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Freedom: Political
Freedom: Political Timothy O’Hagan, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract Political liberty or freedom is an essentially contested concept, as Berlin emphasized. He distinguished positive liberty (the ‘liberty of the ancients,’ exercised in political participation, as well as in Kantian moral autonomy) from negative liberty (the ‘liberty of the moderns,’ the ‘right to be let alone’ in one’s private life). That distinction has been refined, criticized, rejected, and resurrected in the subsequent debate. In the light of it, five rival approaches are distinguished within the English language literature. These are (1) welfare liberalism (Rawls and Dworkin), (2) libertarianism (Nozick), (3) freedom, economics, and power (the neo-Marxism of Cohen, the post-Marxism of van Parijs, and the neo-Aristotelianism of Sen), (4) freedom as attaining autonomy through community (Raz), and (5) civic republicanism, i.e., freedom as involving political activity (the instrumental version of Skinner; the constitutive version of Pettit).
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Two Concepts of Liberty Discussions of political freedom since the mid-twentieth century have rotated around two separate but related themes: on the one hand the slogan of the French Revolution ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ and on the other hand Benjamin Constant’s distinction between ‘the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns,’ transformed and transmitted to the Englishspeaking world by Isaiah Berlin in Two Concepts of Liberty.
Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity Since the French and American Revolution modern states have been committed, at least formally, to the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. However, from the start it became evident that those three aspirations are by no means automatically compatible. Attempts to balance them have taken different forms. Libertarian advocates of the laissez-faire market have argued that any attempt to promote greater equality of resources involves the illegitimate restriction of the right of individuals freely to pursue their own interests, whatever they may be. For some Marxists formal ‘bourgeois’ liberties are valueless until the inequality between social classes is abolished. Many others, who may be labeled social democrats in Europe or liberals in the United States, have sought to show that the three aspirations, far from being incompatible, are linked by ties of mutual entailment.
Two Concepts of Liberty The most influential contribution to the topic of political freedom in the English language literature of the twentieth century remains Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty, delivered as an inaugural lecture at Oxford University in 1958. In it he distinguished ‘positive liberty’ (PL), exercised in political participation, as well as in Kantian moral autonomy, from ‘negative liberty’ (NL), the ‘right to be let alone’ in one’s private life. The author made some changes to the later edition, but the core distinction remained intact. Berlin’s lecture is an unsystematic mixture of different elements: conceptual analysis, political engagement in the postwar antitotalitarian struggle,
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and a rich, if eclectic, essay in intellectual history. But for all its shortcomings, it made the opposition between PL and NL central to much subsequent discussion. Berlin’s political task was to unmask the perversion of language by Stalinist ideologues, who presented the worst forms of oppression as ‘real (socialist)’ freedom, as opposed to ‘mere bourgeois (formal)’ freedom. Berlin aligned the former with ‘positive’ liberty and the latter with ‘negative’ liberty and reasserted the value of the latter against its critics. Historically, Berlin identified NL with liberalism, the tradition that defended the individual against ‘interference,’ particularly when exercised by the state. However, the idea of ‘interference’ is hard to tie down. Berlin himself was ambivalent as to whether the interference must be deliberate or not, but he was adamant that an inability caused by the social structure (e.g., the inability of the worker to control the means of production in traditional Marxist theory) is not a case of unfreedom. He agreed that the ‘classical English political theorists’ were ‘prepared to curtail freedom in the interests of other values and indeed of freedom itself.’ They held that without law, ‘freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.’ A natural interpretation of that insight is that the law positively creates freedom for the minnow, allowing it to do things it would otherwise be unable to do. In the words of Locke (a quintessential negative libertarian for Berlin): “the end of Law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.” Berlin could agree that the pike’s freedom is restricted for the sake of the minnow’s freedom (‘curtailed in the interests of liberty itself’), but his polemical drive was against partisans of PL who would maintain that the pike’s freedom too is (really) enhanced by the restriction. Another ambivalence within NL concerns the connection between freedom and wishes. Berlin began by tying the two together directly, defining oppression as “the part I believe to be played by other human beings . in frustrating my wishes.” Later he rejected the definition of freedom as “the ability to do what one wants” because it is compatible with a situation in which all one’s wants are restricted by brainwashing or the removal of desirable objects. At the heart of NL lies ‘the right to be let alone,’ but that right turns out to be remarkably elusive. If NL is hard to tie down, PL is even more so. PL contains both (1) political elements (PL-pol) and (2) moral elements
