Creating Ideal Liberal Subjects: Law, Contract, and Superego

by Patrick Anderson

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 “Civilization” describes the whole sum of achievements and the regulations … 

which serve two purposes— namely to protect men against nature and 

to adjust their mutual relations.

          

—Sigmund Freud [1]

 

The inability to cultivate a sense of community is often viewed as one of the most problematic aspects of liberalism.  In feudal times, nearly all people were born, lived, and died in the same place, so they identified themselves with the community of their fiefdom.  Their values and interpersonal relations were determined by their setting.  In contrast, people living after the Reformation and the agricultural revolution of the early modern period, up to and including people living today, are increasingly mobile [2].  Liberal political theorists responded to the new conditions by conceptualizing social systems designed to manage itinerant individuals.  Communitarian opponents of liberalism that orient their critique around its normative consequences argue that liberalism has no mechanism to promote community development, and that liberal subjects risk sliding into solipsistic nihilism.  Those who argue that without some form of intentional civic education a community cannot sustain itself seem to make an important point against liberalism.  

 

For their part, liberals embrace the lack of civic cultivation because many equate such policies with an imposition of the good, but liberal theorist Mark E. Button goes against the grain, arguing that all versions of social contract theory intend to shape people into good liberal citizens.  In Contract, Culture, and Citizenship, Button says that Sandel and other communitarians overlook the crucial role that education plays in contract theory, and identifies “a significant transformative ethos within the heart of modern liberalism.” [3]  Button’s stance reinforces the positions of both Hobbes and Rawls that the contract is forward-looking, not merely backward-looking.  Having intentions for the future, liberalism requires its subjects to have civic character and ethical public sensibility; however, these virtues are not natural, people must learn to live as good liberal subjects.  “The question is not,” for Button, “whether but how a liberal society should best understand and undertake its transformative influences on the character and self-understanding of its citizens and the culture that sustains them.” [4]

 

Button’s survey of social contract theories from Hobbes to Rawls concludes that education is the primary means to shaping citizens.  The conflict between not imposing the good and promoting civic values, or what Button calls the “paradox of civic virtue,” is only a tension, not a contradiction. [5]  A minimum of positive characteristics such as toleration, mutual respect, reciprocity, civility, and fidelity are necessary to sustain the liberal ends of autonomy and freedom. [6]  For Hobbes, ‘diffidence’ or distrust is the primary impediment to solidarity, thus fidelity is an important virtue because “Contracts, promises, and agreements are devices of mutual coordination that address this condition of moral and political uncertainty.” [7]  Ultimately, Button’s central thesis, that “contract makes citizens, never simply the other way around,” is an important insight that liberals often neglect. [8]

 

Button is correct to identify education as an important aspect of liberalism, but his account falls short, both by misunderstanding education itself and by ignoring other formative structures.   In a critical look at American public education, Michael W. McConnell complains that “Every affirmation of principle is simply an attempt to ‘impose values’ on someone else.” [9] McConnell argues that this claim is pervasive in educational settings, a fact that seems to undermine Button’s views on education.  Button may respond by saying that education, in his sense, resembles socialization rather than formal learning in an institution.  While he would agree with Rawls' position that we should not impose “comprehensive doctrines” - religions, ideologies, etc. - on citizens, he insists that toleration, mutual respect, and reciprocity qualify as foundational values that make other values possible, and that it is imperative to distinguish between these and enforced, monolithic worldviews. 

 

By focusing all his energy on education, Button overlooks key social configurations that guide the individual not to others, but away from them, namely, the law and the economy.  Button mentions these in passing but does not seriously consider their influence on the formation of the liberal subject.  The legal system, taking individual isolation as its starting point, forms in the space between individuals from their interactions.  Law is intended to direct people to their ends without impeding the paths of others.  Anytime two individuals do intermingle, the interaction is supervised by the state—the institutional manifestation of the law—and contracts are enforced to secure promises and promote certainty.  This form of social control only becomes educational when subjects internalize external authority and govern themselves according to its maxims in the absence of the external power.  Thus, education in the liberal sense is the utilization of the law in the creation of a liberal superego, which is designed to manage the actions of, and interactions between, solitary beings, in order to make governing more efficient.  

