of reducing it to preference or narcissistic self-display.¹⁰ Authenticity originally meant fidelity to a truth encountered inwardly, not the proposition that whatever one happens to desire becomes valuable merely because one desires it.

Yet the distinction between autonomy and preference has become increasingly difficult to preserve. Modern freedom now extends, rightly, into domains once governed almost entirely by inheritance: religion, occupation, marriage, political allegiance, place of residence, and forms of intimate life. At the same time, the individual is required to organize these possibilities into a coherent biography. Sociologists Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim describe individualization not simply as liberation from institutions but as an institutional demand that people construct and manage their own lives under conditions they do not control.¹¹ The modern person must choose an education, develop a career, maintain relationships, cultivate a body, interpret suffering, establish an identity, manage risk, plan a future, and continually revise these decisions as circumstances change. Even belonging becomes something for which the individual must accept responsibility.

The right to choose thereby becomes the command to choose. The person who once suffered from an inherited place may now suffer from the apparent absence of any place that does not have to be personally created. The promise is that one may become anyone; the accusation hidden within the promise is that one is responsible for whoever one becomes. Social conditions, economic limitations, illness, family history, trauma, temperament, luck, and mortality continue to shape every life, but their power is obscured when biography is narrated principally as the outcome of personal decisions. Fate has not disappeared. It has been privatized as failure.

At this point freedom begins to carry a metaphysical weight it cannot bear. Choice can select among goods, but choice alone cannot explain why anything is good. If an object or way of life becomes valuable solely because I choose it, there is no reason to choose one possibility rather than another. If there are reasons why one possibility is better, truer, or more worthy than another, then value is not created by choice alone. The sovereign chooser must therefore borrow standards from nature, culture, religion, history, desire, or other people while continuing to imagine that the self is their sole author. Modern freedom promises self-creation but cannot supply the materials, criteria, or final justification from which a self could be created.

This contradiction does not mean that inherited authority should be restored indiscriminately. Traditional societies could provide meaning by denying freedom, enforcing subordination, and making suffering appear natural or divinely ordained. The gain of modernity cannot be dismissed without dismissing those who needed liberation from precisely these structures. The task is not to choose between oppressive belonging and empty autonomy. It is to understand why emancipation and disorientation have arisen together, and why the protection of freedom does not by itself tell a free person what freedom is for.

The Psychological Burden of Possibility

Kierkegaard perceived the psychological meaning of this transformation earlier than almost anyone. Anxiety is not simply fear of a particular danger. It emerges before possibility, when the self becomes aware that it can act and that acting will make it responsible. His famous description of anxiety as “the dizziness of freedom” names the vertigo of a being that cannot remain innocent once it recognizes its own possibilities.¹² Kierkegaard still situated this drama before God, where freedom, sin, and responsibility possessed a theological horizon. Modern culture has retained the dizziness while weakening the horizon. The individual confronts possibility but lacks a shared account of the good capable of orienting choice.

Sartre radicalized the condition by declaring the human being “condemned to be free.” There is no fixed essence, divine plan, or inherited role that can finally excuse the individual from responsibility for becoming who they are.¹³ Few people live as systematic existentialists, but the cultural command of self-authorship reproduces something close to Sartre’s burden in ordinary life. One must make choices without guarantees and then recognize oneself in their consequences. The freedom that appears exhilarating from the standpoint of liberation can become terrifying from the standpoint of the person who must use it.

Erich Fromm understood that release from traditional bonds does not automatically produce a person capable of living freely. It may instead produce isolation, powerlessness, and the desire to escape into conformity, destructiveness, or authoritarian submission.¹⁴ The attraction of domination cannot be explained only by ignorance. A totalizing movement, rigid identity, or commanding leader relieves the individual of the burden of uncertainty. It converts an open and ambiguous world into a field of necessity. The person surrenders freedom not because freedom possesses no value, but because freedom without belonging, orientation, or effective agency becomes difficult to endure.

Durkheim’s analysis of anomie described a related danger: human desire becomes tormenting when it is no longer limited by a credible moral world.¹⁵ More recently, Alain Ehrenberg has interpreted modern depression through the transition from a culture organized primarily around prohibition and guilt to one organized around initiative, performance, and the demand to become oneself.¹⁶ The characteristic failure is no longer only “I have violated the law,” but “I have not become what I should have been capable of becoming.” Exhaustion, inadequacy, paralysis, and shame emerge when the person cannot fulfill the command to realize a singular life.

