Hegel saw freedom as "possible . . . only if one is also already in a certain (ultimately institutional, norm-governed) relation to others." In other words, freedom is actualized through our social relations, which means that the loss of freedom is actualized through distortions in social relations. This argument, for the first time, opened up philosophical thinking to sociological evidence and, at its most radical, acknowledged that at particular historical moments, institutional forces may come to undermine the inherited values and norms that govern social relations. When this happens, people start to feel themselves "part of a practice that has either gone dead . . . or requires of [them] further commitments incompatible with others necessary within some form of life." Put bluntly, when our form of life starts to conflict with our underlying values, "the lives in a form of life become uninhabitable."

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 490