Freedom is realized through social relations and dies when institutional forces deform them

Evidence

Hegel saw freedom as “possible … only if one is also already in a certain (ultimately institutional, norm-governed) relation to others.” In other words, freedom is actualized through our social relations, which means that the loss of freedom is actualized through distortions in social relations. This argument, for the first time, opened up philosophical thinking to sociological evidence and, at its most radical, acknowledged that at particular historical moments, institutional forces may come to undermine the inherited values and norms that govern social relations. When this happens, people start to feel themselves “part of a practice that has either gone dead … or requires of [them] further commitments incompatible with others necessary within some form of life.” Put bluntly, when our form of life starts to conflict with our underlying values, “the lives in a form of life become uninhabitable.” — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 490

Categorization

• XREF: This Hegelian institutional account of freedom connects to the surveillance/attention school’s critique of how platforms restructure social norms, and could be mapped against chapter 4’s behavioral economics discussion. — connects to: Rigidly institutionalized societies endanger loose ones, not vice versa — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2495; Liberties lose their critical force once institutionalized — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 106; Freedom and situation are mutually constituting rather than opposites — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1164 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the key conceptual premise that platform power matters because freedom is forged in social relations, not individual will.

Broader Connections

• Liberties lose their critical force once institutionalized #corroborates (0.82) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 106
• Freedom and situation are mutually constituting rather than opposites #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1164
• Social relations crystallize into fixed external forms that cannot keep pace with inner life #complicates (0.74) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 778