This burden appears clearly in clinical life. A suffering person is often asked to identify distorted thoughts, regulate emotion, clarify goals, improve habits, establish boundaries, and make better choices. These practices can be genuinely helpful. Yet when detached from family, economic, institutional, and civilizational conditions, they can turn history into homework. The adolescent who cannot leave a destructive home, the worker whose livelihood depends upon an intolerable job, and the isolated adult whose community has disappeared may all be taught techniques of self-management as if freedom were already present at the point of technique. The person is made responsible for adapting to circumstances that remain largely beyond personal authority.

Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty remains important here. Freedom from coercive interference is indispensable, while attempts to impose a supposedly “true” form of freedom can become justifications for domination.¹⁷ The psychological burden of freedom cannot be solved by allowing the state, church, therapist, or community to dictate a person’s proper life. But neither can political noninterference answer the existential question of how a free life becomes meaningful. The problem is not that modern people possess too many civil rights. It is that freedom has been required to perform work once shared by metaphysics, tradition, communal membership, and obligation. A political achievement has been transformed into a total account of human existence.

Addiction and the Refuge of Necessity

Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in addiction. Addiction appears to be the opposite of freedom because the addicted person repeatedly acts against intention, judgment, health, attachment, and long-term desire. Modern interpretations commonly oscillate between two poles. The moral model treats addiction as culpable choice: the person was free and chose badly. The strongest disease model protects the person from blame by removing addiction from the domain of agency altogether. Each position recognizes something real, yet both inherit the image of freedom as sovereign control. The first condemns the person for failing to exercise it; the second rescues the person by declaring that it was absent.

The lived reality is more difficult. Agency can be wounded, divided, narrowed, and reorganized without disappearing. Biological adaptation, trauma, deprivation, psychiatric suffering, social environment, learned expectation, and the pharmacological force of a substance can all become part of addiction. But addiction may also perform an existential function that none of these explanations cancels. It can transform an unbearable field of possibility into a single necessity. The substance tells the person what matters now. It organizes time, desire, attention, and action around an immediate command. The result is devastating, but it is also definite. Diffuse anxiety becomes craving; a future without shape becomes the next drink, dose, bet, purchase, or act.

To say this is not to romanticize addiction or claim that people deliberately become addicted to escape freedom. It is to recognize that compulsion can become a refuge from the demand for self-authorship. The person no longer has to answer every question about identity, vocation, value, and belonging because one need has colonized the field. Addiction creates a terrible form of order where the wider culture has failed to provide a livable one. It becomes a micro-absolute: destructive, humiliating, and increasingly sovereign, yet capable for a time of relieving the person from the unbearable openness of a life that must supposedly justify itself.

This is why recovery cannot be understood as the restoration of unlimited choice. A person does not become free merely by having more options. Recovery ordinarily requires new forms of binding: medical care, repeated practices, truthful relationships, schedules, communities, promises, responsibilities, and forms of meaning that resist momentary desire. The recovering person becomes freer partly by accepting limits that protect life. This exposes a truth modern individualism has difficulty expressing: some commitments do not diminish freedom but make freedom possible. A life without any binding claim is not necessarily liberated. It may be formless, exposed, and easily conquered by the first necessity powerful enough to organize it.

Freedom After Self-Sovereignty

The modern problem therefore cannot be answered by abandoning freedom. The political and moral protections associated with modern liberty remain indispensable. Nor can it be answered by pretending that human beings can return intact to a premodern cosmos whose authority is no longer universally credible. The task is to free freedom itself from the fantasy of self-sovereignty. A finite person is never the author of the conditions that make authorship possible. No one chooses to be born, chooses a body before inhabiting it, invents the language in which thought occurs, creates the need for attachment, or escapes dependence, history, suffering, and death. The self does not begin as an isolated will and later enter relationships. It awakens within relationships that precede it.

