May 1 3-4:30 pm Clark Hall 210 Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Political Liberalism and Wonder

Political liberalism’s fundamental achievement depends on grasping the way others as such, sociality, and the freedom to make mistakes and to disagree are logically interdependent.  Liberty, in turn, is the name for the political concept that protects this logical interdependence.  Political liberalism protects liberty.  This chapter homes in on the most concentrated relation that political liberty protects: wondering together, which I will parse as getting lost together in seeking to understand the good life while being accepting of tolerable differences.  Wondering together is at the heart of the space of sociality, the understanding of which will take us to the void of that space: narcissism and its relationship to fundamental abandonment.  Narcissism in this context is understood philosophically and non-clinically as the unreasonable impulse to control or ignore the wills of others, including their mysterious otherness.  Fundamental abandonment is the relational condition constructed by narcissism where others cannot count on consideration from each other.  Political liberty protects sociality by blocking fundamental abandonment and narcissism within institutions and the wider culture. The chapter thus advances an original conceptualization of political liberalism through the concepts of the space of sociality, wonder, narcissism, and fundamental abandonment.