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(PL-mor). (1) is essentially the freedom to participate in the political process; (2) includes the ability to be the autonomous master of one’s own drives, which is associated with the romantic notion of the divided self. Rousseau says that both (1) and (2) are the outcome of entering civil society, but he is careful not to identify them. When Constant (1988) introduced the distinction between the ‘liberty of the ancients’ and the ‘liberty of the moderns,’ he was concerned with (1). His polemical claim was that the ‘liberty of the ancients’ nowadays meant the unbridled exercise of popular sovereignty (PL-pol) to the detriment of NL. For Berlin, the danger of modern totalitarian ideology is that it harnesses (1) to (2). It suggests that, through laws endorsed by ‘the people,’ irrational empirical selves should be forced to coincide with rational ends (their ‘real selves’). In response to the two themes identified earlier, five broad approaches to political freedom can now be distinguished. In each of these, the three fundamental values of liberty, equality, and fraternity are addressed. Writers inspired by Berlin focus on incompatibilities between those values. Others seek to show that when they are more clearly understood, it will be seen either that they are compatible or that the very idea of balancing one against the other must be abandoned. In their analyses, the terminology of PL and NL frequently recurs, but the distinction made above between dimensions (1) and (2) of PL frequently is ignored. The approaches to be considered are (1) welfare liberalism; (2) libertarianism; (3) freedom, economics, and power; (4) freedom and community; and (5) civic republicanism.
Welfare Liberalism For theorists of welfare liberalism, political freedom is exercised in a context of representative democracy constrained by constitutional checks to protect individual rights and by a fluctuating sense of obligation to redress the inequalities thrown up by the operation of the market. The two outstanding proponents of this approach are John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin.
Rawls Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) is the most comprehensive, systematic work of modern political philosophy. In it the author expounds the moral basis of pluralist welfarism, combining the three elements of liberty, equality, and fraternity into a coherent whole. At the heart of the book lie the two principles of justice. The first principle states that “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.” ‘Basic liberties’ are specified as “roughly speaking, political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law.” These are what Marxists called ‘bourgeois liberties.’ The list is not equivalent to NL-pol, since they include certain ‘positive’ political elements, even if the ‘negative’ liberties of privacy may be more important than ‘positive’ ones to modern citizens. In subsequent work, Rawls (1993) has responded to Hart’s criticism that the idea of ‘maximizing freedom’ is incoherent. He
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has rewritten the first principle to read: “Each person has a claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.” He has also added the ‘integrity’ (physical and psychological security) of the person to the list of basic liberties to be protected by the first principle. However, he has not modified the central claims of A Theory of Justice that the modern liberal state must (1) guarantee ‘basic liberties’ and (2) strive to maximize the welfare of the worst-off members of society by redistributive mechanisms, and that the first principle must not be sacrificed to the second, since ‘liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty.’ Most of the other important revisions have concerned structure and methodology rather than content. Rawls has anchored the two principles more explicitly in a conception of citizens of a modern pluralist state, as it has developed since the Reformation. They are ‘regarded as free and equal persons,’ endowed with “two moral powers . namely a capacity for a sense of justice and a capacity for a conception of the good.” Such citizens display their freedom in the following ways. They have ‘the moral power to have a conception of the good’ and are ‘capable of revising and changing this conception.’ They ‘regard themselves as self-authenticating sources of moral claims.’ They are capable of taking responsibility for their ‘ends.’ The two principles of justice remain unaltered and are still subject to attack from both left and right. Left-wing critics charge that first principle ‘bourgeois’ liberties are hollow and worthless for the mass of the population. To them Rawls had already responded in A Theory of Justice by distinguishing equal liberty from equal worth of liberty, acknowledging that it is the latter that is important, and predicting, perhaps optimistically, that it would be enhanced by the application of the difference principle. Rightwing ‘libertarian’ critics reject all redistributive mechanisms, because they infringe the individual’s unrestricted right to accumulate property. Rawls’ response to them is also contained in A Theory of Justice, namely, that individuals have a basic right to own personal property, but that right does not entail any particular property system, whether capitalist or socialist. In each particular case the choice of system will be determined by its ability to maximize the welfare of the worst-off.
