Over the past two decades the value of freedom has become the principle of so many political dreams and projects. We dwell in a historical moment in which ‘the free world’ has triumphed over its totalitarian adversary, ‘the free market’ over the command economy and the plan, the freedom-loving authentic individual over the loyal collective subject of traditional moralities and communist ethics alike. Freedom, here, seems to form the foundation of the politics of our present: its presence or absence in particular societies, the struggle to achieve it, the conditions that can make it real. But freedom is not only the touchstone of contemporary liberal politics. As substantive dreams of alternative ways of organizing economic activity, political structures and familial and sexual arrangements lose their allure, an ethic of freedom seems also to suffuse the political imagination of our most radical political thinkers: the search for a new politics of freedom, the attempt to delineate and construct practices of freedom, the idea that we should strive for a style of existence characterized by a certain way of working upon ourselves in the name of freedom.

As the twenty-first century begins, the ethics of freedom have come to underpin our conceptions of how we should be ruled, how our practices of everyday life should be organized, how we should understand ourselves and our predicament.