The retrieval of positive freedom,post-Kantian perfectionism and neo-Roman liberty in contemporary political thought

Abstract

In recent years, political theorists have increasingly turned their attention to the past in search of conceptual renovation in the present. While recourse to the past has been a recurring thread throughout the history of political thought, the overlapping concern of recent scholarship has been to revisit seemingly exhausted political concepts with the aim of repurposing them for contemporary political challenges and realities. The three edited collections under review – Positive Freedom, Perfektionismus der Autonomie and Rethinking Liberty Before Liberalism – are distinguished by their thoughtful attempts at retrieving and politicizing the concepts of positive freedom, post-Kantian perfectionism, and neo-Roman liberty in contemporary political thought. These retrievals present promising avenues for theoretical innovation, along with the ever-present risk of diminishing interpretive returns.

Introduction

It is sometimes overlooked that Macpherson's classical study on the political theory of ‘possessive individualism’ (1962) was motivated by an equally important attempt at ‘retrieving’ the developmental thread within liberalism that he thought was hijacked by possessive individualism (1973). A retrieval entails a return to the conceptual past with a practical eye on the present and future. It is motivated by an attempt to recover, or better yet, ‘rescue’ valuable conceptual paths and trajectories that may have been arbitrarily eclipsed or prematurely foreclosed (Cohen, 2008: 1). At the same time, every retrieval carries the risk of diminishing interpretive returns by potentially sacrificing essential features of a tradition to confront contemporary challenges, or by crowding out more appealing traditions that merit retrieval. To be sure, retrievals have often taken diverse and conflicting forms in the history of political thought. One may recall here Benjamin Constant's cautioning against a return to the ‘liberty of the ancients’ ([1819] 1988) and Isaiah Berlin's subsequent warnings about the totalitarian implications of ‘positive liberty’ (1958). These attempts at retrieving ‘the liberty of moderns’ and ‘negative liberty’, respectively, were followed by countervailing attempts by Green (1895), Macpherson (1973), Taylor (1979), among others, at retrieving ‘positive liberty’. The former has traditionally been defined as freedom from external impediments to one's choice, while the latter has usually been framed in terms of freedom to the resources and conditions necessary for realizing one's status as a free and full member of a political community (Christman, 2022: 4).

In what follows, I will review three recent collections, each of which aims to provide a ‘retrieval’ of a neglected tradition in light of contemporary political issues. These three traditions, namely positive freedom, post-Kantian perfectionism and neo-Roman liberty, will be considered sequentially in their respective volumes: Positive Freedom (PF), Perfektionismus der Autonomie (PDA) and Rethinking Liberty Before Liberalism (RLBL). PF, edited by John Christman, attempts to retrieve positive freedom and demonstrate the tradition's appeal by overcoming the limitations of negative liberty/freedom in the present. Perfektionismus der Autonomie, edited by Douglas Moggach, Nadine Mooren and Michael Quante, seeks to retrieve a post-Kantian tradition within perfectionism that has been eclipsed by Aristotelian perfectionism, and whose decisive aim is the perfection of ‘rightful political relations’. Finally, RLBL, edited by Hannah Dawson and Annelien de Dijn, revisits Quentin Skinner's retrieval of neo-Roman liberty in a renewed attempt to confront contemporary forms of domination. As I will demonstrate in turn, each of these retrievals carries risks of diminishing interpretive returns. The overarching turn to politics and the retreat from ethics, which is on display in the PF and PDA collections, risks losing what remains appealing about the traditions of positive freedom and perfectionism relative to their rivals. Rethinking Liberty Before Liberalism, for its part, brings to bear the virtues of neo-Roman liberty, but risks crowding out other traditions within republicanism that are arguably better suited for tackling structural domination.

