This article deals with the topic of emancipation in the social sciences and its transformation in recent decades. Despite its centrality for sociological analysis, emancipation is a topic characterized by ambivalent meanings – autonomy and authenticity, contingency and normativity, free will and negative freedom – and by ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘postcolonial’ interpretations. After a long period in which emancipation was considered the unified expression of the critical consciousness of European modernity, its internal ambivalences have provoked criticism (for instance from the cultural turn in social sciences), enhanced dichotomies in theoretical discussion and highlighted the intertwining between emancipation and historical processes such as individualization and capitalism. This article investigates the ambivalences of the concept of emancipation and frames its present plural meanings, testing its current range and heuristic value.
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