Autonomy as a secular-liberal ideal is class-differentiated and state-regulated

Evidence

Nevertheless, one can draw out a conclusion from Skovgaard-Petersen that he leaves implicit but which I consider especially important for my story. The individual is now encouraged—in morality as well as in law— to govern himself or herself, as befits the citizen of a secular, liberal society. But two points should be borne in mind in relation to this conclusion. First, this autonomy depends on conditions that are themselves subject to regulation by the law of the state and to the demands of a market economy. Second, the encouragement to become autonomous is primarily directed at the upper classes. The lower classes, constituted as the objects of social welfare and political control, are placed in a more ambiguous situation. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1085

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to reader’s prior sources on how the modern subject is governed through autonomy (e.g., work on liberal governmentality, and on how welfare-state categories constitute lower classes as objects) — echoes Foucauldian themes elsewhere in this book.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that liberal autonomy is itself condition-regulated and class-skewed inverts the simple ‘secular freedom vs. religious constraint’ binary — a genuinely paradigm-level point about the structure of modern power.

Related

• Secular liberal autonomy is class-stratified and state-regulated, not universal. (similarity 0.93)
• Modern self-government requires legally remaking entire subject populations. (similarity 0.82)
• The skeptical ideal of secular autonomy is internally unstable (similarity 0.78)