Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

Freedom Beyond Sovereignty

Freedom Beyond Sovereignty

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

SHARON R. KRAUSE

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Sharon R. Krause is professor in and chair of the Department of Political Science at Brown University. She is the author of Civil Passions and Liberalism with Honor.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-23469-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-23472-4 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226234724.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Krause, Sharon R., author.

Freedom beyond sovereignty : reconstructing liberal individualism / Sharon R. Krause.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-23469-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-23472-4 (e-book) 1. Individualism—United States. 2. Liberalism—United States. 3. Agent (Philosophy) I. Title.

JC574.2.U6K74 2015

320.510973—dc23

2014025468

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, who so often showed me the way; and to Tayhas, who brings the light.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION / Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

ONE / Non-sovereign Agency

TWO / Agency, Inequality, and Responsibility

THREE / Vitalities of Non-sovereign Agency

FOUR / What Is Freedom?

FIVE / Plural Freedom

CONCLUSIONS / Redeeming Freedom

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are very few things in life that we actually accomplish alone, or so this book argues, and the book itself embodies that truth. I am grateful to the friends, family, and colleagues as well as the conference panels, colloquia, classes, and reviewers who have helped bring the book to fruition. My colleagues at Brown in the Political Science Department, as well as some from Philosophy, Religious Studies, Sociology, Economics, and Africana Studies, have generously shared their knowledge and commented on various parts of the project, and have made Brown a tremendously nourishing intellectual community. I am especially indebted in this regard to Mark Blyth, Corey Brettschneider, Steve Bush, Mark Cladis, Dave Estland, Alex Gourevitch, Bonnie Honig, Charles Larmore, Tal Lewis, Glenn Loury, Tricia Rose, John Tomasi, and Andre Willis. For fruitful feedback and conversation along the way I thank Brooke Ackerly, Libby Anker, Lawrie Balfour, Yvonne Chiu, Joshua Dienstag, Jason Frank, Michael Frazer, Samantha Frost, Clarissa Rile Hayward, Don Herzog, Nancy Hirschmann, Leigh Jenco, David Kim, Harvey Mansfield, Patchen Markell, John McCormick, Tamara Metz, Michael Morrell, Emily Nacol, Jenny Nedelsky, Lorraine and Tom Pangle, Philip Pettit, Dennis Rasmussen, Andy Sabl, Annie Stilz, Christina Tarnopolsky, Chip Turner, Dana Villa, Drew Volmert, and Liz Wingrove.

The project profited immensely from the opportunity to present parts of it at Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Reed, Stanford, Tulane, University of Chicago, University of Connecticut, University of Houston, University of North Carolina, University of Virginia, UT Austin, University of Wisconsin, Washington University St. Louis, Wesleyan, Vanderbilt, and Yale as well as the Political Philosophy Workshop and the Religion and Critical Thought Colloquium at Brown. I am grateful for those fruitful discussions. Thanks are also due to the members of my fall 2013 graduate seminar for their spirited engagement with the manuscript. Jennie Ikuta and Michal Ben-Noah provided expert editorial assistance along with incisive commentary. Parts of several chapters were published in earlier form as Bodies in Action: Corporeal Agency and Democratic Politics, Political Theory 39, no. 3 (June 2011): 299–32; Plural Freedom, Politics and Gender 8, no. 2 (May 2012): 238–45; and Beyond Non-Domination: Agency, Inequality and the Meaning of Freedom, Philosophy and Social Criticism 39 (February 2013): 187–208. I appreciate the editors’ permission to draw from that material here.

Of all the debts the book has incurred, the deepest and the sweetest is owed to my partner Tayhas. Our shared experience and continuing conversation run through many of its pages, and without her the book could never have come to be as it is. Her courage inspires me, her hand steadies me, her adventurous heart enchants me. What luck that she walks this earth in my time, for where she goes light and laughter and love unexpectedly, exuberantly erupt.

