Jolley Christman
Biographic Data
| ID | 89868 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jolley Christman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jolley |
| FAMILY NAME | Christman |
| SIGNATURE | CHRISTMAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5438-9483 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 81 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Reconceiving Freedom from the Shadows of Slavery: Liberty in a Nonideal World
Freedom and social practices
The central idea of this article is that social freedom should range over socially constituted practices and ways of life rather than merely individual actions or aggregations of such actions. To be free, it is argued, is to be capable of pursuing opportunities to engage in socially constituted practices and ways of living that one has reason to value from the point of view of one's practical identity (or identities). The implication of this posi…
Rousseau's silence on trans‐Atlantic slavery: Philosophical implications
For Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, freedom functions as a foundational value for his entire political philosophy. Parallel to this emphasis is his deep and abiding condemnation of “slavery”, at least the slavery that he claims marked the social existence of his European contemporaries living under unrepresentative monarchical systems. However, the striking aspect of Rousseau's work is his virtually complete silence concerning the institution of chattel s…
Positive Freedom: Past, Present, and Future
What If Anything Is Wrong with Positive Liberty?: The Struggles of Agency in a Non-Ideal World
The contested history of autonomy: Interpreting European modernity. By GerardRosich. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019
Analyzing Freedom from the Shadows of Slavery
Philosophical treatments of core value concepts often abstract from the troubled history and fractured present of the societies to which those concepts are meant to apply. In the case of the political tradition of liberal democratic thought, stretching from the social contract theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries up through contemporary writers, the notion of individual freedom or liberty is central. However, often that idea, and …
The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism
The political philosophy of liberalism was first formulated during the Enlightenment in response to the growth of the modern nation-state and its authority and power over the individuals living within its boundaries. Liberalism is now the dominant ideology in the Western world, but it covers a broad swathe of different (and sometimes rival) ideas and traditions and its essential features can be hard to define. The Cambridge Companion to Liberalis…
Freedom in Times of Struggle: Positive Liberty, Again
Many of those critical of traditional liberalism have focused on the notion of freedom at the center of that approach, namely the (negative) idea of liberty as the absence of interferences with action. Building a plausible and normatively acceptable positive alternative, however, has faced numerous criticisms and challenges. In this paper I discuss what such critics of liberalism sec; as the; limitations of the traditional negative notion and ske…
Coping or Oppression
It is crucial in theoretical and practical contexts to adequately distinguish cases where the constraints of a person's life move her to alter her aspirations in a self-governing way from those that undercut that agency and amount, simply, to submission to oppressive conditions. The latter sort of case amounts to oppression and domination, while the former, to varying degrees, characterizes everyday life. This chapter examines this distinction by…
Dummy Article Title
The extent to which English law remedies injury to autonomy (ITA) as a stand-alone actionable damage in negligence is disputed. In this article I argue that the remedy available is not only partial and inconsistent (Keren-Paz in Med Law Rev, 2018) but also gendered and discriminatory against women. I first situate the argument within the broader feminist critique of tort law as failing to appropriately remedy gendered harms, and of law more broad…
The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and Socio-historical Selves
It is both an ideal and an assumption of traditional conceptions of justice for liberal democracies that citizens are autonomous, self-governing persons. Yet standard accounts of the self and of self-government at work in such theories are hotly disputed and often roundly criticized in most of their guises. John Christman offers a sustained critical analysis of both the idea of the 'self' and of autonomy as these ideas function in political theor…
Autonomy, Recognition, and Social Dislocation
In numerous accounts of both autonomy and freedom, social or relational elements have been offered as conceptual requirements in addition to purely procedural conditions. In addition, it is claimed that social recognition of the normative authority or self-trust of the agent is conceptually required for autonomy. In this paper I argue that in cases where people find themselves completely dislocated from the social and cultural homes that had prov…
Autonomy, History, and the Subject of Justice
The Search for Agency: Comments on John Russon's Human Experience
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays
In recent years the concepts of individual autonomy and political liberalism have been the subjects of intense debate, but these discussions have occurred largely within separate academic disciplines. Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism contains essays devoted to foundational questions regarding both the notion of the autonomous self and the nature and justification of liberalism. Written by leading figures in moral, legal and political the…
Procedural Autonomy and Liberal Legitimacy
A crucial issue in discussions of the nature of individual autonomy concerns whether a person can be properly called autonomous if her value commitments contain (or fail to contain) certain substantive ideals, that is, whether “autonomy” can be conceptualized without reference to such ideals. If not, the question is whether such a “content-neutral” or “procedural” conception of autonomy – one which is defined without including substantive values …
Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays
Autonomy, Self-Knowledge, and Liberal Legitimacy
