ABSTRACT
The western idea of liberty depends on philosophical categories that cannot be separated from the complex, energy-rich societies in which they emerged. The historicity of liberal ideas undermines any sense of a universal yardstick of freedom against which long-term developments might be measured. On the timescale of geological epochs, not only dominant ideas and cognitive categories, but the fundamental structures of psychology and personality are subject to paradigmatic variability. Using Elias’s “triad of controls,” a typology of societal and personality types and material/energy regimes is advanced as a basis for exploring the possibilities for “liberty in the Anthropocene.”