Dworkin Dworkin’s political philosophy is an attempt to ‘fine-tune’ both the methodology and the political recommendations of Rawls’s welfare liberalism. Methodologically, Dworkin denies that liberalism must balance liberty against equality. That image wrongly presupposes that liberty can be quantified, so that ‘fundamental’ liberties weigh more heavily than trivial ones. Instead, ‘the fundamental liberties are important because we value something else that they protect.’ That ‘something else’ is, unexpectedly, a form of equality, the principle that a government should treat all its citizens with ‘equal concern and respect.’ The ‘fundamental’ liberties, then, are entailed by the equality principle itself, according to which ‘the government (should) treat all its citizens as free, or as independent, or with equal dignity.’ Dworkin accepts the Rawlsian requirement that “political decisions must be . independent of any particular conception of the good life ..” Thus governments are bound by the negative requirement to be neutral between
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lifestyles, and also by the positive requirement to ‘respect’ the ‘dignity and independence’ of its citizens. In terms of political recommendations, Dworkin proceeds from a tension at the heart of Rawls’s two principles. While the first principle defends the conditions of basic freedoms, and addresses people as autonomous agents, the second principle might undermine people’s motivation to exercise their freedom to ‘better themselves,’ addressing them as passive recipients of benefits. In response to this tension, Dworkin introduces a key modification. He follows Rawls in compensating people for ‘irrelevant differences, like differences in talent.’ However, he argues that people should be ‘responsible for the costs of their choices.’ The system, in short, must be both ‘ambition sensitive’ and ‘endowment insensitive.’ However, Dworkin’s modification may have introduced a new tension of its own, since, however finely tuned it is, its two requirements must work against one another: “the more we try to make the distribution sensitive to people’s ambitions, the more likely it is that some people disadvantaged by circumstances will be undeservedly penalized, and vice versa” (Guest, 1997). Everything now hinges on the possibility of making a realistic distinction between ambition and endowment, between ‘personality’ and ‘circumstances.’ The fact that this is so difficult suggests that the tension between freedom and equality may still be unresolved.
Libertarianism, Freedom as the Unrestricted Right to Own Private Property: Nozick Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) was a polemical response to Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. At the time of its publication, there was a backlash against welfarism and state intervention in the economy. That backlash was driven by the economic theory that managed markets are inefficient, since redistribution through taxation takes away incentives. However, although Nozick’s book was congenial to that theory, his philosophical position is independent of it. Nozick would defend his position on the grounds that it was the correct one, even if it were inefficient. He would in fact reject appeals to economic efficiency as improperly utilitarian. Although labeled a ‘libertarian,’ Nozick’s starting point is not the idea of ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom,’ but rather the Lockean one of ‘self-ownership.’ This has polemical value because it allows Nozick to proceed against Rawls’ (and other welfarists’) programs of redistribution by appealing to a hatred of slavery shared by all across the political spectrum since the ‘bourgeois revolutions,’ and suggesting, by a rhetorical sleight of hand, that “taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.” The slide has some source in Locke’s ‘labor theory of property,’ the idea that one has a property right to something if one has ‘mixed one’s labor with it.’ However, Locke did not suggest that that right is absolute in the same sense that one’s right to bodily integrity is. The sleight of hand at the heart of libertarianism is this. We all agree that if A has the right to make use of B’s body, of which B is the rightful owner, without B’s consent, then B is A’s slave. By parity of reason, it is suggested, if A has the right to make use of B’s property, of which B is the rightful owner, without B’s consent, by taxing B, then B is A’s slave. The sleight of hand depends on accepting the extension of self-ownership from
ownership of one’s own body to ownership of whatever one has acquired legally, an extension that is not evidently justified. Nonetheless, libertarians may be able to deploy a ‘slippery slope’ argument against welfarism without making this particular sleight of hand. Rawls’s two principles of justice are intended ‘to balance the twin demands of (1) respecting choices and (2) rectifying circumstances.’ Rawls intends (1) to be applied to individuals, (2) to groups. However, according to the libertarian, there is nothing within Rawls’s theory to prevent the radical welfarist from extending rectificatory treatment to individuals too. How is one to define what intervention is legitimate in order to rectify circumstances? If the line is to be drawn around the body, it would seem to mean that any nonbodily interference is at least in principle legitimate in order to rectify circumstances. That sounds sinister even to those who are not extreme ‘libertarians.’
