La Political enlightment and citizens selfgovernment

Abstract

According to the philosophy of Enlightenment, the problem of the autonomy of the human being is inseparable from its faculty of choice under the general and for the general. The idea here is the development of the human being, since this faculty of choice, in terms of its forms of social realization in the context of the interaction and conflict of us. In this sense, the problem of autonomy is necessarily linked to its practical realization, and for this reason the self-government of citizens constitutes the historical claim, in the 18th century, of that faculty of free choice against the arbitrariness and coercion of power.

The philosophical consideration of moral and political autonomy is located in the field of the problem of the institution and rationality of the social and political order to the extent that it is assumed as a conscious construction of the human being itself. It is in accordance with the requirement of this link between the autonomy of the human being, as a self-determination being, and the problem of the rationality of the political order, that we want to demonstrate here that the philosophy of the Enlightenment entails a radical democratic content as the fundamental content of political modernity.