In the Enlightenment tradition of the justification of political authority, institutions of state power are seen as legitimate only if such institutions can be freely supported by those living under them. Liberal legitimacy, then, assumes that autonomous citizens can endorse the principles that shape the institutions of political power. The conception of autonomy functioning in such a picture, moreover, requires that such citizens uniformly enjoy…
Saving Positive Freedom
In this article, I respond to Eric Nelson’s claim (in “Liberty: One Concept Too Many?”) that the most prominent versions of a positive concept of freedom all reduce to negative notions. I argue that in his otherwise scholarly and well-argued article, Nelson confuses a conceptual dispute with a normative one based on moral or political principle. Further, I point out that the traditional critique of positive conceptions of liberty, which rests on …
Relational Autonomy, Liberal Individualism, and the Social Constitution of Selves
Caring for property: Comments on Susan Smith's “States, markets and an ethic of care”
Social and Political Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction
This accessible and user-friendly text will prove invaluable to any student coming to social and political philosophy for the first time. It provides a broad survey of fundamental social and political questions in modern society, as well as clear, accessible discussions of the philosophical issues central to political thought.Topics covered include: the foundations of political authority, the nature and grounds of economic justice, the limits of …
Liberalism, Autonomy, and Self-Transformation
Dans un vaste eventail de theories liberales, l'individu est suppose agir sur ses desirs et sur ses actes de facon rationnelle et autonome. De nombreuses critiques de cette vision liberale de l'individu en font apparaitre les limites en montrant que de nombreuses composantes de l'identite ne sont pas sujettes a l'alteration volontaire ni au controle. Cet article examine les reponses liberales a ces critiques, et reprend ces dernieres en considera…
Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Restraint
Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom
Saving Positive Freedom
In this article, I respond to Eric Nelson’s claim (in “Liberty: One Concept Too Many?”) that the most prominent versions of a positive concept of freedom all reduce to negative notions. I argue that in his otherwise scholarly and well-argued article, Nelson confuses a conceptual dispute with a normative one based on moral or political principle. Further, I point out that the traditional critique of positive conceptions of liberty, which rests on …
Self-ownership, Equality, and the Structure of Property Rights
A POWERFUL WAY OF EXPRESSING the principle of individual liberty is to claim that every individual has full over her body, skills, and labor. The view is that those rights, liberties, and powers that are associated with the ownership of property comprise the rightful sovereignty that each person has over herself within the proscription of harm to others. In short, people own themselves. This principle of self-ownership is also a difficult stickin…
Autonomous Agents: From Self-control to Autonomy
Autonomous Agents addresses the related topics of self-control and individual autonomy. Self-control is defined as the opposite of akrasia-weakness of will. The study of self-control seeks to understand the concept of its own terms, followed by an examination of its bearing on one's actions, beliefs, emotions, and personal values. It goes on to consider how a proper understanding of self-control and its manifestations can shed light on personal a…
Analyzing Freedom from the Shadows of Slavery
Philosophical treatments of core value concepts often abstract from the troubled history and fractured present of the societies to which those concepts are meant to apply. In the case of the political tradition of liberal democratic thought, stretching from the social contract theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries up through contemporary writers, the notion of individual freedom or liberty is central. However, often that idea, and …
Growing Smaller: Three Tasks in Restructuring Urban High Schools
Demoralized by high failure rates, unwieldy bureaucracies, and entrenched adversarial relationships, urban school populations struggle in harsh conditions. In this article, the authors offer a framework derived from S years of ethnographic research in Philadelphia high schools, to illuminate the vision and labor necessary to make urban school reform both systemic and doable. They identify and describe three tasks-building community, generating kn…
Doing Eve's Work: Women Principals Write about Their Practice
Autonomy: A Defense of the Split‐level Self
Entrepreneurs, Profits, and Deserving Market Shares
The question I wish to take up in this paper is whether competitive markets, as mechanisms that initiate the distribution of scarce goods, allocate those goods in accordance with what participants in those markets deserve. I want to argue that in general people do not in fact deserve what they get from market interactions, when “what they get” is determined by the competitive forces coming to bear on the market (the laws of supply and demand). Th…
Autonomy and Personal History
Virtually any appraisal of a person’s welfare, integrity, or moral status, as well as the moral and political theories built on such appraisals, will rely crucially on the presumption that her preferences and values are in some important sense her own. In particular, the nature and value of political freedom is intimately connected with the presupposition that actions one is left free to do flow from desires and values that are truly an expressio…
Self-ownership, Equality, and the Structure of Property Rights
A POWERFUL WAY OF EXPRESSING the principle of individual liberty is to claim that every individual has full over her body, skills, and labor. The view is that those rights, liberties, and powers that are associated with the ownership of property comprise the rightful sovereignty that each person has over herself within the proscription of harm to others. In short, people own themselves. This principle of self-ownership is also a difficult stickin…
Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom
A Theory of Property
The Myth of Property: Toward an Egalitarian Theory of Ownership
