Secular liberal autonomy is class-stratified and state-regulated, not universal.

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

• XREF: Directly corroborates the Cooper thread: the ‘neutral’ liberal subject of secular modernity presupposes class position and state/market conditions, parallel to how Cooper shows the neoliberal ‘autonomous individual’ quietly assumes Christian-conservative family norms.
• QUESTION: Asad says lower classes are left ‘ambiguous’ — worth chasing how this maps onto Cooper’s account of who the entitled subject of welfare vs contract actually is.