Abstract

Aiming at a reformed notion of emancipation, this dissertation develops a complex notion of individual freedom as a normative criterion for the assessment of societies. The majority of it is devoted to the concept of freedom in Theodor W. Adorno and Cornelius Castoriadis, who have only rarely been compared. Their respective concepts of freedom bear strong similarities while being sufficiently different to enable mutual elaboration. The semantic complexity of their usage of the term is unique in critical theory. ;My analysis uncovers three dimensions of freedom in Adorno and Castoriadis; "energetic freedom"---freedom from the repression of somatic impulse and of irrational spontaneity---"reflective freedom"---freedom from heteronomous, "blind" determination by alien forces through their reflective appropriation by an organizing ego-instance---and "freedom as plurality"---freedom from repetition, homogeneity and reductive identity through novelty, creation and plurality. Concerns usually expressed in mutually hostile theoretical camps are thus brought together in their writings. My interpretation emphasizes the distinctness of these dimensions and the complexity of their relations. Liberation in all three dimensions is necessary for individual freedom, while all dimensions have their internal problems and would be self-defeating in isolation. The thesis constructs a notion of three-dimensional freedom that is sensitive to the relations of dependence, of mediation and of irreconcilable tension between the three dimensions of freedom. ;With respect to the socio-political preconditions for individual freedom, the dissertation compares Adorno's and Castoriadis's discourses to the vocabulary of "negative" and "positive" freedom in analytic political philosophy. Three-dimensional freedom contains both "negative" and "positive" elements in this semantic space. Following the implications of three-dimensional liberation for concrete institutional assessments, Adorno's and Castoriadis's suggestions are presented and critically examined. ;Three-dimensional freedom is presented as a form of the good life, the normative viewpoint based on it is a "political morality of freedom" in Joseph Raz's sense. It does not exclude "moral doctrines" from the "political" arena, as demanded in John Rawls's "Political Liberalism". The study also compares three-dimensional freedom with other reformulations of the project of emancipation by Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth and Ernesto Laclau