The Myth of Property is the first book-length study to focus directly on the variable and complex structure of ownership. It critically analyses what it means to own something, and it takes familiar debates about distributive justice and recasts them into discussions of the structure of ownership. The traditional notion of private property assumed by both defenders and opponents of that system is criticized and exposed as a “myth.” The book then …
Doing Eve's Work: Women Principals Write about Their Practice
Growing Smaller: Three Tasks in Restructuring Urban High Schools
Demoralized by high failure rates, unwieldy bureaucracies, and entrenched adversarial relationships, urban school populations struggle in harsh conditions. In this article, the authors offer a framework derived from S years of ethnographic research in Philadelphia high schools, to illuminate the vision and labor necessary to make urban school reform both systemic and doable. They identify and describe three tasks-building community, generating kn…
Autonomous Agents: From Self-control to Autonomy
Autonomous Agents addresses the related topics of self-control and individual autonomy. Self-control is defined as the opposite of akrasia-weakness of will. The study of self-control seeks to understand the concept of its own terms, followed by an examination of its bearing on one's actions, beliefs, emotions, and personal values. It goes on to consider how a proper understanding of self-control and its manifestations can shed light on personal a…
Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Restraint
Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Restraint
Book Review| October 01 2000 Liberalism, Perfectionism, and Restraint LIBERALISM, PERFECTIONISM, AND RESTRAINT. By Steven Wall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xi, 244. John Christman John Christman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2000) 109 (4): 604–607. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-109-4-604 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Searc…
Liberalism, Autonomy, and Self-Transformation
Dans un vaste eventail de theories liberales, l'individu est suppose agir sur ses desirs et sur ses actes de facon rationnelle et autonome. De nombreuses critiques de cette vision liberale de l'individu en font apparaitre les limites en montrant que de nombreuses composantes de l'identite ne sont pas sujettes a l'alteration volontaire ni au controle. Cet article examine les reponses liberales a ces critiques, et reprend ces dernieres en considera…
Social and Political Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction
This accessible and user-friendly text will prove invaluable to any student coming to social and political philosophy for the first time. It provides a broad survey of fundamental social and political questions in modern society, as well as clear, accessible discussions of the philosophical issues central to political thought.Topics covered include: the foundations of political authority, the nature and grounds of economic justice, the limits of …
Relational Autonomy, Liberal Individualism, and the Social Constitution of Selves
Caring for property: Comments on Susan Smith's “States, markets and an ethic of care”
Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays
In recent years the concepts of individual autonomy and political liberalism have been the subjects of intense debate, but these discussions have occurred largely within separate academic disciplines. Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism contains essays devoted to foundational questions regarding both the notion of the autonomous self and the nature and justification of liberalism. Written by leading figures in moral, legal and political the…
Procedural Autonomy and Liberal Legitimacy
A crucial issue in discussions of the nature of individual autonomy concerns whether a person can be properly called autonomous if her value commitments contain (or fail to contain) certain substantive ideals, that is, whether “autonomy” can be conceptualized without reference to such ideals. If not, the question is whether such a “content-neutral” or “procedural” conception of autonomy – one which is defined without including substantive values …
Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays
Autonomy, Self-Knowledge, and Liberal Legitimacy
In the Enlightenment tradition of the justification of political authority, institutions of state power are seen as legitimate only if such institutions can be freely supported by those living under them. Liberal legitimacy, then, assumes that autonomous citizens can endorse the principles that shape the institutions of political power. The conception of autonomy functioning in such a picture, moreover, requires that such citizens uniformly enjoy…
Saving Positive Freedom
In this article, I respond to Eric Nelson’s claim (in “Liberty: One Concept Too Many?”) that the most prominent versions of a positive concept of freedom all reduce to negative notions. I argue that in his otherwise scholarly and well-argued article, Nelson confuses a conceptual dispute with a normative one based on moral or political principle. Further, I point out that the traditional critique of positive conceptions of liberty, which rests on …
The Search for Agency: Comments on John Russon's Human Experience
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Autonomy, History, and the Subject of Justice
The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and Socio-historical Selves
It is both an ideal and an assumption of traditional conceptions of justice for liberal democracies that citizens are autonomous, self-governing persons. Yet standard accounts of the self and of self-government at work in such theories are hotly disputed and often roundly criticized in most of their guises. John Christman offers a sustained critical analysis of both the idea of the 'self' and of autonomy as these ideas function in political theor…
Autonomy, Recognition, and Social Dislocation
In numerous accounts of both autonomy and freedom, social or relational elements have been offered as conceptual requirements in addition to purely procedural conditions. In addition, it is claimed that social recognition of the normative authority or self-trust of the agent is conceptually required for autonomy. In this paper I argue that in cases where people find themselves completely dislocated from the social and cultural homes that had prov…
Political science (32 works) · Law (30 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (26 works) · Epistemology (24 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law and economics (15 works) · Autonomy (14 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (12 works)