Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-Person Expressivity and Its Social Implications

In this book, Altieri argues that subjective agency cannot be satisfactorily accomplished within the modes of thought now dominating the humanities: literary criticism and cultural studies remain trapped in binaries shaped by post-structural theory, and Anglo-American ethics is not sufficiently responsive to the challenges that theory poses to its assumptions about interests, judgment and public responsibility. So he turns, instead, to the expressivist tradition in philosophy best represented by Spinoza and Hegel. But rather than rely directly on its languages for substance and for self-articulation, he shows how one can secure those ideas on the basis of Wittgenstein's work on intentionality. In so doing, Altieri works through the most influential contemporary accounts of ethical agency - by Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams and Stanley Cavell - in order to argue that a version of expressivist interests based on Kant's aesthetics offers the most promising path. Finally, he spells out the connections between expressivist ethics and liberal politics, using those connections to defend liberalism against communitarian positions.