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Liberalism Unsettled: Freedom And Status In The Promise Of Marriage, Anat Rosenberg

Anat Rosenberg

This paper examines the tension between freedom and subjection under liberalism; but, rather than emphasize either side of the binary, my aim is to articulate the terms of duality, and provide an account of the social life of liberal thought. To do so, I revisit the nineteenth-century promise of marriage. The promise of marriage represented a conceptual fusion of the liberal ideals of contract and sentiment, central to rise of the free market and the conjugal family, and of the counterforces of status – particularly gender and class. While the former marshaled the hope of free will as a new …