Framing emancipations

Original ambivalences of ‘modern’ emancipation

In the social sciences, emancipation can certainly be considered a classic topic, deeply rooted in the history of the discipline. Nonetheless, it is still ubiquitously at issue, and subject to different interpretations related to the contexts, positions and identities of actors involved in emancipative processes. If we consider the Latin etymology of the word – emancipatio – we may note that to be emancipated means primarily to be ‘out of someone else’s control’; in specific cases, emancipation means to give freedom to someone or to gain freedom from authority. As a normative process, emancipation was possible in the religious sphere, as well as in relation to situations of subjugation, as in the case of slavery. Hence, emancipation is a concept originally related to liberation, freedom, effort to gain freedom, granting of freedom and struggle against subjection.

The reference to emancipation as a historical element of European modernity dates back to Kant’s (1784) famous article ‘What is Enlightenment?’, where emancipation is conceived as the exit of the human being from ‘self-incurred immaturity’ (Unmündigkeit). As a philosophical idea – as it has been in German idealism – or as ground for material conflicts and mobilizations – as it has been in the Marxist tradition – emancipation has characterized the modern need to test concepts of the true, the good and the just (Heller, 2005: 64). The modern conceptualization of emancipation has also been characterized by both individual emancipation from the control of other individuals (groups, communities, clans, clergy, owners and masters) and collective emancipation from the constraints of nature with the help of technique and scientific reason (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979; Habermas, 1987; Honneth, 1991; Horkheimer, 1947).

Hence, the modern idea of emancipation is constructed around the narration of stories of self-determination of choice, in which equality and fairness have been granted by institutions and normative references (which, inevitably, are themselves forms of self-restriction), as well as by stories of inner desire of pure autonomy and immanent freedom, as expressed in the tradition of heretical materialism from Spinoza to Deleuze. Moreover, in the historical process of self-determination, the idea of the uniqueness of every single individual has grown increasingly important, and so too has the idea of personal choice and responsibility in relationships with others as well as with material objects and money (Dumont, 1977). Consequently, in modern European thought, emancipation is related both to virtue – the virtue of the bourgeois subject looking for his/her free choice – and to the project of collective liberation in a fairer society free from exploitation relations. Emancipation is an act of creation of the free individual as well as an act of liberation from situations of constraint. As Foucault (2008) states in his concept of governmentality, this twofold meaning can also explain the original inextricable intertwining of emancipation, individualization, liberalism and capitalism.

In addition, we should not forget that this European and modern idea of emancipation, with its intrinsic ambivalences, has been exported through colonization, and that it has been often used to justify the domination of colonized countries in the name of their future freedom and ‘civilization’. The very concept of humanity that modern emancipation carried forward was not incompatible with the dehumanization of the ‘others’; on the contrary, the desubjectivation of all ‘others’, from the sexualized body of women to the racialized body of natives, was a common way to affirm the existing emancipation of the white European man (Buck-Morss, 2000).

Ambivalent interpretations of the concept of emancipation are present also in the social sciences. Indeed, sociology has dealt both with the idea of emancipation related to rights, equality and the struggle against power relations, and with the reference to personal emancipation as an individual goal and the search for a ‘true self’. This double interpretation – autonomy and authenticity – is mainly related to historical events, and particularly to the history of social movements. For instance, while in industrial societies emancipation from false consciousness was a fundamental aim of the working-class movement and a first step in claiming social justice, in post-industrial and post-materialist societies, personal authenticity and uniqueness have become just as important as autonomy and social equality in defining emancipation (Melucci, 1996; Ray, 1993). While in the 1960s and 1970s the issues of self-determination and social justice were at the forefront of the social sciences (as well as of the common-sense discussions of many citizens), in the following decade Western social movements became mainly focused on the claim of difference, postmodernism celebrated the end of grand narratives and geopolitical changes facilitated the affirmation of neo-liberal politics. By the end of the century, women’s struggles, students’ mobilizations and other ‘new social movements’ had already obtained a broad formal recognition of personal self-determination; hence, the concept of emancipation was largely taken for granted, while authenticity became an easy target of marketing campaigns.

