The pursuit of political freedom is necessarily ambivalent because it is at odds with security, stability, protection, and irresponsibility; because it requires that we surrender the conservative pleasures of familiarity, insularity, and routine for investment in a more open horizon of possibility and sustained willingness to risk identity, both collective and individual. Freedom thus conceived is precisely at odds with the adolescent pleasures held out by liberal formulations of liberty as license. Indeed, the admonition to adolescents that “with freedom comes responsibilities” misses the point of this investment insofar as it isolates freedom from responsibility. The notion that there is a debt to pay for spending, a price to pay for indulgence, a weight to counter lightness already casts freedom as a matter of lightness, spending, indulgence – just the thing for adolescents or the relentlessly self-interested subject of liberalism. Freedom of the kind that seeks to set the terms of social existence requires inventive and careful use of power rather than rebellion against authority; it is sober, exhausting, and without parents. “For what is freedom,” Nietzsche queries in Twilight of the Idols, but “that one has the will to assume responsibility for oneself”.

Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995) at 24-25