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Institutional differentiation and individual freedom

Despite being arguably the most important modern principle of social organization, institutional differentiation (ID) is to a large extent absent from the sociological debate over modern freedom, which is dominated by two other principles: the democratic rule of law and capitalist markets. In this article, I analyse the effects of ID on individual freedom. To bring ID into the debate, I describe the most important intermediary social processes that translate the effects of this macro-level property into conditions of individual freedom on the micro-level. Four main conclusions follow from my analysis: firstly, that including ID provides support to the ‘optimists’ who think freedom has been democratized in post-war western societies; secondly, that to give an account of modern freedom, we need to include a new category of social freedom provided by ID: ‘substantial’ freedom; thirdly, that social exclusion is the major threat to individual freedom in ID societies; and lastly that we need to develop a concept of ‘positive’ social freedom, in which social structure not only constrains, but also enables individual freedom.