INTRODUCTION

Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

What does it mean to be free? America is the land of the free, or so our national anthem boasts. We certainly invoke the word frequently. Among other things, freedom is the darling of both political campaigns and product advertising in the United States. Yet American society is saturated with failures of freedom today. The race-based disadvantages that systematically constrain the life chances of African Americans and thereby hinder their freedom offer but one example. Almost fifty years after the civil rights movement black people in the United States are still twice as likely to be unemployed when compared with whites, three times more likely to live in poverty, and more than six times as likely to be imprisoned.¹ Blacks also suffer at higher rates from chronic disease, and they die younger.² Indeed, on many, many measures of a decent human life blacks on the whole fare substantially worse than whites do—even in the age of Obama. Inequalities such as these, racial and otherwise, both reflect and regenerate the limited life prospects of the marginalized. They undercut individual agency in systematic ways, and compromise both justice and freedom. These failures are not new, of course; they have haunted American society for a long time now. We must find a way to do better. The United States promises freedom and justice for all, and as American citizens we have a collective obligation to fulfill this promise.

To remedy the failures of freedom that plague American society today we need to rethink some fundamental assumptions that we hold, assumptions that are prevalent in political theory and that permeate our popular culture. These assumptions bear on the meaning of freedom but they also involve common conceptions about the human condition more generally and about the nature of human agency in particular. Above all, we need to move beyond the idea that agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, as self-determination or control over one’s action. Hannah Arendt once said that if we genuinely care about freedom then we must learn to renounce the aspiration to sovereignty in this form.³ She had noticed the tendency, so familiar in the philosophies of the modern West, to conflate agency with the ideal of sovereignty, and she diagnosed this tendency as the source of many ills for freedom. Arendt was not right about everything, and there is plenty to object to in her theory of politics, but she was on to something important in criticizing the aspiration to sovereignty as a personal ideal. This way of conceiving human agency does indeed make trouble for freedom.

The notion of sovereignty is especially associated with the rise of the modern state, of course, a defining feature of which is the capacity to exercise control over a territory and a population.⁴ A state is sovereign to the extent that no other entity has the power or the right to determine what happens within its domain. Alongside the idea of the sovereign state, there emerged within modern liberalism a quasi-parallel conception of the human being. On this view, evident in one way or another in thinkers from Locke to Kant to John Stuart Mill, the individual is likewise understood, at least in principle, to be the master of her domain. The presence of a rational will gives her the capacity to control her action, it is thought, and the equal moral status of persons means that she is entitled to do so, or at least that she has no natural obligation to obey anyone else. To be sure, the notion of sovereignty as applied to individual agency has never been as absolute as sovereignty in the context of the state.⁵ Neither the power nor the right to exercise personal control over one’s action was ever understood to be unlimited. Liberal thinkers all acknowledge that agency is regularly influenced and impeded by many external factors, for instance, and they insist that the individual’s right to control her action is properly constrained by the state in view of the demands of social coordination and the rights of others. Nobody believes that individuals are perfectly sovereign.

Yet being an agent is generally understood within the liberal tradition in ways that draw on the notion of sovereignty, however implicitly. To be an agent, on this view, is to be in control of what one does rather than being controlled by others or by circumstance. It means acting on one’s own intentional choices (meaning, on some views, one’s autonomously generated choices) rather than acting from instinct or necessity or deference. The rational will is usually thought to be the source of agency insofar as it gives us the capacity to make choices, to guide ourselves, and thus to control our actions. If most of us doubt that human beings ever achieve perfect control in this sense, many of us do assume that the closer one comes to this ideal the more agentic one will be. And we commonly locate the sources of agency in internal faculties of the person, especially the faculties of reason and will. We hold to a sovereigntist view of agency to the extent that we identify agency in the ideal case with being in control of one’s action, where the content of one’s will defines the meaning of the action, and one’s effects manifest one’s own reasoned choices rather than the wishes of others or the random effects of chance.

While everyone acknowledges that human agency rarely instantiates the ideal of sovereignty perfectly, this way of understanding agency does pervade many of the most familiar and influential theories of freedom today, including (for instance) the ideal of non-interference found in the work of Isaiah Berlin and the republican model of non-domination defended by Philip Pettit and others.⁶ On both views, the function of freedom, as an enabling condition of human agency, is to protect the individual’s capacity for intentional choice and control. The ideal of sovereignty is also implicit in much of the freedom talk that is everywhere in American popular culture. Freedom for us almost always refers to the freedom to choose, and thereby to exercise control over our actions and our destinies. Whether it concerns health care options, or reproductive rights, or cable TV providers and auto insurance, our ability to control our action through the exercise of choice is, we think, the measure of our freedom.