 

Law

 

The separation of church and state brought about by the Reformation did not negate the need for civil authority; rather it created new ways of conceptualizing such power.  Martin Luther, and John Calvin after him, theologically justified state power; in fact, Luther went to far as to say, “Men ought to obey rulers as His officers and be subject to them with all the fear and reverence, as to God himself.” [10]  No person had authority to defy the sovereign.  While Calvin agreed with Luther, he felt that the state should be systematized to ensure order, and for this he relied on the law.  “A well-regulated polity,” says Calvin, “which excludes all confusion, incivility, obstinacy, clamours, and dissentions” is governed by law. [11]  The law must promote rational, calculated actions on the parts of individuals.  Calvin surpassed Luther and set legal thinking on a new trajectory that shaped the post-Reformation period.  Understanding this aspect of law’s origin, its relation to the state, and how it functions now and for the future help bring to light the ways in which law shapes liberal subjectivity.  

 

In the history of legal theory, law is taken to represent the entire matrix of interpersonal relations, manifesting as an organized system derived from simple interactions.  Kant describes the law as “derived entirely from the concept of freedom in the mutual external relationships of human beings.” [12]  Law emerges from the interactive space between individuals.  It is not something that is manufactured independent of and imposed upon relations; interpersonal contact is the precondition from which the law can manifest.  The social contract is created to mitigate potential conflict between two or more wills, which may dispute property or ideas.  While these tensions are always public in the sense that they have to do with external, physical beings, the law “ultimately derives from the clash of private interests,” the interests that the social contract is intended to manage. [13]  The guiding principles that emerge are at first only customs, or lex non scripta [unwritten law]; only after systematizing conventions does the law take its shape as “something permanent, uniform, and universal.” [14]

 

The form of our interactions produces law, but it secures only rights and not ends.  For Kant, private wills desire public things, property, for example, but the law “does not concern the relationship between the will of one person and the desires of another … it concerns only the relationship between the will of the first and the will of the second.” [15]  Equal regulations imposed on all parties harmonize the freedom of all by mutually limiting the freedom of all.  The law then becomes a system that separates people, directs their interactions, and maintains order.  Individual rights are secured, but in order for the law to be impartial and objective, it must protect all individuals and create a framework in which all can pursue ends without impinging on the projects of others.  Law maintains order by becoming an anonymous system that regulates the wills of others.  As China Miéville explains, “Where there is even the potentiality of disputation … a specific form of social regulation is necessary.  It must formalize the method of settlement of any such dispute without diminishing either party’s sovereignty or equality.  That form is law.” [16]  What would be direct contact between two human beings is instead mediated through an ‘objective’ system designed to resolve differences by the predictable, universal application of pre-established rules.  

 

The enforcement if an abstract legal system requires the creation of an impersonal sovereign, the point at which the legal matrix is quilted together. [17]  William Blackstone says that the law is “the supreme arbiter of every man’s life, liberty, and property.” It must stand independent of the legislature and executive: “were [the law] joined with the legislative, the life, liberty, and property, of the subject would be in the hands of arbitrary judges, whose decisions would be then regulated only by their own opinions, and not by any fundamental principles of law.” [18]  But law must be enforced, so Hobbes cleverly depersonalizes the sovereign; it is the office of the sovereign—not the person occupying it—that administers the law and demands respect. [19]  It is from this office that the law emanates, as the sovereign has “the whole power of prescribing the rules whereby every man may know what goods he may enjoy, and what actions he may do, without being molested [annoyed] by any of his fellow subjects.” [20]  It is the anonymity of office that guarantees order, for “mass habitual obedience to certain persons” causes instability. [21]  The sovereign permeates society through law, formalizing inter-individual contact by colonizing the space between.  

