درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

In America, it is common to hear people say that they “hate kids” even in an era of political correctness when to declare that one hates, say, women, people of color, or members of the LGBTQA community would be completely unacceptable. Currently, there is little scholarship conducted, and there are virtually no university courses taught, on the topic of the rights of children. Compare this to the amount of scholarship that exists, and is encouraged, concerning sexism, racism, ableism, and LGBTQA discrimination. All of this, then, despite the fact that minors make up roughly 27% of the world’s population, despite all of us having once been children, despite our professed concern, love, and care for children. All of this is because children are, perhaps, the last group of oppressed human beings that we fail to recognize as oppressed. What is noteworthy about the oppression of young people compared to the oppression of other groups is how governments tend to position themselves in relation to the issue. Rather than denying children specific rights, the U.S. government, for instance, remains agnostic on most issues, preferring to give parents and guardians the legal right to decide what their children can and cannot do.

The notion of 'freedom' has gained an emblematic character in contemporary political discourse. It is, commonly, viewed as the central value and political goal of modern societies. Similarly, human rights documents conceive of freedom as their founding principle with universal validity. In contradistinction to this prevalent approach to freedom, this paper aims to demonstrate that freedom is, primarily, a political signifier with social-historical variability. One cannot, therefore, simply and uncritically assume that freedom has (or should have) universal validity or transhistorical significance. In the first section of this paper, the structure of the contemporary liberal discourse on freedom is discussed and called into question. In light of Arendt's interpretation of freedom and through her analysis of the public domain, I reflect on the social-historical variability of the meaning of freedom and its inextricable nexus with a particular form of society. In the second section and drawing on Castoriadis, the notion of 'freedom' is approached in view of human signifying practices and the imaginary dimensions of society. This examination reveals in what way freedom––in the sense of a central social imaginary signification––contributes to the institution of an autonomous mode of society and determines the affective disposition and intentional vector of its inhabitants.