Certainly, many important scholars – especially the critics of the neo-liberal turn like Stuart Hall and Pierre Bourdieu – continued their reflections on issues related to emancipation, such as hegemony and domination. The great influence of authors like Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault in the international debate has also contributed to maintaining attention on the emancipation as a theoretical concept. Postcolonial studies and critical global studies are also fields in which the idea of emancipation has continued as central, though subjected to analysis of its relationship with Western modernity and the colonial past (Nederveen Pieterse, 1997). In political philosophy, scholars have sought to account for the historical transformation of emancipation and its ubiquitous links with liberalism and capitalism (Gauchet, 2005; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985).

Indeed, neither have authors of the so-called postmodernist, deconstructivist or neo-pragmatist turn relinquished reference to emancipation. The notion was not explicitly at the forefront of the theoretical constructs of Jacques Derrida or Richard Rorty, but it was part of their radical and analytical critique of the previous theoretical paradigms concerning the relation between subjects and social reality (Derrida, 1994; Rorty, 1999). Particularly in the United States, the ‘pragmatic turn’ has been considered an alternative to foundational projects of social critique. Focused on contingency and ‘action’, the turn to pragmatism is supposed to overcome more idealistic and ‘spectatorial’ approaches to emancipation (Rorty, 1998).

However, at least in regard to the more specific sociological debate, it is only in recent years that the topic of emancipation has regained a more central place. On the empirical side, social mobilizations against neo-liberal finance and injustices in globalization processes have brought the attention of scholars back to topics such as capitalism, social inequalities, vulnerability and the personal capabilities of social actors. On the theoretical side, contemporary authors related to the French critical tradition, like Luc Boltanski (2009), as well as to the German strand of the Frankfurter critical theory, like Axel Honneth (2000), have contributed to reviving the debate on emancipation and critique as theoretical issues central to the social sciences.

Framing emancipations in their plural meanings and transformations means taking account of historical as well as theoretical investigations. This article focuses on three elements that have concerned the recent conceptualization of emancipation: the cultural turn and its focus on difference and otherness; the theoretical discussion on emancipation since postmodernism, post-structuralism and the linguistic turn; and the ambivalent intertwining between emancipation and historical processes such as individualization and capitalism.

Emancipation and otherness

The contemporary globalized world is profoundly different from the world in which the modern conceptualizations of emancipation first arose. The idea of emancipation is no longer built around the subjectivity of the white bourgeois European man, for it also concerns the subjectivities of all those ‘different’ from the original standard. Especially since the Second World War, decolonization, the ‘cultural turn’ in social sciences and the collective claims of difference by social movements have shown how this model was falsely neutral in its claims to genderlessness, colourlessness, culturelessness (Bhambra, 2007, 2011). Cultural pluralism, feminism, globalization and migration flows have certainly contributed to the calling of a Western-centred idea of emancipation into question. However, it is by the constellation of postcolonial studies, as well as by critical global studies and theories of plural modernities, that the concept of emancipation has been more explicitly challenged through a critique of its original contradictions.

Most authors acknowledge Frantz Fanon (1963, 1967), together with W.E.B. Du Bois and Aimé Césaire, as the main pioneer of this critical investigation. Indeed, Black Skin, White Masks (1967) is explicitly constructed around the contradiction between the assimilation of modern emancipation values and the realization that, within these values, it is impossible for a Black subject to be fully emancipated. From a theoretical point of view, Fanon’s critique was rooted in an existentialist quandary: the impossibility of full emancipation is related to an original form of extraneousness; the human condition of the Black subject raises the question as to what it means to be an emancipated human (Gordon, 1995). Fanon’s work also raises an epistemic question about the modern construction of emancipation as a historical product closely bound up with colonialism and its consequences. There is no place in the past for the ‘others’, especially for Black and indigenous subjects. In the Western historical construction, they are not considered to be original actors in emancipation processes, and they can only wait for an emancipation and civilization imported from outside. Consequently, it is from an original condition of marginality that a different conceptualization of emancipation can be developed. This epistemic question is today a central issue for many Latin American, African and Asian intellectuals who recognize themselves in the postcolonial or decolonial constellation, and it is part of a broader reflection on the Eurocentric notion of modernity (Chakrabarty, 2000; Dussel, 1995; Mignolo, 2007; Nandy, 1983).

