In this essay, Simon Marginson focuses on self-determining academic freedom in universities, and especially the conditions and drivers of the radical-creative imagination that is manifest in sudden intellectual breaks in knowledge. Marginson's objective is to establish foundations in political philosophy for a sociological study of the effects of the new public management (NPM) on academic self-determination and radical creativity. After discussing the radical-creative imagination, Marginson identifies the core elements of academic self-determination as agency freedom, freedom as power, and freedom as control. He then annotates each of the particular administrative and financial practices fostered by NPM in the light of these constituents of freedom, explores the implications for the radical-creative imagination, and identifies possible lines of empirical inquiry for further sociological study.