Autonomy - the Metaphysical Blanket of Modern Man? : An examination of Berlin's two notions of liberty

This paper should be seen against the background of my dissertation project, in which I aim to sort out some of the empirical confusions concerning Ronald Inglehart’s so-called self-expression values by developing more theoretically refined research hypotheses. I argue that much of the empirical disagreement on whether self-expression values promote democracy or not depends on the fact that their active ingredient, called liberty aspirations, actually consists of several very different and often conflicting conceptions of liberty that have been collapsed into one. Thus, contrary to what Inglehart and his colleagues assume, there can be no unambiguous relationship between liberty aspirations and democracy. The relationship very much depends on which conception of liberty we are discussing. We will not know where self-expression values come from, why they arise, and which kind of democracy they do (or do not) promote, unless we know which sort of liberty aspirations they actually capture. In order to do this, we cannot as Inglehart start with factor scores. Beginning in the proper end necessarily brings us back to political theory.Draft for workshop in Political Theory in Uppsala, Sweden, April 2007