Postcolonial thought is usually identified with the triumvirate of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha. Indeed, these three have been highly influential in developing a debate on the subjectivity and freedom of all those who have been considered as ‘others’ with respect to the model of emancipated Western, White, bourgeois man. Their works are focused on the construction of representations (Bhabha, 1994; Said, 2004) and subalternity (Spivak, 1988, 1999), and have made a fundamental contribution to the pluralization of the idea of emancipation. They have shown that emancipation is primarily a way to speak with one’s own words independently from the normative references of emancipation itself. Nonetheless, the works of Said, Spivak and Bhabha are mainly based on a discussion of European postmodern and poststructuralist authors. Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are the principal interlocutors, together with psychoanalytic thinkers such as Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. Such intellectual rootedness in Western philosophy has been criticized by those authors most engaged in epistemic criticism of the construction of the modern idea of subjectivity and emancipation. This has induced many postcolonial scholars to develop a historical critique of the construction of the idea of modernity as an endogenous European process.

Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, rationality, secularism and capitalism are the classical sociological understandings of European modernity that do not include the rest of the world. This Eurocentric vision has been challenged by the multiple modernities paradigm, by critical globalization studies and by cultural historical sociology (Adams et al., 2005; Seidman, 1996). In some cases, these critical approaches simply seek to pluralize the idea of modernity by recognizing the history of other civilizations and their cultural specificities. In other cases, a more explicit challenge is raised against the conceptualization of modernity itself as a typical Western process. It is in this case that the idea of emancipation is also considered as inseparable from the Western idea of modernity, and that a historical and spatial rupture with Western modernity is considered inevitable. A true global history cannot be hierarchical: non-Western civilizations have contributed to shaping the idea of emancipation, despite the silencing of their voices in dominant historical narratives.

The cultural turn, the constellation of postcolonial studies and the critical reconstruction of modern history have contributed in different ways to deconstructing the European grand narrative of emancipation. They have shown the limits of an auto-referential idea of emancipation, as well as the need for a historical sociology able to investigate both contradictions and multicultural relationships in the conceptualization of emancipation. This work is ongoing, but the intellectual challenge has been cast.

Theoretical investigations on emancipation

In social theory, emancipation is related to different abstract referents: the struggle against what is false and ideological; personal autonomy, freedom and self-determination; space for antagonism and pluralism; a fair society because only social justice prevents exploitation and alienation; authenticity, uniqueness, true self. There is no clear overlap among these references, but they are often merged in theoretical discussion. This is probably due to the theoretical genealogy of the concept in modern thought. After Kant’s assertions concerning emancipation and the Enlightenment came the different but equally influential interpretations of Marx. From his early writings, such as Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), Marx claimed that emancipation is not just an idea – the one elaborated by the ‘bourgeois’ philosophy of Kant and Hegel – to which the individual can aspire for himself/herself. Bourgeois’ political liberation from the Ancien Régime is not sufficient; freedom and autonomy must also be related to material conditions of life and economic development. Thus, because emancipation cannot be based on normative values – for Marx all values are ideologies and scientific reasoning is preferable to ethical references – emancipation must be based on praxis and labour and on a critique of the contradictions of capitalism.

By contrast, the idea of emancipation as developed by the romantic tradition of modernity is clearly addressed to the liberation and discovery of the self, and the focus is on the search for authenticity and self-transparency (Taylor, 1989). From the German Ideology of Marx and Engels to Adorno’s (1973) ferocious critique of Heidegger, this idea of emancipation as authenticity has been problematic. According to Adorno, emancipation as authenticity is at the same time a useless mirage and an excessively radical goal, one too ambitious to be pursued by a single individual. More generally, the falseness of the goal of individual liberty reflects the falseness of bourgeois society, with its reference to the secular self-sufficiency of rational individuals.

From this point of view, the conceptualizations of emancipation inherited by the social sciences are deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, denouncing every attempt to achieve autonomy and authenticity as potentially false means promoting a theoretical horizon of nihilism which extends far beyond ‘negative dialectics’. Yet, this horizon has been considered an irreversible acquisition since the linguistic and hermeneutic turns: according to scholars of postmodern thought, emancipation is the dissolution of foundations. Because there is not a truth ‘over there’, emancipation is unfounded, it is absolute immanence, a never-ending interpretation; thus, any attempt to synthesize becomes ideology (Vattimo, 2004). On the other hand – and contrary to the above position – because emancipation and freedom are considered to be necessarily based on a final agreement about a just society, they cannot be ‘reduced’ to an illusion and must be rooted in normative and historical references, which are indispensable even when emancipation is considered to be partial or relative (Habermas, 1987).