Freedom, Economics, and Power In the past, egalitarians, Marxists, and non-Marxists alike derided ‘bourgeois freedoms’ for masking from the workers their real enslavement. The modern egalitarians considered in this section all take seriously the demand for real equality of freedom. However, unlike their predecessors, they all also take seriously the importance of the ‘basic’ freedoms that lie at the heart of liberalism. The three positions considered in this section are linked by the insight that freedom and equality are linked intimately, and that the conditions of equality and inequality are zero-sum relations of economic power. In each of the three, real freedom is ‘positive’ in the sense that it requires more than just the ‘right to be let alone.’ On the other hand, it is not the ‘liberty of the ancients,’ since it recognizes the importance of private life in the modern world.
Neo-Marxism: Cohen In the most sophisticated version of neo-Marxism, that of Cohen, “there is . a conflict between social equality and the liberty of some people,” but that should not stand in the way of “the pursuit of social equality, since a humane concern for liberty must first of all direct itself to the condition of those who enjoy hardly any of it.” Neo-Marxists thus agree with liberals that freedom of the individual is the most important political value, and that modern capitalism delivers it to all members of society, including proletarians, in several important ways. First, all members of a capitalist society (worker and capitalist alike) are legally free. Second, any particular worker is always legally free, and often economically free, to leave the proletariat and become a petty bourgeois or even a capitalist. However, within a capitalist society, ‘although most proletarians are free to escape the proletariat, indeed even if all are, the proletariat is an imprisoned class.’ Third, capitalism has delivered ‘important freedoms beyond that of buying and selling.’ These include ‘freedom of speech, assembly, worship, publication, movement, and political participation.’ The neo-Marxist Cohen is agnostic about ‘how accidental the connection between capitalism and those freedoms has been and is,’ but is committed to the view that only ‘freedom to buy and sell belongs to
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capitalism’s inmost nature.’ However, Marxists must still acknowledge that ‘bourgeois freedoms’ really are freedoms: “. when socialists suggest that there is no real liberty under capitalism, or that socialism promises liberty of a higher and unprecedented kind . their line is theoretically incorrect and politically disastrous. For liberty under capitalism is, where it exists, just that, liberty; and if socialism will not give us plenty of it, we shall rightly be disappointed.” In recent writings, Cohen (1995) has begun to investigate the idea of real freedom, understood as ‘autonomy, the circumstances of genuine control over one’s own life.’ With this turn, neo-Marxism returns to the old site of conflict, since we must ‘ask what kind and degree of control over external things a person must have to enjoy autonomy, and then to ask whether such control is compatible with socialist equality.’ Cohen’s project now is to translate the idea of real freedom into terms that are applicable to the real world, and, where possible, quantifiable. His model of ‘equal access to advantage’ now stands alongside Van Parijs’s (1995) and Sen’s (1992) models. It thus forms part of a rich developing research program. Whether it should still be called Marxist is another question.
