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Quentin Skinner et al., POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: THE VIEW FROM CAMBRIDGE, 17 Freedom, on the other hand, is too contested a concept to do anything foundational With it-rather than operating as a single potentially unified and unifying concept, it collapses on scrutiny into a multiplicity of highly diverse uses. The only way to deal with this is to integrate freedom into wider ethical conceptions (Luther's 'freedom of the Christian', Kant's 'autonomy', Humboldt's conception of freedom as development of the powers and capacities of the individual, Constant's liberty of the moderns', and so forth). But when one does that, freedom loses its apparent unity and much of its specious motivational power, and Will need to be replaced by something more comprehensive and complete (Christianity, laissez-faire, existentialism, etc.). Any such more concrete replacement Will of course evidently be highly controversial, replacing a mere illusion of consensus With the reality of gross disagreement. So it is difficult to see which Way to go. As for 'civil society', this seems a completely confused concept that is not Worth anyone's time trying to untangle. Melissa Lane disagreed on the question of freedom. Progress has been made in our understanding of the structure of different possible accounts of freedom. Significant advances have been made, for example, by Amartya Sen in elucidating the notion of capabilities, by loseph Raz in elaborating an account of personal autonomy and its relation to the availability of valuable choices, and by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner in recovering and developing republican conceptions of liberty. She agreed with RG that the choice between such diverse accounts would depend on one's attitude to broader ethical conceptions, yet such work had clarified the nature of possible accounts and had dispelled certain myths about the possible contours of the concept of freedom. Raz's work, for example, had challenged the notion that authority and autonomy can o…