 

For law to fulfill it purpose in reducing and reconciling disagreements and dispute, it must have a performative function that shapes the lives if its subjects.  Both Hobbes and Locke desire the law to guide individuals rather than restrain them.  “For the use of laws,” according to Hobbes, “is not to bind the people from all voluntary actions, but to direct and keep them in such motion as not to hurt themselves by their own impetuous desires, rashness, or indiscretion, as hedges are set not to stop travelers, but to keep them in the way.” [22]  The analogy here is astute and revealing: just as pedestrians are kept on the path and off the grass by hedge, people are kept on their paths and out of the way of others by the law.  Locke articulates the same position in similar language, saying, “for law, in its true notion, is not so much the limitation, as the direction of a free and intelligent agent to his proper interest [and] ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices.” [23]

 

Despite the fact that liberal philosophers conceive of the law as a restraint on the potentially arbitrary paths of people, they argue that it is necessary for the preservation of negative individual liberty.  Negative liberty, the state of being free from external constraints, constitutes an important piece of liberal social contract theory, and restrictions on this type of freedom are antithetic to individual autonomy. Locke, for example, argues first that the law does not confine people, and then goes further, insisting that it must “preserve and enlarge freedom.”  Because the freedom of each person is threatened by the arbitrary and uncertain wills of others, the law makes it possible “to be free from restraint and violence from others.”  In its performative functioning, law is the only institution that can guarantee the negative liberty of all; therefore, “where there is no law, there is no freedom.” [24]

 

Legal efficacy applies to people in the present but its main objective is to secure rights and freedom on a long-tem basis, extending its performativity into the future to promote stability.  The scientific and rationalistic similarities between Hobbes and Rawls come to life when they connect law to certainty.  For Hobbes, law is about the good to come, namely, future order and long-term stability. [25]  As Berns explains, “just as controversies are put to rest in mathematics, so evidently [Hobbes] hoped that the political controversies that had always disturbed the peace of the political world could be put to rest.” [26]  Similar to Hobbes, Rawls advocates “justice as regularity,” and defines the legal system as “a coercive order of public rules” designed to regulate individual conduct by “providing the framework for social cooperation” and “a basis for legitimate expectations.” [27]  For these thinkers, individuals need law to guide others out of their paths, and base the expectations they have of others on this function of law.  They both agree that people “lack full confidence in one another,” that they distrust others, not only now, but always. [28]  Both present and future social certainty rests on the legal regulation of wills. 

 

Contracts

 

Law is designed to shape the wills of citizens both in the present and into the future, which requires a guarantee on future action.  As Friedrich Nietzsche states, “To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man?” [29]  Nietzsche points out the problem of trust: we can never be certain someone will follow through on a promise. Liberal legal theorists rely on contracts to resolve the “paradoxical task of nature” that Nietzsche describes.  Just as law is designed to channel individual trajectories away from those of others, contracts represent the meeting point of isolated people and expectations for the future.   The enforcement of contracts gives the State a window into the interactions of its citizens.  In a problematic way, contracts are often equated with promises, confusing the nature of interpersonal interactions.  Beginning with Hobbes, liberal contract theorists address this problem because the entire social order is grounded in a contract.  

 

In Leviathan, Hobbes defines “contract” as a “mutual transferring of right,” while “promise” is said to be a contract made by “words of the future.” [30]  Yet in De Cive, he states, “contract is a promise, law a command.” [31]  His semantic confusion does not clarify whether a contract or a promise is the class to which the other belongs.  Regardless of the relationship, Hobbes is clear that promises and contracts are only kept when “there is a power set up to constrain those that would otherwise violate their faith.” [32]  The power of God may be greater than that of the State, but people more readily fear the State; therefore, Hobbes concludes that a government should be established to enforce contracts and promises.  We must remember Hobbes’ theory of diffidence: that the law of nature commands self-preservation, and reason can lead a person to keep or break a promise depending on what will bring the greatest benefit.   After all, when people make promises, “it is not the vow, but the law that binds them.” [33]

 

