What does ‘autonomy’ mean today? Is the Enlightenment understanding of autonomy still relevant for contemporary challenges? How have the limits and possibilities of autonomy been transformed by recent developments in artificial intelligence and big data, political pressures, intersecting oppressions and the climate emergency? The challenges to autonomy today reach across society with unprecedented complexity, and in this book leading scholars from philosophy, economics, linguistics, literature and politics examine the role of autonomy in key areas of contemporary life, forcefully defending a range of different views about the nature and extent of resistance to autonomy today. These essays are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the predicament and prospects of one of modernity’s foundational concepts and one of our most widely cherished values.

Chapter 5.6 and 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Christopher Watkin is Australian Research Council Future Fellow in European Languages at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His recent books include French Philosophy Today (2016), Michel Serres: Figures of Thought (2020) and Biblical Critical Theory (2022). You can find him on the web at christopherwatkin.com, and on Twitter @DrChrisWatkin.

Oliver Davis is Professor of French Studies at Warwick University, UK. He is the author of Jacques Rancière (2010), editor of Rancière Now (2013) and co-author, with Tim Dean, of Hatred of Sex (2022), among other works. He serves as Executive Editor of Modern & Contemporary France. He is currently researching the political stewardship of psychedelics.