Indeed, the idea of emancipation seems trapped in at least three orders of ambivalence. The first relates to the conceptualization of emancipation in its more individualized form: here, there is a tension between the search for authenticity, happiness and identity – as hedonistic outcome of 1968 and ‘new social movements’ – and the search for freedom as autonomy, equality and moral dignity, which relates to the idea of a just society. The second order of ambivalence is that related to the ‘liberal’ as against the ‘antagonistic’ ideas of democracy. Within the liberal framework, emancipation can have a definitive legitimation, with a strong emphasis on individual freedom and human rights. By contrast, within the antagonistic framework, emancipations are always plural, contradictory and multicultural, a definitive synthesis is not possible and the rule of law is always a form of constraint and a source of power relations; hence, emancipation is temporary and immanent (Mouffe, 2005). Finally, a third order of ambivalence seems to be more closely related to the tension between the ideas of free will and negative freedom; the focus is on individuals and their efforts to construct themselves in contexts where power is always present. In this strand of interpretation, which links under the rubric of ‘negativity’, such diverse authors as Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Adorno and Foucault, emancipation is first of all ‘the art of not being governed or, better, the art of not being governed like that and at that cost’ (Foucault, 1997: 27).

Today, few scholars put the issue of emancipation as such at the centre of their work or consider it an analytical concept with the heuristic capacity to unify the analysis of a large spectrum of phenomena. In social theory, the alternative positions of Habermas and Foucault remain important references, with enduring influence on more specific investigations into emancipation, as in feminist theory or postcolonial studies. Despite the huge amount of literature on these two protagonists in the debate, their legacy on the topic of emancipation is less discussed in comparative terms.

In his encyclopaedic analysis of the history of social theory, Habermas has analysed emancipation as both scientific and technical control over nature and as personal autonomy related to mutual agreement based on intended meanings (Habermas, 1998). This latter interpretation is part of Habermas’ hermeneutic approach to the study of social integration. If one does not want to consider emancipation as a solipsistic and anti-social search for autonomy, it is necessary to treat personal autonomy as the result of inter-subjective mutual understanding – the ‘communicative action’ – and of possible agreement on normative expectations (Habermas, 1984, 1988, 1996). In Habermas’ effort to provide a normative foundation for critical theory, he finds that the horizon of emancipation cannot be related to the elimination of every kind of normative relation, as it is in post-structuralism and deconstructivism. Rather, in Habermas’ view, emancipation is rooted in the relative autonomy of the life-world and in its potential for social struggle, and is intertwined with the possibility to act in a public sphere where virtually (in an ‘ideal speech situation’) everyone can speak and thus contribute to identifying the ‘best argument’.

This position is critical of both the idea of rational actor – supposed to be already emancipated – and the genealogical idea of contingent and situated emancipation possible only here and now. Particularly in the 1980s, the debate on emancipation was part of the dispute between Habermas’ analytic of truth and Foucault’s ontology of the present. Habermas considered the perspective of an immanent and situated emancipation to be insufficient, solipsistic and too relativist. Social domination cannot be merely described, and social liberation must be justified. Linguistic communication is the key to explaining both domination and emancipation: communicative action is an emancipatory force, while domination is related to distorted communication. Foucault, by contrast, considered every form of formal agreement or discourse on truth values to be an inevitable source of domination. Reason and knowledge are always intertwined with power, and ideal non-authoritarian agreements cannot exist (Foucault, 1983).

Indeed, in Foucault’s interpretation there is no definitive emancipation: the very thing that generates the possibility of emancipation makes achievement of a stable and universal normative foundation contradictory. The construction of the governmentality, as a form of subjugating self-management in a liberal environment, is the consequence of this contradiction. Hence, individual and collective liberation cannot but be self-founded. Critical thought is above all individual thought, even though there is no sort of original freedom to regain (Foucault, 2001). Following Adorno’s negative dialectics, Foucault rejects any discourse of authenticity and internal truth, but he leaves room for a possible contingent emancipation: the struggle for freedom is a practice in permanent tension with the outside world (Foucault, 1983). The Kantian exit from ‘self-incurred immaturity’ cannot be based either on a moral dialogue or on a self-founded subject. Foucault’s idea of emancipation is related more to a present of spontaneity than to a future of stable rights. Emancipation is first of all an exit strategy with no specific goal. Because there is no future collective redemption, emancipation can be conceptualized only within the horizon of contingency, not as a historical process.