Regardless what form the relation between contract and promise takes, and apart from the problems of the foundations thereof, the importance of promises and the purpose for enforcing them is long-term stability and predictability.  According to Charles Fried, in making “a promise one is taking responsibility not only for one’s present self but for one’s future self.” [34]  For Hobbes, to promise something and not perform is to simultaneously will and not will an action—an obvious contradiction, and, since inconsistency is averse to peace, people must be made to follow through on their fiduciary duties. [35]  The irony here becomes apparent when we dilate our analysis from economic and other relatively insignificant contracts and look at the social contract as a whole.  If it is an ethical obligation to honor promises, and one promises to follow the rules established by the contract, then breaking the law or causing social unrest is immoral.  Peace, stability, justice, order, and morality diametrically oppose conflict, volatility, injustice, disorder, and evil.  But if it is not a moral duty to honor promises, then society requires an omnipotent, omnipresent institution to regulate the activities of its subjects, guide them out of one another’s way, and supervise their interactions in order to ensure stability, in other words, the State.  If, as I argue in “The Nature of the Social Contract: Isolation, Order, and a Peculiar Toleration,” the establishment of a neutral third-party arbiter marks the existence of civil society, then in this view society is founded on the distrust that others will not keep their word, and nothing more. [36]  This is why Hume avoids the whole problem by arguing that we must practice “both allegiance and fidelity” for the same reason: “because society could not otherwise subsist.” [37]

 

Superego

 

We began this part of the investigation with a discussion of education and have examined the ways in which societal structures like the law and enforced contracts are intended to give shape to the outward actions of citizens.  Now it is necessary to switch from a telescopic analysis of law to a microscopic analysis of the unresolved tension between virtue, morality, and proper liberal subjectivity.  Liberalism has primarily been taken as an exterior system; however, it is crucial to discuss the way in which it penetrates the lives, the very selfhood, of people.  Sigmund Freud explains that when exterior authority is internalized, the superego forms as a reflexive system of social domination.  Liberalism promotes superego development by colonizing individual subjectivity and inculcating people with its values.

 

Freud argued that the existence of society depends on repressing instincts, such as aggression, and that people use this energy to govern themselves according to social norms and regulations through the creation of the superego.  In Civilization and its Discontents, he describes the process by which this happens in a vivid passage that is worth quoting at length:

 

His aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from—that is, it is directed towards his own ego.  There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets its over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of “conscience,” is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. … Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city. [38]

 

This process is a violent process that captures the individual and changes the very way he or she interacts with the other and him or herself.  The superego exercises control at a greater efficiency than any external authority because it is pitting the person’s energies against itself.  The close proximity of oversight gives the superego access to intent, and “bad intentions are equated with bad actions,” going beyond the prevention of unsocial actions by preventing unsocial thoughts. [39]  Finally, Freud explains that those individuals who conform closest to social norms are the most fearful of inadequacy, saying, “it is precisely those people who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness.” [40]  Though it is questionable whether or not a ruler can successfully repress the passions of the citizens, the superego performs this task with greater efficacy and certainty.  

 

Liberal contract theorists expect subjects to internalize authority to the same extent they want subjects to obey the State.  Hobbes argues that people must be taught to respect the sovereign and “to avoid doing of injury,” and they must “do all this sincerely from the heart.”  The citizen should not obey only because they are being coerced, the citizen should want to obey because they see it as good.  Such obedience requires that intentions as well as actions should conform because “Not only the unjust facts [acts], but the designs and intentions to do them … are unjust, which consisteth in the pravity of the will as well as in the irregularity of the act.” [41]  The Hobbesian “superego” reflects Freud’s account in the prevention of unjust acts via the prevention of unjust thoughts.  

