Lecture
CPP Colloquium "What is freedom for? A relational approach to liberal personhood"
- Date
- Thursday 17 April 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.48
The Centre of Political Philosophy is pleased to announce a lecture by Marthe Goudsmit Samaritter, postdoc researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, Department of Criminal Law in Freiburg.
About
Marthe Goudsmit Samaritter is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law. She works on criminal law theory, jurisprudence, and personhood theory. Her research focuses on non-physical wrongs against persons, such as those of the digital age, for instance image-based sexual abuse. She holds a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford, and previously studied Philosophy of Law (MA), Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law (LL.M), and Public International Law (LL.M) at Leiden University.
Abstract
Liberal political theory’s foundational commitment to _atomistic personhood_—premised on autonomous, self-determining individuals whose value stems from their mental capacities—shapes how liberal democracies conceptualise freedom, rights, and state authority (Nedelsky 2012). This paper contends that this ontology inadequately addresses harms arising from the erosion of relational bonds (e.g., coercive control, digital abuse) and misaligns with growing biological and psychological evidence of humans as inherently relational beings (Varela 1991, Kyselo 2014). By reorienting liberalism toward _relational personhood_—a framework recognising individuals as mutually constituted through networks of care, recognition, and interdependence (Nedelsky, 2012, Herring 2013)—this work redefines liberty not as non-interference but as the positive capacity to flourish through sustaining meaningful relationships.
Critiquing the implicit atomism of persons in classical liberalism (Locke 1690), the analysis reveals how traditional definitions of personhood in liberal democracies assume an ontology of metaphysically isolated individuals (Rawls 1985), sidelining relational harms as secondary to physical or material injury (Von Hirsch and Jareborg 1991). Relational personhood, by asserting that value and identity emerge not from isolated intellectual capacities but through being embedded within social contexts (Foster and Herring 2017), repositions violations such as systemic isolation and image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) as central, rather than peripheral, wrongs. Such harms destabilise the conditions for relational selfhood, which, when taken as the theoretical foundation for our legal and political systems, is a prerequisite for meaningful liberty.
This paper explores how liberalism can be reconciled with a relational definition of persons by positing that the reason we value freedom is not freedom for freedom's sake (Berlin 1958), but that it is valuable because it can enable us to maximally be ourselves. Depending on one's definition of personhood 'what is freedom for?' gets a different answer, and, I hold, whatever the answer is could function as a theoretical foundation for law in liberal societies. That persons are inherently relational beings is a good reason to adopt a relational definition of persons in liberal democracies. This reconceptualisation of liberal persons challenges liberalism to evolve beyond its atomistic roots, offering a cohesive rationale for protecting digital and interpersonal spaces where relational personhood is most vulnerable. By centring the purpose of liberty as pursuing the enactment of personhood, liberal democracies can better navigate 21st-century wrongs while preserving their foundational commitment to human value—now understood as inherently social as opposed to individualistic.