Contrary to Habermas who insists on the topic of inter-subjectivity, Foucault does not seem specifically interested in the relationship with the ‘other’; this is the main critique that feminist studies have addressed to him (Butler, 1997). Emancipation is not approached by Foucault as a collective process, but rather as a practice whose sense and purpose is purely individual and context related. Any form of resistant critique must remain individual, because any attempt to construct collective action will only end up creating of other forms of government and domination (Foucault, 1997). Hence, emancipation is not an intelligible goal, but rather a contingent need outside the subject’s control.

The contingency of emancipation supported by Foucault or the necessity of a normative ground defended by Habermas are still alternative sides of the theoretical debate. However, in contemporary sociological discussion, there are scholars seeking to go beyond this ‘neo-nietzschean’ or ‘neo-kantian’ dichotomy. Among them, particular mention should be made of Luc Boltanski and Axel Honneth. Even though the former is more focused on contingency and the latter on normativity, their theoretical analyses of emancipation try to explore new directions; these are mainly analytical frameworks within which more specific and empirical investigations on emancipation can be developed.

Luc Boltanski (2009) has explicitly insisted on the need to renew the topic of emancipation with the concept of critique. Following a path based on the necessity to go beyond the idea of domination conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu (2000), Boltanski has focused on the idea of critical capacity (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991). Critical capacity is at the basis of the emancipation process, and it is rooted in situated practices and contingent opportunities. According to Boltanski, emancipation must be studied starting from its procedures, ordinary life, and different situations of dispute. On the one hand, situated and contingent events of critique highlight that change is possible through the justifications that correspond to particular spheres of collectively shared meaning. On the other hand, these critiques highlight the pluralistic nature of emancipation in different situations. Consequently, emancipation does not have a universal, unitary or metaphysical content; rather, it must be justified on the basis of some form of legitimation.

From this point of view, emancipation seems to consist merely of individual and contingent ‘small’ struggles. However, it is from these situated opportunities for struggle that individuals can liberate themselves from specific constraints and dependencies and contribute to transforming institutions. From the standpoint of greater freedom of choice – mainly in consumption and private habits – most individuals are today able to focus on the incomplete side of emancipation, that of social equality. After the success of the criticism typical of 1968, which was focused on the search for personal authenticity but is now too compromised with present neo-liberalism, it is necessary to resume an idea of emancipation that is again related to social justice (Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999).

Starting from a very different theoretical background, Axel Honneth has also explicitly renewed the concept of emancipation. His theory of recognition is related to an ethical idea of emancipation as a project of ‘Sittlichkeit’, where the general goal is more normative than practical: that of a good and ethical society (Honneth, 1995). Despite its highly formal structure, Honneth’s theory of recognition is intended to be an attempt to rejuvenate critical theory and the project of social emancipation in a situation of ‘organized self-realization’ (Honneth, 2000, 2004). Even though Honneth is not an empirical researcher, he starts analytically from a phenomenology of domination, from the moral claims of oppressed people, and from a definition of justice related to the experience of injustice in a post-industrial and pluralist society. Hence, his idea of emancipation is grounded in his conceptions of inter-subjectivity and individual autonomy: a decentred autonomy that can only be achieved through social recognition of human dignity and value (Honneth, 1991). Contrary to Habermas, who moved from hermeneutics and pragmatics, Honneth’s idea of emancipation from reification and domination is firmly based on subjective experience and inter-subjectivity as anthropological ground. In his theoretical approach, emancipation is possible because subjects are able to conduct social critiques against pathological institutions and to detect social injustice.

Scattered emancipations and structural ambivalences

For various reasons based on historical analysis as well as theoretical discussion, emancipation today is no longer considered a unidirectional process in which humanity as a whole is involved. To frame emancipation as a plural and differentiated process, it is necessary also to consider the main structural changes amid which the potential emancipated subjects live. Historical processes such as individualization, capitalism or liberal democracy constitute different grounds upon which to analyse the ambivalences internal to the idea of emancipation, particularly that between the aspirations to autonomy and the potential negative consequences of the applications of such autonomy.

