Skinner saw Enlightenment freedom values as impediments to behavioral science

Evidence

Though confident that science would eventually overcome the practical challenges of a behavioral technology, Skinner was more troubled by the cultural impediments to a human science of behavioral prediction and control founded on the viewpoint of the Other-One. He resented the friction produced by human beings in their stubborn attachment to the values and ideals of freedom inherited from the eighteenth-century philosophers, and he equally despised the existential project of the postwar philosophies that planted authenticity, free will, and autonomous action at the heart of second-modernity yearning. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1207

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing Skinner’s specific writings against the Existentialists and the eighteenth-century philosophers he resented — the intellectual genealogy of the freedom-versus-control debate.
• XREF: connects to: Skinner envisioned a population-scale technology of behavioral control that rejected freedom — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1012; American public rejected behaviorism’s claims over individual freedom — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1022; Early behaviorists saw knowledge requiring the forfeit of freedom — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1159 (+12 more)