 

Locke follows Hobbes in demanding this internalization, even though he puts it in somewhat different words.  Repression is more apparent in Locke’s writings because he emphasizes the denial of desire.  For Locke, “the great principle and foundation of all virtue, and worth is placed in this, That a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best, though the appetite lean the other way.” [42]  Moral rectitude means resisting those things that could jeopardize social stability and order under the guidance of reason.  But Locke knows that people do not naturally do this, so he recommends educating children to act in accordance with social expectations so they may freely control themselves when they become adults.  Rawls actually argues that future generations will come to accept the social contract as being in their best interest, and that would be the case because people will be socialized or taught to appreciate it as such. [43]  As David C. Durst comments on Locke’s theory, “For what seems to be the innermost authority of man is on closer inspection but the moral authority of others within.” [44]

 

Of all the social contract theorists, Kant seems to be the paradigmatic case of liberal superego authority.  Nietzsche warns us that “Not even in good old Kant” is there real freedom because “the categorical imperative smells of cruelty.” [45]  Kant recognizes the need to educate people because “reason does not itself work instinctively, for it requires trial, practice and instruction to enable it to progress gradually from one stage of insight to the next.” [46]  Because we access morality through reason, this development is imperative.  Like all other liberals, Kant knows that people will things, but their motives must be “none other than the absolute law itself.” [47]  He seems to equate the moral law with the juridical order, prompting the question about law’s foundations once again.  Regardless, Kant requires people to follow both moral law and legal law, so the superego must direct the subject to obey each. [48]

 

Despite the history of the superego in liberalism, Rawls believes that contemporary citizens can relax their superegos because they are no longer as necessary; however, it is not that the need for the superego has disappeared—it has merely changed its form.  “One of the virtues of a well-ordered society,” says Rawls, “is that, since arbitrary authority had disappeared, its members suffer much less from the burdens of oppressive conscience.” [49]  He seems to argue that since the principles of justice as fairness are chosen in the freest way possible, and they provide the greatest stability to society, that people will not have to internalize “arbitrary authority.” [50]

 

There are two possible readings of this, both of which are inspired by Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian psychoanalytic approach.  First, one could argue that the superego does not disappear, people just identify with it so closely that they forget it is the superego—a process akin to Zizek’s observation that ideology has not disappeared, it's just that we believe more than ever. [51]  In the second, more compelling reading, the superego injunction to obey—or in its Kantian form, “Think freely, but obey!”—has extended itself beyond obedience to enjoyment. [52]  In our contemporary consumer culture, pleasure and gratification are the only things for which we strive.  To be sure, the superego foundation remains: we must discipline ourselves because discipline is the precondition for true enjoyment.  We must jog, before we have cake; we must work hard and save, before we can have a new car.  But now we may reformulate the command: “Enjoy, but obey!”  Ultimately, these two readings are not mutually exclusive.  We can believe more than ever that we must have discipline in order to enjoy, and that we must enjoy. [53]  In this light, the Rawlsian superego appears as an innocuous acquaintance that leaves us undisturbed by moral conundrums, so long as we obey.  

 

Through this analysis of law, contracts, and superego, we can see the truth of Button’s statement that “contract makes citizens,” but we can also recognize the shortcomings of his approach.  We can agree with Button that “it is not whether, but how,” liberalism employs its “transformative ethos” to create its own subjects, but a focus on education ignores the subtle forms of coercion and violence that impose on the individual.  Nietzsche was correct when he stated, “man was actually made calculable,” and now we see part of how this calculability is cultivated. [54]  The law emerges from the entire matrix of interpersonal relations and, once abstracted, it is knitted to the sovereign as a mysterious, impersonal system of order.  Individual trajectories are guided by regulations while interactions are managed by enforcing contracts.  Eventually, people internalize these forms of authority becoming good, ‘tolerant’ liberal subjects who move about while avoiding conflict.  

 

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1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), 63.

2. Cf., Patrick Anderson, “Unleashing Modernity,” presented at the Eastern Michigan University Undergraduate Philosophy Conference, Ypsilanti, MI, March 17, 2012.

3. Mark E. Button, Contract, Culture, and Citizenship: Transformative Liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 5.

