Page - 74 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

75 | www.limina-graz.eu Isabella Guanzini | Ideas of Freedom or he can escape from freedom seeking refuge in other forms of depend- ence and subjection. Within the current political and cultural constellation, where the shared symbolic order has been, in fact, deeply enfeebled, the connective tissue of the different liberties has been lacerated: as a consequence, the exercise of individual liberty itself has become extremely problematic. After the con- flict between liberalism and Marxism during the decades of the Cold War, the question of freedom re-emerges within a politico-economic context that is radically altered. The expansion of global economy and the trans- formation of economic power in the phase of advanced capitalism have undermined the traditional symbolic order, the relationships between so- ciety and politics, and even the very notions of liberalism and democracy. In sum, the general configuration of contemporary existence. On the one hand, according to the sociological analyses of Ulrich Beck (Beck 1992; Beck 1999) and Anthony Giddens, the Risikogesellschaft configures it- self as a society exposed to the new dangers resulting from the unpredict- ability and uncontrollability of the collateral effects marking technologi- cal and industrial progress (so much so that Beck speaks of non-knowledge society): on the other, the Risikogesellschaft presents itself as the habitat of a global citizenship, which is required to assume new responsibilities every- day: within the risk society everything can and must be decided again and again by the single individual. In today’s highly individualized society, where the traditional narratives have lost their legitimacy and their force, subjects must develop their own biography in an autonomous way. Far from generating an emancipatory effect, such a situation assumes the features of an unsustainable hazard, whose disruptive result is the loss of a common horizon onto which one could simply shift the burden of responsibility. The difference to traditional societies consists in the fact that the subject of late capitalist societies acts under the illusion of being free, namely of being an active subject capable of rational and conscious choices geared towards improving the quality of life. The social rhetoric – i.  e. the cun- ning of capitalist reason – systematically relies on the spectre of freedom as the managerial and productive principle of the individuation of subjects. Indeed, as Foucault claims, neoliberal governmentality is marked by the incessant “production of freedom” corresponding to the economic regime of a specific society: The spectre of freedom as the principle of the individuation of subjects