(Photo from the collection of the British Imperial War Museum, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Lockean Subject
By Jürgen Martschukat
Since the seventeenth century, the idea of the human being as a self-owning, autonomous, voluntarily acting agent has become deeply embedded in liberal political thought. In the neoliberal age of the last fifty years or so, this notion has shaped political and everyday action more than ever before, becoming even more profoundly entrenched in the concept of ideal subjecthood. However, this so-called Lockean subject has come in for criticism…