Scholars working on the historical transformations of democracy and capitalism are not necessarily interested in emancipation as such, but some of their works have highlighted the ambivalences in emancipative processes (Rosanvallon, 2006). For instance, individualization has been a focal point of analysis of modernity and a pivotal element in the emancipation project. Individualization is related to freedom of choice, to responsibility and ‘maturity’, and to singularity and uniqueness, but also to loneliness in the face of risks and accidents. If the classical social sciences were more concerned with the issue of compatibility between individualization and social order, today individualization is more frequently analyzed as a process in which individuals are left alone to face responsibilities, injustices and decisions concerning their personal lives (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001). Individuals are defined by the trials to which they are subject. ‘Personal problems’ (unemployment, divorce or illness, for example) must find personal solutions, and rarely are they faced as difficulties shared with other people in the same situation. Because emancipation is often a taken-for-granted acquisition, and because individuals are supposed to be more autonomous and ‘mature’ than in the past, they must deal with their everyday problems in a personal way without the control – but also without the support – of a community, of a solid welfare state or of standardized normative solutions.

In the so-called affluent and developed societies, individuals are supposed to be emancipated, but this does not mean that they are all able to make their decisions in fair situations with equality of means, resources, opportunities, access to information and support, and parity of participation. Growing injunctions towards emancipation must often be faced in situations of evident inequality. In this regard, the role of the political economy and the transformations of capitalism are still crucial in understanding the ambiguities and ambivalences of emancipation. It is not only in the Marxian tradition that emancipation has been rooted in political economy. Since the work of Max Weber, economic thought has had great influence on the entire theoretical construction of the relationship between individuals in search of freedom and societies in permanent need of order and organization. The economic paradigm that accompanied the spread of the Enlightenment has introduced not only an instrumental and utilitarian interpretation of reason but also a vision of the world in which the horizon of transcendence – which means also the transcendence of definitive emancipation – progressively disappears (Taylor, 1989). Thus, the process of the individual’s emancipation from a holistic idea of the social has been closely related to the autonomization of the economic paradigm and to a new form of relationship among subjects, and between subjects and material objects (Dumont, 1983). The reflexive awareness that society holds together by itself has been accompanied by the advent of individualization, the sociological critical investigation of the social and the triumph of economics as a new social logic.

Scholars interested in the material and symbolic colonization of culture by the economic paradigm note that the success of the economic frame has been due not only to its simplicity but also to its promise of emancipation as the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’. This promise has intertwined the modern idea of self-determination with the construction of new utopian horizons of material ‘well-being’: in democratic societies, capitalism rules through the search for a consensus around what happiness and freedom are (Lordon, 2010). Particularly, in the economic version of Enlightenment rationality, individuals have become explicitly responsible for their own situation of subordination as well as for their search after happiness and emancipation. As Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) point out, capitalism itself has contributed to enhancing the dream of emancipation. The logic of capitalism, especially in its ‘neo-liberal’ form, has absorbed and domesticated those forms of critique based on subjective creativity and the search for uniqueness typical of the 1968 upheavals and ‘new social movements’ of the 1970s, as well as of some forms of performative and aesthetic protest typical of recent mobilizations. As a matter of fact, the rules of capitalism are loose enough to play with the needs of self-determination, weakening the criticism related to the denunciation of social inequalities. The search for authenticity and the Enlightenment idea of personal autonomy and self-rule have been perfectly compatible with post-industrial capitalism, and they have been easily included in new forms of commodification and the construction of brands.

These analyses remind us that, in the liberal predicament, democracy and capitalism have long sought reconciliation with each other. However, the internal contradictions of this search for a positive coexistence have been characterized by at least one other important ambivalence: that the primacy of the rights of the individual entails an institutional frame and a strong idea of the State that both liberal thought and the historical search for individual autonomy have always considered dangerous (Gauchet, 2005). The very idea of democracy is founded on reference to the supreme value of the single individual, whose value is founded in turn on the power of the collectivity: the autonomy of the ‘reasonable’ single subject is possible only within the State and the law. This means that it is inherently contradictory to base the idea of emancipation on resistance against the State, as can be seen in the liberal tradition as well as among its radical genealogical critics such as Foucault.

