This means that, to some extent, human desire must indeed heavily invest in a narrative reading of life events that provide the conditions for its flourishing. On the other hand, exclusive and totalizing investments in such narrative readings make civic freedom and civic rationality impossible. This leaves unanswered the central question raised by the teleological turn in post-metaphysical liberal political philosophy. To the extent that the narrative over-investment of desire in its current object represents a danger, we can understand civic freedom, as the liberation of desire, as a good worthy of pursuit for its own sake. But to the extent that civic freedom itself can produce a narrative detachment from all objects of desire, it represents a threat.
Civic freedom is a component of the civic good.
If we are to understand the civic good as a final and substantive good, it must provide some measure for determining the limits and boundaries of the liberation of desire. That measure can perhaps be provided by the second component of the civic good, the exercise of a capacity for civic justice. . . . Copyright 1997 Thomas Bridges.