Abstract

In this dissertation I examine how liberal writers contend with the question of social interdependence and the boundaries between the privileged self and community. I look at the work of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henry David Thoreau and Horatio Alger, each of whom grapples with and ultimately fails to combine the need for autonomy with the need for other people. I argue that this attempt fails because it is at heart a contradictory project. The subject seeks to act "as if" he were alone even while he is surrounded by privilege from and care-taking by his social subordinates. He assumes, and seeks to transcend this support in order to be free. But in so doing, he has made himself dependent upon the very relationships he wishes to transcend. ;Whereas pre-liberal notions of subjectivity allow the reification of "the other" this project becomes infinitely complicated by the most important innovation of social contract theory, the introduction of the other's potential humanity and equality with the privileged subject. From Locke on, others takes on a peculiar "half-person, half-thing" characteristic whereby the subjects dependence upon them is both seen and not seen, understood as a threat and invisible. Rather than enabling the liberal subject to have freedom, autonomy and privilege all at once, the dual nature of the other thwarts this possibility. On the one hand, the other is too much another person for the subject to be able to consider that he is truly autonomous, truly independent of it. On the other hand, the other is too material, too present for the subject to be able to ignore and gloss over his relationships with and dependence on it. Thus the contradictions of social difference lie at the heart of liberal theory, negating the very freedom and autonomy that these writers most cherish