Toward an Integrated Account of Freedom. Lessons from Arendt, Foucault and Beauvoir

What is freedom? This classic question has been highly innovatively answered in the twentieth century. This research project focuses on the three  answers provided by Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) and Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Each has formulated an influential account of freedom. Although these writers are usually considered to belong to different philosophical movement, recent scholarship points out the strong similarities between their thought. Hence, it is all the more surprising that no literature exists that combines all three approaches of freedom. It is this gap in the secondary literature that this research project purports to fill. Moreover, this project gains in relevance in light of Foucault’s suggestion that the late-modern state succeeds in normalizing the behavior of its subject in an ever more drastic way. An approach that combines the strongest aspects of all three authors’ account thus plays a strategic role in thinking about how to arrest normalization processes. In this research project I investigate the authors’ accounts of freedom by studying three subthemes: corporeality, the relation to others, and rights. This selection allows cross-comparison, while also addressing three dimensions of existence that are considered to be profoundly altered in late-modernity. I study these themes by employing a textual interpretation that allows me to single out those aspect of each authors’ account that are still relevant today.