Retrieving positive freedom: Political, not metaphysical

The ‘tradition’ that came to be known as ‘positive freedom’ was largely formulated in response to the limitations of negative freedom/liberty. Notwithstanding the diversity that exists within most political traditions, Michael Garnett is correct to refer, in his contribution to Christman's edited volume on PF, to a distinct ‘tradition’ of positive freedom’, which is to be distinguished from an incidental convergence of views among disparate political theorists on the subject of liberty or freedom (p. 9). The contributors to PF would doubtless agree that exponents of positive freedom do not regard freedom as a zero-sum game, which entails a necessary trade-off between positive and negative freedom, such that the realization of the former would inevitably undercut the latter. The necessary choice between ‘positive’ and ‘negative liberty’ informed Berlin's famous essay on ‘Two Conceptions of Liberty’, which was written during the height of the Cold War. However, long before Berlin, Benjamin Constant already acknowledged that ‘the liberty of the moderns’ should ideally be conjoined with the most salvageable elements of the ‘liberty of the ancients’ ([1819] 1988). One can also persuasively demonstrate, as does Dimova-Cookson, that a robust understanding of ‘moral positive freedom’ should be pursued alongside a more dynamic account of ‘personal positive freedom’, which has either been neglected or has largely been associated with the tradition of negative freedom (p. 63). In other words, positive and negative freedom should not be construed as either/or concepts. A more ecumenical approach would allow for interpretations of the two concepts of freedom as representing differences in degree of realization (i.e., more or less freedom) as opposed to differences in kinds of freedom.

Contemporary theorists of positive freedom have largely sought to overcome the traditional positive-negative freedom divide. Maeve Cooke alerts readers to this promising trajectory in her eloquent exposition of Habermas' and Honneth's ‘political’ (as opposed to ‘metaphysical’) conceptions of freedom, which have been framed as appealing alternatives to the one-sidedness of traditional accounts. Cooke proposes a ‘universalist conception of freedom that integrates the valid insights of communalist and individualist approaches’, (p. 196) extending this insight to her reading of Habermas and Honneth, whose individual conceptions are ultimately judged one-sided, but should nevertheless be interpreted as engaging in a common project, that is, rising to the challenge of developing a normatively appealing conception of freedom for the present. After all, neither Habermas nor Honneth subscribes to the rigid divide between negative and positive freedom; the former seeks a middle-ground between classical liberalism and civic republicanism, while the latter has called for an account of ‘social freedom’ that overcomes the deficiencies of ‘legal’ and ‘reflexive’ freedom.

Not surprisingly, the retrieval of positive freedom has also been concerned with responding to salient objections from critics, historical and contemporary. David Ingram inquires into the viability of a recognitive account of freedom, especially the version developed in recent years by Honneth. Ingram arrives at the conclusion that a more modest account of social freedom is ‘at least theoretically viable’ (p. 98). However, such a conception of social freedom would have to address the circularity introduced by an individual's perceived identification with the existing normative order while also allowing for the realistic possibility of partial reconciliation with public institutions ‘that selectively limit structural domination while never quite reconciling us to our social existence as a whole’ (p. 101). At best, one should aim for a modest and politically deflationary account of positive freedom that reckons with the challenges presented by pluralism. Ingram's approach is representative of ongoing attempts by proponents of positive freedom to retrieve the tradition's strengths by emphasizing its political character and consciously retreating from its more substantive ethical underpinnings. However, such a retrieval comes at a cost because the normative robustness of positive freedom is also what distinguished it in favourable ways from the seemingly formal and atomistic foundations of negative freedom.

Horacio Spector, for his part, is concerned with elaborating a definite threshold that enables ‘positive libertarianism’ to ‘justify a governmental paternalistic intervention in someone's choice if this intervention will in all likelihood produce a significant gain of his overall positive freedom’ (p. 193). To reconcile positive libertarianism and paternalism, Spector maintains that such a threshold would only apply when the agent's unimpeded choice would ‘irreversibly endanger his overall positive freedom’ (p. 193). The paternalism objection is a powerful one, so it is not surprising that the justification for it is highly qualified and circumscribed by Spector. Another powerful objection against positive freedom is that it is conceptually unequipped at broaching disability. According to Nancy Hirschman, this has been one reason why many scholars of disability have often adopted a ‘negative liberty approach’ (p. 156). However, Hirschman argues that a constructivist approach, which is attentive to the construction and dynamism of desire-creation, lends itself to a more robust conception of positive liberty that is informed by disability (p. 173). There is a shared awareness among proponents of positive freedom that ‘traditional’ accounts of positive freedom are inadequate, and that the retrieval of positive freedom warrants a political reconstruction for the present. In the spirit of such reconstruction, Carol Gould's chapter (pp. 141–154) seeks to reframe democracy through a more robust account of positive freedom against the backdrop of rising economic inequality and authoritarianism, while Rutger Claassen's chapter (pp. 217–235) is concerned with the spectre of neo-feudalism under contemporary capitalism and the challenges of counteracting it with recourse to more positive conceptions of freedom and property relations. In all these contributions, the retrieval of positive freedom is attempted by way of a ‘political’ account of freedom that is no longer wedded to substantive metaphysical commitments, whether it be a universalist conception of human ‘essence’, ‘virtue’ or the ‘good’.

