Peter Hallward, 'A law unto ourselves: autonomy as mass sovereignty'

As its usage in compounds like automation and autocracy also suggests, the ‘auto’ or ‘self’ of autonomy is ambiguous, and helps to mark the concept off from related notions of freedom, independence, and so on. What kind of actor can freely lay down a law for itself, a law in the strict, universal and commanding sense of the term? Who is the self of such selflegislation? Or in terse classical terms, whose will is law? Without wanting to delve too deeply into the canonical history of European philosophy here, I think Kant’s famous and uncompromising answer to this question helpfully foregrounds its conscious and voluntarist dimensions, but it unhelpfully abstracts the moral actor from all constitutive social relations, investing it in pure practical reason as such. Hegel’s proto-communitarian rejoinder to Kant certainly recovers the relational and plural quality of a political actor, but also diminishes its capacity to act, and to legislate, by dispersing it across the general spirit that both animates a legitimate state and ‘disposes’ its members in a law-abiding hierarchy. Rousseau’s emphasis on popular sovereignty and participatory law-making, by contrast, helps clarify what’s at stake in the ongoing struggle for autonomy, a struggle understood as an essentially collective effort that pits a mass community of equals against any kind of domineering elite. Marx, Gramsci, Fanon and many others subsequently took further steps in this direction, but so long as this struggle continues, genuine autonomy remains an end for which we have yet to devise adequate means.