The struggles for personal freedom inaugurated by the social movements of 1968 and developing through the following decade have been critical of the State and its endeavour to control individuals through institutions such as the school, the health system and social welfare policies. The analytical focus on the search for authenticity as the primary form of emancipation from the control of apparatuses and institutions has represented a considerable shift away from the idea of emancipation developed by the struggles for equality, rights of citizenship and social justice. Thus, the radical claim for liberation and the ceaseless search for hidden domination have also, paradoxically, enhanced understandings of individualization processes as expressions of a more accomplished self-determination in lifestyles, and in professional and private life.

Only recently, since the end of the 1990s, have references to emancipation been again related more explicitly to structural inequalities, although the present debate has not really or systematically been linked with the Marxian legacy. This discussion has focused mainly on the idea of ‘neo-liberalism’ as a rhetorical device by which to depict a not only economic but also cultural shift (Fraser, 2003; Sennett, 2008; Touraine, 2001). A reconfiguration of the interpretation of emancipation as a way to overcome social injustices has also been evident amid the new wave of social movements. From the mobilizations for a ‘global justice’ of the last decade, to the recent ‘Occupy’ movements, the goal of emancipation has begun to be expressed as liberation from the tyranny of anonymous financial markets with their control over national welfare states and local political decisions. Mobilizations such as those of the ‘Arab Spring’ have also highlighted the relationship between a lack of democracy and the justification of social inequality. The global intertwining of these mobilizations has shown that, even though there is no longer an aspiration to total emancipation but rather a focus on critical capacity ‘from below’, the critical focus on neo-liberalism is a common abstract reference useful for renewing the idea of emancipation as the expression of needs for equality, personal freedom, redistribution and recognition.

Among contemporary scholars, Nancy Fraser has insisted particularly that, in the present situation, structural inequalities concern long-standing economic and welfare state trends, and they must be addressed as structural problems (Fraser, 1997, 2012). According to Fraser, theoretical paradigms of emancipation, based on the immanence of practices and a search for self-government like the one inspired by Foucault, may have been adequate in the time of Fordism and Keynesian welfare, but they are no longer sufficient to cope with the inequality problems typical of post-Fordist and post-socialist conditions. Indeed, Foucault has inspired a radical critique of neo-liberalism as biopolitics and restructuring of technologies of government in terms of self-regulation: his view of biopolitics as the new avatar of political economy is closely connected to liberal claims of freedom and self-regulation (Esposito, 2008). However, this criticism has not been connected to reflection on the politics of redistribution as a necessary element of emancipation because of Foucault’s representation of domination and his distrust towards the State and its institutions (Foucault, 2008).

Overall, the contemporary debate on emancipation seems interested in renewing the topics of social justice and self-determination by looking beyond orthodox Marxism (with its inability to take account of the cultural turn brought about by feminism, multiculturalism, postcolonial studies and environmentalism), beyond Foucault’s neo-nietzschean contingency of critique (with its radical ‘phobia’ towards normativity and institutions) and beyond Habermas’ neo-kantian and liberal trust in the conciliation of capitalism and plural democracy. From this point of view, a ‘good’ or ‘ethical’ society is one in which individuals are emancipated because they have reached peaceful agreement on their reciprocal rights and duties, because they have recognized, protected and accepted reciprocal differences and because they have guaranteed equality of treatment and access to symbolic and material resources (Benhabib, 2002). However, an idyllic situation of this kind can only be accomplished on the basis of common values and common references to validity claims concerning the idea itself of emancipation.

Combining emancipations

Today, emancipation tends to be conceptualized as relative, and possible only in a dialogical relation among different claims of emancipations, both symbolic and material. In an environment of plural and contradictory emancipative processes, there are no longer pre-emancipated individuals able to show the way to freedom, and there are no longer individuals that can speak from a position free from accusations of ideology. This realization is the result of different pathways.