Retrieving post-Kantian perfectionism as the realization of ‘rightful political relations’

The perfectionist tradition has undergone its own ‘retrieval’ in recent years. The perfectionist tradition has historically been associated with Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, Hegel, J.S. Mill, Marx, Nietzsche and Green. According to Thomas Hurka, the perfectionist tradition lends itself to wide and narrow definitions. On the broad definition, perfectionism is concerned with promoting ‘objective human goods’, such as knowledge, achievement and robust personal relations. On the narrow definition, perfectionism is concerned with realizing specific attributes of human nature (e.g., ‘grace’, ‘reason’, ‘labour’ and even ‘power’), which will vary according to its diverse representatives (1993: 4). Hurka introduces another helpful distinction between ‘egalitarian’ and ‘elitist’ versions of perfectionism, referring to Marx (p. 165) and Nietzsche (p. 164) as the tradition's egalitarian and elitist representatives. While Marx's egalitarianism is contested in the scholarly literature (on this, see Wood, 2014), both the narrow and wide definitions of ‘traditional’ perfectionism are concerned with maximizing the realization of objective human ‘goods’, ‘virtues’ or ‘properties’ (‘essences’) – those features of perfectionism that the contributors to PDA will seek to downplay.

It is not surprising that Immanuel Kant rarely figures among the philosophical representatives of perfectionism. Kant's political philosophy was concerned foremost with realizing ‘rightful political relations’ among free individuals, rather than with state-directed efforts at cultivating a particular conception of moral ‘virtue’ or the ‘good’ (Moggach, 2021: 186). As Moggach maintains in his helpful study of ‘Left-Kantian Perfectionism’, Kant was critical of Leibniz's ‘perfectionist ethical system’, as well as Christian Wolff's account of ‘paternalistic perfectionism’ (p. 188). According to Kant, both remained wedded, albeit in different ways, to Aristotelian perfectionism. Not unlike Christman's volume on PF, Moggach, Mooren and Quante – the editors of PDA – seek to retrieve a neglected tradition within perfectionism that is consciously oriented towards politics rather than morality or ethics. More specifically, the editors seek to retrieve a neglected tradition within perfectionism that was formulated by ‘post-Kantian’ thinkers, ranging from Herder to Adorno.

To be sure, the case has been made, most notably again by Hurka, that a broad definition of perfectionism can give autonomy its rightful due. Hurka writes: ‘A plausible broad perfectionism, then, can treat autonomy only as one good among others, which may sometimes be outweighed. It therefore cannot endorse an absolute liberty principle, but it can endorse a non-absolute principle’ (1993: 149). However, judged from the post-Kantian perfectionist view, Hurka's qualified account of ‘autonomy as perfection’ remains far too wedded to an objectivist view of moral goods that do not adequately prioritize the realization of ‘rightful political relations’.

Far from being confined to a few obscure thinkers, post-Kantian perfectionism ends up being a rather expansive, internally diverse and sometimes conflicting tradition. In addition to chapters by Moggach, Marcos, Rojek, and Mooren and Quante that address historical and systematic issues concerning the post-Kantian perfectionist tradition, the bilingual (English and German) volume features dedicated chapters on Herder, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Gans, Bauer, Stirner, Ruge, Marx, Kierkegaard, J.S. Mill, Nietzsche, (Hermann) Cohen and Adorno. The sheer breadth of thinkers can seem daunting at times, especially to an English readership. Nevertheless, PDA distinguishes itself in commendable ways by the careful attention it gives to some of the leading ‘post-Hegelian’ philosophers in the perfectionist tradition. While Marx, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard have generated extensive debates beyond the perfectionist tradition, the same cannot be said about Gans, Bauer, Stirner and especially Adorno.