Hegel criticized the idea that freedom consists in arbitrary choice detached from social substance. Freedom becomes concrete only through forms of ethical life in which persons can recognize themselves and one another—in family, civil association, shared practices, and institutions capable of sustaining agency.¹⁸ These institutions can become oppressive and must remain open to criticism, but the isolated chooser is not their natural predecessor. Individual agency is formed through language, education, recognition, discipline, trust, and care. The freedom to question one’s inheritance is itself acquired through an inheritance.

A more adequate freedom would therefore be responsive rather than sovereign. It would not mean passive submission to every demand. Traditions can lie, authorities can abuse, families can wound, and communities can exclude. Critical judgment remains necessary precisely because obligations must be distinguished from domination. But judgment does not create reality from nothing. It answers to truths, persons, promises, and forms of suffering that place claims upon us before we choose them. Emmanuel Levinas’s insistence that responsibility to the other precedes the sovereignty of the self points toward this reversal.¹⁹ Freedom is not first the power to remain untouched; it is the capacity to respond without being annihilated by what is asked.

This conception changes the relation between freedom and obligation. A promise limits future options, yet without promises there can be no trust. Love exposes the person to needs they did not author, yet without such exposure freedom collapses into solitude. Vocation closes countless possible lives, yet only through sustained devotion can a life acquire depth. Recovery requires renunciation, yet that renunciation may restore the capacity to act. The suffering neighbor, the frightened child, the sick body, and the truth one would prefer not to know are not merely obstacles placed before an otherwise sovereign will. They disclose what freedom is capable of serving.

Freedom must therefore be protected politically, formed socially, and fulfilled ethically. Political freedom prevents other people and institutions from possessing the person. Social formation gives the person the capacities and relationships required for meaningful agency. Ethical freedom allows the person to answer what is worthy rather than merely selecting among available preferences. None of these dimensions is sufficient alone. Protection without formation leaves the person abandoned; formation without protection becomes control; ethical language without freedom becomes coercive moralism.

The decisive modern question is consequently not how to eliminate every limit. A life acquires form through limits, just as speech becomes possible through grammar and music through disciplined relation to sound. The question is which limits destroy agency and which make agency possible, which obligations enslave and which call the person beyond captivity to appetite or fear. This is a more difficult question than the celebration of choice, because it requires judgment about the good. Yet modern freedom cannot indefinitely avoid such judgment. Refusing to name what freedom is for does not produce neutrality; it leaves markets, technologies, bureaucracies, addictions, and private compulsions to answer in our place.

Conclusion: What Is Freedom For?

Freedom is new not because earlier human beings never resisted power, practiced self-command, or sought room in which to live. It is new because modern societies have made individual self-determination a universal source of legitimacy and have extended it into the construction of identity and meaning. Premodern people were often burdened by a place they could not escape. Modern people are increasingly burdened by the demand to create a place for themselves. Neither condition is innocent, and the suffering of one should not be used to conceal the suffering of the other.

The answer is not less freedom but a less impossible account of it. Human beings need protection from coercion, the right to question inherited authority, and the opportunity to shape their lives. But they also need goods they do not merely invent, relationships they do not treat as disposable, institutions that do more than administer competition, and obligations capable of giving freedom direction. The mature question is no longer simply, “How can I become free from every claim?” It is also, “What is worthy of my freedom, and to whom am I answerable?”

The modern soul does not suffer because it has been given freedom. It suffers because it has been told that freedom must create, from itself, the meaning, identity, attachments, and absolution that no finite person can generate alone. Freedom becomes livable again when it ceases to mean sovereignty and becomes the power to answer—truthfully, faithfully, and with others—to a world we did not make.

Notes

1. Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns,” in Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 309–328.

2. Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), especially books I and III; Orlando Patterson, Freedom, Volume I: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

3. Epictetus, Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, trans. Robin Hard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), especially Handbook, sections 1 and 14.

4. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993); Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), especially book VIII.

5. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

6. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983).

7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially chapters 13–18; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Second Treatise, especially sections 4 and 95.

8. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17–22; Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in the same volume, 37–108.

9. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), especially chapter 3.

10. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

11. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage, 2002).

12. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte with Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 61.

13. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

14. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941).

15. Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1951), especially book II, chapter 5.

16. Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, trans. Enrico Caouette et al. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).

17. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–172.

18. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially sections 142–157.

19. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).