4. Ibid., 22, emphasis mine.

5. Ibid., 16-17.

6. Sandel repeatedly argues that these features occupy the place of “the good” in liberal theory.  Cf., “Political Liberalism,” in Justice: A Reader, ed. Michael J. Sandel  (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Democracy’s Discontent (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996).

7. Button, Contract, Culture, and Citizenship, Op. Cit., 15.

8. Ibid., 3.

9. Michael W. McConnell, “Don’t Neglect the Little Platoons,” in For Love of Counrty?  Martha C.  Nussbaum, ed.  Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 78.

10. Duncan B. Forrester, “Martin Luther and John Calvin,” in History of Political Philosophy, Third Edition, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 335, 338.

11. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 171.

12. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 73.

13. China Miéville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 86.  .

14. Quoted in Herbert J. Storing, “William Blackstone,” in History of Political Philosophy, Third Edition, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 627-628, 630.

15. Kant, Political Writings, 133.  Also, “Hobbes defines law in terms of will, not reason” (Laurence Berns, “Thomas Hobbes,” in History of Political Philosophy, Op. Cit., 412).

16. Miéville, Between Equal Rights, Op. Cit., 79. 

17. This section is guided in part by the Marxist state derivation theory of law; cf. ibid., 122-128.

18. Storing, “William Blackstone,” Op. Cit., 627-628.

19. Quentin Skinner, “The State,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terrance Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 124-126.  Calvin agrued along similar lines, saying, “the law is a silent magistrate, and a magistrate a speaking law” (quoted in Wolin, Politics and Vision, Op. Cit., 186).

20. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994), 114 and Berns, “Thomas Hobbes,” Op. Cit., 404-405.

21. H. L. A. Hart, “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals,” in Philosophical Problems in the Law, ed. David Adams (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1996), 40.

22. Hobbes, Leviathan, Op. Cit., 229.

23. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 123.

24. Ibid., 123-124.

25. Richard Ashcroft, “Ideology and Class in Hobbes’ Political Theory,” Political Theory 6 (1978), 39.

26. Berns, “Thomas Hobbes,” Op. Cit., 405

27. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 235-236.

28. Ibid., 240.

29. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 57.

30. Hobbes, Leviathan, Op. Cit., 82-83.

31. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive or The Citizen, ed. Sterling P. Lamprecht (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1949), 157

32. Hobbes, Leviathan, Op. Cit., 85.  He repeats this in De Cive, saying of the person tempted to break a promise, that the law “compels him to make good his promise for fear of the punishment appointed by the law” (quoted in Button, Contract, Culture, and Citizenship, Op. Cit., 69).

33. Hobbes, Leviathan, Op. Cit., 88.

34. Charles Fried, Contract as Promise: A Theory of Contractual Obligation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 21.

35. Hobbes, De Cive, Op. Cit., 44, 57-58.

36. Patrick Anderson, “The Nature of the Social Contract: Isolation, Order, and a Peculiar Toleration,” presented at the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, & Letters Conference, Alma College, Alma, MI, March 2, 2012.

37. David Hume, “The Irrelevance of Consent,” in Political Thought, ed. Michael Rosen and Jonathan Wolff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 64.

38. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Op. Cit., 114.

39. Ibid., 121.

40. Ibid., 117.

41. Hobbes, Leviathan, Op. Cit., 222-224.

42. Quoted in David C. Durst, “The Limits of Toleration in John Locke’s Liberal Thought,” Res Publica 7 (2001), 52.

43. Cf., Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Op. Cit.

44. Durst, “The Limits of Toleration,” Op. Cit., 52.

45. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Op. Cit., 65.

46. Kant, Political Writings, Op. Cit., 42

47. Ibid., 68.

48. Cf., Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 363-369

49. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Op. Cit., 490.

50. Ibid.

51. Cf., Slovoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989).

52. Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, Philosophy in the Present, ed. Peter Engelmann, trans. Peter Thomas and Alberto Toscano (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009), 56. 

53. Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 98.

54. “Man himself must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is to stand for his own future, which is what one who promises does” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Op. Cit., 58-59)!