Norbert Waszek's chapter on the political philosophy of Eduard Gans is a welcome contribution, especially since Gans is usually read exclusively through the shadows of Hegel and Marx. Waszek emphasizes the extent to which Gans’ perfectionism grasps social progress based on the degree to which the constitutional state turned social state can realize the self-determination of active citizens by addressing ‘the social question’ (p. 183). David Leopold's chapter on Max Stirner confronts the inescapable question of how Stirner – the avowed ‘egoist’ and ‘anarchist’ – can be interpreted as a perfectionist in the first place. Leopold's response entails the creative attribution of a ‘non-essentialist perfectionism’ to Stirner, whose meaning is characteristically negative, that is, focused decisively on resisting omnipresent threats to ‘self-rule’, principally from the state and other individuals (p. 282).

Douglas Moggach and Michael Kuur Sørensen's chapter on Bruno Bauer tracks the latter's concern with the critique of religion and moribund political institutions, which found political expression in the 1848 European Revolutions, as well as Bauer's commitment during that time to a robust republican constitution aimed at realizing both political and social emancipation (pp. 217–219). Moggach and Sørensen also underscore Bauer's opposition to ‘incipient schools of socialism’ for their deference to the proletarian class, rather than to the universal struggle against arbitrary privileges (p. 219). The authors also note Bauer's abandonment of the post-Kantian perfectionist paradigm following the defeat of the 1848 Revolutions (pp. 222–223), and it must be added here, his eventual turn to a reactionary and virulently anti-Semitic politics (p. 374).

Michael Quante's chapter on Marx, an English variation of which appears in the PF volume (2022: 28–44), ¹ begins with Marx's Paris Manuscripts of 1844 and his attempt at reconciling Feuerbachian-inspired philosophical anthropology with a post-Kantian perfectionist account of freedom. Quante ultimately interprets Marx as a qualified post-Kantian perfectionist on the basis of Moggach's definition of that tradition (pp. 251–252). However, even if Marx's mature critique of political economy in Capital is interpreted as a normative project, ambivalence remains over his specific understanding of autonomy (i.e., whether it should be construed as individual or social autonomy), and moreover, whether Marx's perfectionism is best framed as a version of deontology, utilitarianism or virtue ethics (p. 266). It is regrettable that Quante does not consider Marx's journalistic writings during the 1848 Revolutions (see Shoikhedbrod, 2022, 2019), which help clarify his commitment to realizing ‘rightful political relations’ in practice. If Bauer's writings between the Vormarz through 1848–49 can be considered representative of post-Kantian perfectionism, so too should Marx's journalistic writings during the time when constitutionalism and political rights were critically at stake.

The most surprising candidate for post-Kantian perfectionism is surely Theodor Adorno (pp. 371–395). Not unlike Leopold's approach to Stirner, Samir Gandesha approaches Adorno's post-Kantian perfectionism as a version of ‘negative Aristotelianism’, according to which ‘we can only know the “good life” negatively, that is, on the basis of the contours of the “damaged life”’ (p. 375). Gandesha emphasizes the profound impact that the rise of Nazism and its culmination in the Holocaust had on Adorno's philosophical writings, especially The Dialectic of Enlightenment (jointly authored with Max Horkheimer) and Negative Dialectics. The latter work, according to Gandesha, sought to retrieve Kant's conception of autonomy through the formulation of a ‘new categorical imperative’ in the aftermath of Auschwitz (p. 376). A central feature of this new categorical imperative is its ‘“mindfulness” (Eigendenken) of suffering nature’ (p. 377). Adorno differs strikingly from the post-Kantian Left Hegelians of the nineteenth-century in that his understanding of autonomy is centered, not on its ‘“ongoing contribution to human progress”’, but its contribution to ‘forestalling historical catastrophe’ (p. 381). It is with good reason, therefore, that Adorno draws on Kant's moral philosophy rather than his legal and political theory. The enduring lesson of Adorno's negative perfectionism is that the perfection of autonomy is now bound up with attempts to prevent suffering and forestall looming catastrophes, which are certainly timely teachings. However, it remains to be seen if a negative perfectionism of this sort is robust enough to facilitate the realization of ‘rightful political relations’ among individuals in a globally divided and vastly unequal world.

As with PF, one wonders whether the retrieval of post-Kantian perfectionism, with its emphasis on prioritizing the realization of rightful political relations, is hasty in giving up essential features of the perfectionist tradition that are worth preserving, particularly at a time when liberal egalitarians remain steadfast in their commitments to honouring neutrality with respect the ‘good’, even when that good happens to be the ideal of equality (on this, see Sypnowich, 2018). Against their best efforts, post-Kantian perfectionists may very well end up reinforcing, rather than counteracting, liberal proceduralism, which was found wanting precisely for its normative thinness.