There are good reasons to find the sovereigntist view of agency attractive. We very much wish to have the kind of control that it promises. Among other things, we want to believe that we can rise above the power of our circumstances, that our actions can be self-generated and hence subject to our control because their origin is inside us. We also quite rightly accept the normative injunction that is implicit in the ideal of personal sovereignty, namely that individuals and their choices should be treated with respect. Much as the principle of state sovereignty refers to both the power and the right of a state to control a particular population and territory, so the ideal of personal sovereignty involves both a descriptive claim about human agency as consisting in the rational capacity for control over one’s action and a normative claim about the right to such control. The latter is an example of what we might call normative individualism, the idea that the individual human being has intrinsic moral value as an end in herself and is therefore entitled to various protections, including respect for her choices. Choosing is indeed one way that we exercise agency, and a society that restricted individual choices arbitrarily or too fully could not count as free. The normative individualism inherent in the ideal of personal sovereignty is a fundamental precondition of liberal democracy, and it should never be abandoned. But the descriptive claim that agency consists in the capacity for personal control over one’s action, that it is an internal property located in the individual will, and that it always takes the form of intentional choice is something that should make us skeptical.

We should be skeptical about this view because it fails to capture core features of how human agency works. Agency properly conceived is the affirmation of one’s subjective existence, or personal identity, through concrete action in the world. To be an agent is to have an impact on the world that one can recognize as one’s own. Agency thus has both an efficacy side and an identity side. The efficacy side distinguishes agency from mere willing—or dreaming. You are not an agent if you do not act so as to affect the world. You are, of course, still a human being even if you do not affect the world, and as such you are entitled to moral respect and protection. But you are not in that case entitled to be called an agent. As long as we acknowledge the efficacy side of agency, and recognize the distinction between agency and mere willing, we must admit that agency is not an exclusively internal capacity of the person. Agency does involve some faculties that are internal to the person, such as willing and believing and desiring, but agency is not reducible to such faculties. The reason agency is not reducible in this way is that our effects frequently depend on the social uptake provided by other people—on how they interpret what we are doing and how they respond to it. The impact we have on the world is not subject to our personal control. The constitution of many actions—as embodying both the agent’s personal identity and her effects—depends as much on other people as it does on the agent herself. Individual agency is an emergent property of intersubjective exchanges in this respect, not solely a function of faculties such as the will that are strictly internal to the individual. Because agency depends on social uptake, it is a socially distributed phenomenon.

This feature of agency often goes unseen, especially by those who are privileged. When social uptake consistently functions to sustain one’s agency, as in the case of the privileged, it disappears from view, generating the illusion of personal sovereignty.⁷ Where social uptake is systematically denied, as among the marginalized, its role in sustaining agency comes into sharp focus. It is important to see that agency eludes personal control in a fundamental way, not just contingently. The point is not simply that human beings sometimes (or even regularly) fail to achieve full control because they exercise their agency only imperfectly. On the contrary, even the perfect exercise of agency often will be a failure from the standpoint of personal control because many of the effects we have are by their nature not subject to our control. For the same reason that individual agency eludes personal control, it also regularly comes apart from our choices and intentions because we are commonly the agents of outcomes we did not foresee or wish to bring about. Agency thus extends beyond intentional choice. For both reasons—because agency eludes personal control and because it extends beyond intentional choice—the exercise of agency is a non-sovereign experience, to invoke the language of Hannah Arendt once again.

So one reason to be skeptical about the sovereigntist view of agency is that it fails to capture core features of how agency works. Another reason to be skeptical concerns the implications that the sovereigntist view has for personal responsibility. Agency and responsibility are closely connected, partly because responsibility comes into play only on the condition that agency is present. We do not hold people responsible for events in which their agency played no role. And how we conceive human agency affects how we attribute personal responsibility. When viewed through the lens of democratic politics, the sovereigntist approach to agency generates a conception of personal responsibility that is both excessively restrictive and overly demanding.

It is too restrictive because it justifies the privileged in denying our responsibility for impersonal structures of oppression to which we contribute without meaning to do so. If I did not intentionally set out to discriminate, the thinking goes, then the entrenched patterns of inequality that I see around me must not be a function of my agency, and hence they must not be my fault. Perhaps it would be nice of me to do something about them, but because I am not actually responsible for creating them I have no real obligation to change them. We see this logic in play, for instance, in debates about reparations for slavery, in discussions of how to address America’s failing public schools, in connection with the persistent gender-based wage gap, and in arguments about the sometimes harmful effects of globalized capitalism. In each case, assignations of personal responsibility are troubled by our strict identification of agency with intentionality and control. We are right to assume that responsibility presupposes agency. Yet if agency implies intentionality and control, then there will be many social dynamics that fall outside the scope of individual agency and personal responsibility because they outrun our intentions and elude our control. Our sovereigntist assumptions about agency are too restrictive in this respect to sustain an ideal of personal responsibility that is adequate to the demands of democratic justice.

