Freedom, conflict, and the eclipse of emancipation: a positional sociology perspective

Abstract This article offers a critical sociological analysis of the contemporary disjunction between the persistent emphasis on individual freedom and the progressive weakening of the material and collective conditions of emancipation. Rather than interpreting this disjunction as a simple gap between normative principles and social practices, the article argues that it reflects a structural transformation in the meaning of freedom and in its relationship to conflict. The analysis shows how freedom, in its hegemonic contemporary configuration, has historically consolidated as a status. Understood as a formal attribute of the subject, freedom is not restricted but stabilized in a way that separates it from the social relations and material conditions that enable its effective exercise. This reconfiguration allows freedom to coexist with growing inequalities, widespread precarity, and institutionalized forms of violence, without requiring any transformation of the social relations that produce them. From this perspective, emancipation does not appear as the unfulfilled complement of freedom, but as what freedom, as status, tends structurally to displace. Conceived as a historical and conflictual process, emancipation makes visible the conditions of subjectivation and challenges the apparent necessity of the existing social order. Its marginalization therefore signals not its theoretical obsolescence, but the increasing difficulty of sustaining collective processes of social transformation in contexts marked by the depoliticization of conflict. Drawing on a positional sociology perspective, the article conceptualises freedom and emancipation as situated and unequally distributed capacities, and proposes a framework for reconnecting freedom, conflict, and emancipation within contemporary critical social theory.