Retrieving neo-Roman liberty and confronting ‘structural’ domination

Although Quentin Skinner has remained a trenchant critic of Macpherson's possessive individualism thesis, he describes his original attempt at carving out a neo-republican corrective to classical liberalism as a ‘retrieval’ in Dawson and de Dijn's edited volume on RLBL. By retrieval, Skinner means ‘the project of rehabilitating a conception of civil liberty that had once been hegemonic but had largely been lost to sight’ (p. 233). Skinner's retrieval of civil liberty retraces that concept to its origins in Roman civil law and its later reappropriation by English common law jurists. In Skinner's view, the distinguishing feature of neo-Roman liberty consists in its view of the individual as sui iuris. To be sui iuris is to enjoy the status of a free person (i.e., being the master of one's person and possessions), who is not subject to the arbitrary will of anyone else. Contrasting his neo-republican conception of civil liberty with the classical liberal understanding of liberty as the absence of external impediments to choice, as well as Philip Pettit's neo-republican account of freedom as ‘non-domination’ (Pettit, 1997), Skinner insists that ‘the crucial and distinctive neo-Roman claim is thus that freedom is not basically a predicate of actions; it is basically the name of a status, that of persons capable of living as they please in virtue of not being subject to the will of anyone else’ (p. 243). In short, Skinnerian neo-Roman liberty has its eye on the crucial task of securing one's status or standing as a free person. The best way of grasping this status conceptually is by retrieving neo-Roman liberty in the present.

A further distinction may be drawn here between Skinner's neo-Roman conception of liberty and J.G.A. Pocock's civic republican account of liberty (Pocock, 1975). Although both look to ancient Rome, Skinner's retrieval turns to Roman civil law while Pocock's retrieval points to Roman public law (i.e., the active citizen of the Roman Res publica). These differences in emphasis invite alternative ways of ‘retrieving’ republican liberty, just as they offer competing visions of the appropriate relationship between private and public domains, including alternative approaches for confronting the threat of structural domination – an issue that is acknowledged by Skinner in his rejoinder to critics (pp. 252–254). Is liberty best safeguarded by protecting the private property of free persons, or by supporting an active citizenry that regards the business of the state as the ‘public's thing’? On this view, Skinnerian neo-Roman liberty, for all its important nuances, shares more in common with the tradition of ‘negative liberty/freedom’, while Pocock's conception of liberty has greater affinity with the tradition of ‘positive liberty/freedom’.

There has indeed been a flowering of interest in neo-Roman or republican theories of freedom over the last 25 years. Philip Pettit's Republicanism (1997) was particularly influential in shifting the dominant understanding of freedom from its classical liberal framing as non-interference with choice to the neo-republican idea of freedom as non-domination. Pettit's emphasis on freedom as non-domination is not shared by all representatives of neo-republicanism. Quentin Skinner, as we have seen, takes issue with Pettit's neo-republican account for neglecting the extent to which neo-republicans are distinctly concerned with threats to one's standing as a free person (p. 243). Dawson and de Dijn's edited volume, RLBL, merits praise for extending the spirit of this challenge to the neo-Roman conception of liberty that is at the heart of Skinner's Liberty Before Liberalism (1998). The volume represents a celebration of Skinner's deservedly influential work, as well as a welcome opportunity for critical reflection after some 25 years.

The volume sets itself apart by bringing into relief previously neglected thinkers, traditions and movements that should find pride of place in the neo-Roman tradition. Although all the chapters in the volume deliver on this score, the chapters by Foxley, Bergès, Koekkoek, Leipold and Halldenius stand out precisely because they capture historical and contemporary forms of hierarchy, exclusion and domination that have often escaped the radar of neo-Roman liberty and arguably the neo-republican tradition as a whole.

Foxley's chapter concerns itself with John Milton's attempt at reconciling hierarchy, inequality and subjection with neo-Roman liberty. Milton interpreted neo-Roman liberty selectively and inconsistently, inferring that there is no contradiction involved in ‘being ruled by one's superior’, even if such rule entailed the subjugation of women by men and that of masters over ‘natural slaves’ (p. 98). This inconsistent application would receive the justified ire of Mary Wollstonecraft, who sought to extend neo-Roman principles in the struggle against women's subjugation (p. 117). Foxley reaches the fitting conclusion that Milton's attempt at reconciliation ‘fatally undercuts the normative force of the theory. This was a liberty which required one set of external circumstances (self-government) for some people and another (the rule of a superior) for others’ (p. 99). It must be noted here that in addition to the phenomenon of ‘counter-revolutionary’ thinkers deploying neo-Roman concepts to defend hierarchy and subjection, which is skilfully examined by Lok (pp. 178–193), the fact remains that far too many historical proponents of neo-Roman liberty did not take issue with its inconsistent application across the globe.