Somewhat paradoxically, the sovereigntist view of agency also generates a notion of personal responsibility that is too demanding insofar as it makes us individually responsible for doing things that no one person can accomplish alone. If the source of my action is located in my personal will, and if my agency consists in the capacity to control my deeds, then at least in principle I should be able to rise above the power of my circumstances. However difficult this may be, I have the capacity and hence the responsibility to pull myself up by my bootstraps, and others can reasonably demand that I do so. This logic comes into play in the diagnosis of the cultural pathologies that are said to characterize America’s racialized ghettos, a diagnosis that indicts the behavior of marginalized individuals while letting the privileged largely off the hook for social dynamics to which both groups contribute. Indeed, the sovereigntist ideal of agency often gets deployed in ways that (however unintentionally) justify the privileged in an unconscionably narrow sense of responsibility and exaggerate the responsibility of the marginalized. Both the restrictiveness and the demandingness of personal responsibility so conceived derive from our attachment to a sovereigntist idea of human agency that identifies agency with intentional choice and control. Both tend to exacerbate existing inequalities. And both are deeply disabling for democratic citizenship, or at least for practices of democratic citizenship that promote justice for all.

One last reason to resist the sovereigntist view of human agency has to do with how it affects our pursuit of freedom. Here and throughout the book I use the term freedom in a political sense, as a function of interpersonal relations and the political institutions and social practices that shape them. The study of freedom in political theory has a long history of very diverse approaches, but for all the diversity most theorists have agreed in seeing freedom as an enabling condition of human agency; to be free is to be in a position to exercise one’s agency. If agency is an internal faculty of the person rooted in the individual will and manifest in the activity of choosing, as the sovereigntist view assumes, then freedom will mostly be a matter of ensuring that other people and groups (including the state) stay out of the individual’s way. Thus both Berlin’s ideal of freedom as non-interference and Pettit’s ideal of freedom as non-domination focus on protecting individual choice. True, Pettit’s view calls for quite a lot in the way of social provision and state intervention, but the purpose of all this is to protect the individual’s ability to choose from being interfered with by others (persons and governments) who have the power to do so arbitrarily. Both views see freedom as the ability to carry out the control over one’s action that agency, conceived as an inner faculty, makes possible. And they both locate freedom primarily in political institutions and in the public status of citizenship, including the formally established rights and liberties that constitute this status.

On the non-sovereign view, by contrast, the fact that agency is not solely an inner faculty of the individual but an emergent property of intersubjective exchanges means that the protections associated with non-interference and non-domination will not be enough to support agency and establish freedom. Formal institutional mechanisms are not likely to be sufficient either. Beyond our political institutions and public status as citizens, the quality of our informal interpersonal interactions will matter quite a lot to individual freedom because these interactions are constitutive of agency as a socially distributed phenomenon. If agency involves the affirmation of one’s identity in one’s deeds, freedom refers to the whole constellation of conditions that make this affirming action possible. Establishing the right political institutions and the proper slate of rights and liberties will be only the beginning, even for an explicitly political account of freedom. A non-sovereign theory of freedom will need to be attentive to subtle, often unconscious social dynamics that undercut agency in systematic and unjust ways precisely because agency is not a strictly internal affair. In view of agency’s non-sovereign character, these informal social dynamics matter to freedom not at the margins but at the core. They matter far more than is true on many familiar models of freedom today. And they matter in ways that go beyond what the state itself can and should try to control. Political freedom is in large measure a function of what we often think of as private exchanges. It involves the state, but it also points beyond the state and beyond the formal rights and liberties that are the focus for the pursuit of freedom on more sovereigntist models. The non-sovereign view of agency calls for a micropolitics of freedom, and it emphasizes an emancipatory ethos of democratic citizenship.⁸

