Basic agreement about freedom’s meaning has collapsed in the twenty-first century

Evidence

Of these themes, freedom may prove to be the great puzzle for the early twenty-first century. In the previous century, I grew up naively assuming that I’d see a constant, steady increase in this nebulous stuff through my lifetime, both in personal choices and in politics. In some ways, this has come true. On the other hand, unforeseen by anyone, basic ideas about freedom have been assailed and disputed in radical ways, so that we are now unable to agree what it amounts to, what we need it for, how much of it can be allowed, how far it should be interpreted as the right to offend or transgress, and how much of it we are prepared to give away to remote corporate entities in exchange for comfort and convenience. What we cannot do any longer is take it for granted. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1002

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: existentialist freedom as a framework for current debates over ‘cancel culture’, corporate data bargains, and the offense principle.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapters’ account of Sartrean freedom as radical choice, contrasted here with postmodern disputes over what freedom even means. — connects to: Separate but equal doctrine was legally abandoned within decades; Traditional liberal freedoms are obsolete as the definition of a free society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 111

Broader Connections

• Separate but equal doctrine was legally abandoned within decades #exemplifies (0.75)