The apparent inconsistency between the norm and practice of neo-Roman liberty remains paradoxical so long as one assumes that republican regimes were normatively committed to equality and anti-imperialism. However, as Edward Andrew has shown convincingly in his Imperial Republics, the historical record suggests that republicanism and imperialism are not antithetical, and moreover, that egalitarian commitment is not a defining feature of neo-Roman liberty in practice (Andrew, 2011). Andrew's conclusions raise important challenges for those who seek in the neo-Roman treasure chest a normative basis for condemning imperial slavery and championing the cause of abolitionism by way of a retrieval.

A similar challenge extends to those seeking to extend the concept of neo-Roman liberty to condemn ‘wage-slavery’ and capitalist domination with inspiration from Marx and the radical labour movement. Bruno Leipold has been instrumental in developing the contours of a ‘radical republicanism’ with precisely those aims (see as well Gourevitch, 2014; Roberts, 2016). Leipold's chapter eloquently dissects the different forms of domination that prevail under capitalist production: class domination, workplace domination and the impersonal domination of the market (pp. 194–214). The latter form of domination also presents the most difficulties for the project of retrieving neo-Roman liberty. Skinner is to be commended for suggesting that the neo-Roman tradition would become more valuable ‘if current discussions of domination and dependence were expanded in the manner originally posed by Marx, Engels, and some of their followers’ (p. 265). However, the task of expanding the scope of neo-Roman liberty in a way that is sensitive to ‘structural domination’ is hamstrung by the tradition's roots in Roman civil law and its enduring influence. According to Roman civil law, which is at the heart of Skinner's retrieval of neo-Roman liberty, the source of domination must be traced back to an identifiable legal person or group of persons (p. 265), as opposed to an intricate structure(s) of domination. Such structures of domination fall beyond the purview of neo-Roman liberty and are thus rendered ‘invisible’, to use Leipold's apt formulation.

To be sure, there are constructive strategies by which Skinner and more radical proponents of neo-Roman liberty can confront some of the tradition's internal challenges and limitations. One such strategy has recently been proposed by Camila Vergara, who argues in favour of demarcating two threads in republican constitutional thought, which lend themselves to ‘elitist’ and ‘plebeian’ interpretations. According to Vergara, who ultimately endorses ‘plebeian republicanism’ (see Breaugh, 2013; Vergara, 2022, 2020), ‘the plebeian strand, which developed from the experience of resistance of the common people against oligarchic domination, begins with the premise of actual or potential oppression, and therefore, seeks to challenge the status quo, not preserve it’ (2022: 30). Vergara's position accords well with Halldenius’ central thesis concerning the necessary application of neo-Roman liberty to human rights, which should be concerned foremost with ‘the rectification of subordination and vulnerability through institutional design’ (RLBL, p. 229). The recent ‘plebeian turn’ in neo-republican thought can serve as a promising road for retrieving a more appealing version of neo-Roman liberty that does not succumb to the tradition's historical blind spots. In this respect, radical republicans will also have to confront the possibility that, for all its virtues, Skinner's retrieval of neo-Roman liberty may stand in the way of a more radical republicanism whose time has come.

Conclusion

In summary, I have critically examined three recent and innovative scholarly efforts at interpretive ‘retrieval’ in contemporary political thought. In each case, the retrieval of a neglected tradition has led to conceptual reconstruction with an eye to confronting existing political challenges. The retrievals of positive freedom, post-Kantian perfectionism, and neo-Roman liberty shed valuable light on timely roads that have yet to be travelled. However, these innovative retrievals also carry risks of diminishing interpretive returns, whether by downplaying a tradition's substantive ethical underpinnings to prioritize its political character (PF and PDA) or by unwittingly eclipsing other traditions that are arguably better equipped at confronting the political challenges of our time (RLBL). To be sure, the success of these retrievals will depend in large part on how well their proponents are able to confront the inherent limitations of their respective traditions.