The effort to rethink agency and freedom in non-sovereign ways is of a piece with recent work by social scientists such as Cathy Cohen and Loïc Wacquant, among others, who seek to reconceptualize the conventional structure/agency divide more productively, especially as it bears on race and poverty.⁹ This effort also answers to the challenges posed by theorists such as Elizabeth Anderson, Michelle Alexander, and Glenn Loury, who articulate so powerfully the persistent, if shifting, landscape of racial inequality in the United States. This landscape manifests the practical effects of America’s attachment to the ideal of personal sovereignty. Anderson, for example, studies the re-segregation of American public schools in the post-1980s period, tracking its progress and finding rising racial inequalities in its wake.¹⁰ Americans (both black and white) tend to blame blacks themselves for these inequalities, although it is not difficult to show that their causes are far more complex.¹¹ We blame the victims, Anderson says, partly because we do not see much intentional discrimination either in ourselves or in those around us. White people do not for the most part consciously intend to dominate or oppress black people, and they do not as individuals control the complex constellation of causes that contribute to these outcomes. Where there is no intentionality and no control, we think, there can be no agency, hence no freedom, and consequently no personal responsibility. And if white people are not the agents of racial inequality then black people must be doing it to themselves.¹²

Michelle Alexander makes a similar point with respect to the racial dynamics of mass incarceration in the United States today. Both legal principle and public sentiment require that racially unequal outcomes must result from conscious intentionality if they are to register as something for which we hold individuals responsible. Here again our sovereigntist assumptions are implicitly in play. We hold people responsible only if they are agents, and we only count them as agents if their actions manifest their intentions and reflect their control. Because many of the actions that lead to unequal outcomes in the criminal justice system are unintentional and beyond any one individual’s capacity to control, we have a hard time identifying racial bias in the system and assigning responsibility for it. The result is widespread injustice, with blacks six times more likely than whites to lose their freedom (i.e., be imprisoned) for identical crimes.¹³ In some parts of the country, a substantial majority of black men (three out of four in Washington DC) serve time in prison, mostly on drug charges, despite the fact that people of all colors use and sell drugs at similar rates.¹⁴ Other recent work on race and politics reinforces the idea that we cannot understand racial inequality in the post-civil rights era, and the violations of freedom it entails, in terms of the old categories of intentional discrimination and conscious prejudice, meaning against the background of our sovereigntist conception of agency.¹⁵ The traditional vocabulary of the civil rights struggle, as Eddie Glaude puts it, needs recalibration.¹⁶ Among other things, we need to move away from the language of racial discrimination, as the conscious effort to disadvantage others, to the language of racial stigma, which covers the background beliefs, values, and practices that sustain racial inequality and compromise freedom but that are not the intentional products of any sovereign agents.¹⁷

One of the distinctive features of racial inequality today is that it coexists with markers of real racial progress. This is the age of Obama, after all. Yet while President Obama’s election was a tremendously significant and promising event for the country, it has not brought an end to racial inequality here. In some ways, in fact, it introduced new complacency in the face of this inequality. As early as election night 2008, conservative pundits were insisting that henceforth there could be no more excuses for the kinds of racial disparities that are so much a part of the American landscape.¹⁸ The election proved, they said, that anybody could become anything in America, and hence that all limitations in life must be self-imposed, in effect chosen.

The election of Barack Obama was not the first time that one individual’s success has been taken to redeem the failed freedom of countless others. Consider Richard Rodriguez’s reflections on the performance of Leontyne Price the night that the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center first opened:

You are probably too young to remember or perhaps you have forgotten what a pride for America that evening was—the most modern opera house in the world . . . and with Leontyne Price, the reigning dramatic soprano of her day, enshrined at the center. And yet, the Metropolitan Opera seemed at that moment—eight o’clock, September 16, 1966—to mark the very crossroads of American history, the division of the old era and the new. Leontyne Price seemed the apotheosis of African America, of new America, as if uncountable degradations inflicted upon African Americans might be ransomed by a single, soaring human voice. . . . That same year, 1966, there were thirty-eight race riots in American cities.¹⁹

Similarly, the age of Obama is an age of rising inequality, and this inequality has a racial hue, as recent work on education, unemployment, and the criminal justice system shows.²⁰

What one commentator has called the enduring injustice of racial inequality in the United States surely reflects the fact that since the end of legalized discrimination racial injustice has been sustained largely through informal practices and patterns of social exchange rather than through officially sanctioned laws and public policies, and through social stigma rather than intentional prejudice.²¹ Indeed, many of the systematic failures of freedom that characterize our social landscape reflect subtle dynamics of agency and inequality that we frequently fail to see and that we do not fully understand. Because we do not grasp the intersubjective nature of human agency, we cannot respond effectively to the troubles of those whose freedom is compromised by these dynamics. We also have a hard time acknowledging our own responsibility for their troubles. If agency is equated with intentional choice, and if responsibility tracks agency, as we have seen, then our responsibilities will extend only as far as our intentional choices do. Yet if we let ourselves and others off the hook for social dynamics that we did not intentionally choose, nothing will ever change. Hence the enduring character of racial and other systematic injustice in our time, and the failures of freedom that go with it.

