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In the television series >The Walking Dead<, survivors of an apocalypse take shelter in a prison, while zombies circle the fences looking for a way in. The zombies are shadows cast by a past to which the survivors cannot return but which they cannot escape. The living dead represent the past that, as Karl Marx wrote, >weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.< The prison that holds us today is what right-wing philosopher Francis Fukuyama called >the end of history,< a predicament in which >we cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better.<
Negative freedom was the ideological rallying call of the bourgeoisie’s historically progressive period, when it overthrew the economic and political power of the landed aristocracy and gave birth to modern liberalism. Liberal philosophers asserted the moral primacy and autonomy of the individual and advocated the market and representative democracy as forms of association that allowed freedom from externally imposed authority. Only those relations of obligation and authority entered into voluntarily by the individual could have legitimacy.