Feminist and postcolonial studies have given concreteness to the postmodern and poststructuralist topic of difference, and the cultural turn in both the historical and the social sciences has underscored the original dominant position of those who elaborated the modern and European conceptualization of emancipation as a self-referential model. Here the pluralistic idea of possible emancipations is primarily the result of the claims for recognition arising from the ‘marginality’ and the ‘subalternity’ of those who had not been recognized as protagonists in the processes of emancipation: women, coloured people, colonized civilizations. Enlightenment and its ideals have not been considered as a sort of false consciousness – and Marxism itself has often been considered as Eurocentric – but as a cultural product that must necessarily be deconstructed and unpacked in order to recognize local translations and interpretations.

Emancipation from false consciousness and mystification has been a fundamental goal of many social movements in Western and non-Western countries, and an important element of the ethical mission of at least a part of the social sciences. In the Marxian template, the struggle against false consciousness could be conducted from a position where ideology was not overwhelming and where it was possible to tell the truth. However, from a theoretical point of view, since the linguistic turn, the hermeneutic approach, deconstructionism, the pragmatic turn and the theoretical focus on contingency, there is no longer a place from which it is possible to state such a definitive truth (Habermas, 2003). There is consequently no definitively emancipated point of view, but rather the possibility to obtain new insights and resources for critique from the meeting with differences (Rorty, 1989). Of course, this analytical position has provided an important theoretical background to the claims of social movements, feminism and postcolonialism for a more pluralist conceptualization of emancipation, and it has also made it possible to frame and interpret more local and specific emancipative struggles.

We live today in an age of pluralistic emancipations no longer related to a unified idea of social order or to a self-referential and univocal cultural standard (Laclau, 1996). The topic of emancipation is no longer a holistic reference under which struggles are condensed into an eschatological ‘perfect state of liberation’; there are no more ‘total questions’ and ‘total answers’, central conflicts and unified horizons of liberation. The falseness from which we must be emancipated cannot be denounced by someone speaking in a Wittgensteinian ‘private language’. There are no more hegemonic models able to guide us towards the light of self-determination. The feeling of hope and the horizon of utopia that characterized the modern discourse and imaginary of emancipation have given way to disillusion, and the search for a theoretical way out is also far from finding a common ground (Butler et al., 2000).

The long crisis of the grand modern narrative of emancipation is closely related to present-day cultural pluralism, as well as to historical transformations such as those of individualization, globalization and transnationalism, and the planetary diffusion of neo-liberal capitalism. In the absence of a central conflict and of a historical emancipatory collective actor (the working-class, colonized people, women, ethnic minorities and so on), single subjects seek their own way to emancipation starting from their specific, personal and contingent experiences, and different struggles for emancipation can be present in a single subject. However, single individuals can no longer be defined as ontological carriers of emancipation in the Kantian sense, and they have no reason to consider themselves as belonging to a collective body, nor can they be considered historical actors fighting for the same and impersonal goal of a definitive social justice. The search for emancipation becomes more instable and contingent, with no anchorage in a specific social position. This of course does not mean that there are no more collective struggles for emancipation. On the contrary, in at least the past two decades, upheavals related to international social mobilizations for a just society have probably been the main field in which the attempts to conciliate pluralism and the contingency of emancipative claims with the issue of social equality have taken shape (Rebughini, 2010).

To conclude, we may state that emancipation has never been a monolithic concept, even when presented through a monolithic rhetoric of freedom (either in its Kantian or Nietzschean sense), or a monolithic and universal aspiration to equality (Balibar, 2010). Ideas of emancipation have also been elaborated outside European modernity, while within the Western tradition emancipation has had a plurality of meanings, albeit usually caught in the contradiction between its contingent and situated side and its utopian or normative one. Emancipation remains an unresolved theoretical issue for social science: emancipation of whom, from what and from whom are not unified within some rhetoric of a common struggle to achieve a definitive and systemic result. Nonetheless, social sciences cannot forgo reference to emancipation. This concept remains essential for discussion on inequality and discrimination, subalternity and hegemony, domination and liberation. The discussion must shift from a dualistic framework, in which emancipation is conceptualized either as a whole (exclusively elaborated by European modernity) or as scattered and particularistic claims, to a more dialogic and pluralistic framework able to take account of the never-ending daily endeavour undertaken by different subjects engaged in different situations and fields. A possible theoretical approach to emancipation should combine reference to the contingency and specificity of its processes with ethical reference to its evaluation as ‘good’ and necessary.