The influence of liberal theory is partly responsible for our myopia. For all its virtues—and there are many—liberal theory has never been very good at addressing the informal, often unwitting ways that power interacts with human agency to compromise justice and constrain individual freedom. Poststructuralists, feminists, critical race theorists, queer theorists, and other critics of liberalism have generally been more successful in diagnosing these dynamics. Yet they have not on the whole offered enough in the way of empowering solutions to the problems they identify. If we are to make good on liberal democracy’s promise of freedom and justice for all, we will need to do better. We will need to move beyond the myth of sovereignty, where individual agency is conceived as an internal property of the person and identified narrowly with intentional choice and control. We must move beyond the myth of sovereignty if we are to appreciate the troubled agency of the marginalized, to grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change, and to understand the full complexity of freedom.

Yet we need not dissolve individual agency into socially constituted identities or prevailing relations of power. Human agency is an assemblage of the communicative exchanges, background meanings, social interpretations, personal intentions, self-understandings, and even bodily encounters through which one’s identity finds affirmation in one’s deeds. So conceived, agency is non-sovereign but it is nevertheless robust and potent. Indeed, the agency of those who are dominated and oppressed frequently surprises us with its vitality. Revolutions happen. Moreover, individual initiative matters a great deal to human agency; there can be no agency without it. The non-sovereign view of agency defended here affirms the power of agency and the importance of individual initiative even as it contests the myth of sovereignty.

This view is also compatible with liberal individualism as a normative ideal. The normative commitment to individual freedom that forms the core of liberal theory is both sound and valuable, and it ought not be abandoned. The distinction between agency as a practical capacity and the normative status of the individual is crucial here. The concept of agency is sometimes invoked to express the moral standing of persons as free and equal, a status that is in principle inviolable. Agency as a practical capacity can be undone as a result of systematic inequality (or because of more random factors) but agency when conceived as a normative status is not vulnerable in this way. Yet while it is true that agency as a normative status should be understood as inviolable, it is crucial to remember that agency in this sense is not the same thing as the practical capacity to affect the world through action. We tend to conflate, however unconsciously, the practical capacity with the normative status, thus imputing an inviolability to the actual exercise of agency that is misleading. Because we believe that everyone ought to be treated as if he were an agent, we often act as if each individual (even those subject to systematic social inequality) simply is an agent. This practice makes it all too easy to wash our hands of the failed freedom of other people and to demand actions from them that no one can accomplish alone. We must be mindful of the distinction between agency as a practical capacity and the normative status of persons as morally free and equal. With this distinction in mind, we can move beyond the false ideal of personal sovereignty without leaving either normative individualism or individual freedom behind.

Still, the non-sovereignty of human agency is bound to have important implications for how we understand the meaning of freedom. In exploring these implications I focus especially on American society, which like many other democracies today is free in some respects but unfree in others—and unfree in ways that track systematic social and economic inequalities. My emphasis is less on formal political institutions and laws than on informal, interpersonal dynamics, cultural values, and social practices. It is certainly true that the formal and the informal features of any society interact in reciprocally reinforcing ways. Yet the two can be distinguished conceptually, and each one must be understood on its own terms too if we are to have a full picture of the political community as a whole. Who we are as a country is shaped in fundamental ways by countless interpersonal dynamics that interact with but are not reducible to the formal institutions and public principles that constitute the basic structure of our society.²² These dynamics are difficult to theorize. They are not written down anywhere in the manner of laws and constitutional doctrines. They cannot be traced, as political institutions are, through tangible documents or publicly visible buildings and offices. Indeed, many of the dynamics are quite ephemeral. They exist as they are enacted—and they are enacted all the time—but they rarely announce themselves as such. They often involve beliefs and values that most people (including those who enact them) would never admit