Post-Marxism: van Parijs In the post-Marxist program of van Parijs, the normative goal of equalizing access to freedom is maintained. At the same time, the Marxian theory of exploitation is abandoned, and the capitalist market is now seen as the only vehicle that can deliver ‘real freedom for all’ in practice. The goal is to ‘empower’ the greatest number of people. The method is to guarantee them an unconditional ‘basic income’ that will prevent personal dependence and allow individuals to make meaningful choices between life styles. The ‘basic income’ project has now entered the real political agenda in Western Europe. The goal of the post-Marxists is to reconcile freedom and equality by the principle to ‘maximization of an unconditional income, subject to formal freedom being protected and to no one’s endowment being unanimously found worse than someone else’s.’ That would guarantee the widest, and fairest, distribution of ‘real’ freedom that could also be delivered by a ‘sustainable’ economic system. Van Parijs maintains that that system would be a highly regulated, interventionist form of capitalism. His reasons are fourfold. First, it is (probably) more efficient than socialism. Second, it can (probably) guarantee a higher basic income than socialism can. Third, it can (certainly) guarantee formal freedoms, whereas socialist régimes have still to prove that they can. Last, and this is a decisive consideration, even if there are reforms of international economic affairs, it will be impossible to promote an ‘autarkic’ socialist régime in one country without imposing unacceptable restrictions on the movement of its people to other (higher paying) countries.
Neo-Aristotelian Freedom as Capability: Sen The third egalitarian model combines sophisticated economic theory with a deep philosophical anthropology derived from Aristotle. The leading proponent of this model is Sen. The aim here is to construct a model of freedom that is sufficiently objective to be used in cross-cultural comparisons,
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but that is also sensitive to the different weightings given to the elements of a flourishing life in different cultures. Sen (1992) draws up a list of ‘functionings’ that include ‘being adequately nourished’ and ‘having self-respect,’ and defines ‘well-being freedom’ as the capability to achieve those functionings. However, there is also ‘agency freedom,’ defined as the capability to achieve whatever one’s objectives are. Since many people have objectives other than their own well-being, these two freedoms may conflict. It is agency freedom that has been at the center of most liberal discussions. Sen acknowledges its importance, but weighs it alongside well-being freedom in evaluating the totality of a person’s life. Even within agency freedom, Sen advises liberals not to exaggerate the importance of the agent’s direct control of an outcome. Instead, he proposes a counterfactual formula, “I am free when control is exercised in line with what I would choose.” That formula can be generalized to cover all forms of freedom, even when the term ‘freedom’ is extended to cover ‘freedom from hunger,’ ‘freedom from malaria,’ etc.: ‘One values living without malaria, desires such a life, and would have chosen it, given the choice.’ Society has different obligations to its members concerning their well-being and their agency. It has an evident ‘responsibility to a person’s well-being, especially when it is in some danger of being particularly low,’ which it does not have for that person’s particular agency objectives. In advanced liberal societies at least, ‘in which the focus is on the freedom that people have,’ no patterned outcome can be imposed. For ‘even when complete equality of well-being freedom is . entirely realized, this need not lead to an equality of well-being achieved, since different individuals may give different priority to the pursuit of their own well-being.’ In rejecting patterned outcomes, Sen has shown that the capability model does not conflict with the central values of liberalism expounded by Rawls and Dworkin. The capability model inherits from Aristotle the idea that human beings are endowed with specific capacities that can be more or less fully realized in a flourishing life. In his presentation of the model, Sen is concerned that Aristotle’s particular ‘view of human nature (with a unique list of functionings for a good human life) may be tremendously overspecified.’ He prefers to leave open ‘both . the exact grounds underlying the determination of relative weights, and the actual relative weights chosen.’ This gives Sen’s version of the ‘capability approach’ not only a degree of incompleteness relative to Aristotle’s but also, he thinks, a “considerable ‘cutting power’” for use in the real world of cultural diversity.
Freedom as Attaining Autonomy through Community: Raz Communitarian critics including Taylor, MacIntyre, and Sandel brought two charges against liberalism. At the level of theory, they claimed that it is based on a methodological individualism that in turn derives from an impoverished, atomistic conception of human nature. At the level of practice, they argued that because the liberal order fails to provide a satisfactory sense of identity for its members, ‘intolerance flourishes most where forms of life are dislocated, roots unsettled, and traditions undone.’ Along with the communitarians, Raz (1986) rejects methodological individualism, but against them he argues that this
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does not entail a rejection of liberal values. Raz’s liberalism, ‘the doctrine of limited government,’ is rooted in a ‘nonindividualist conception of morality.’ In opposition to Rawls’s antifoundationalism, Raz propounds a “doctrine of political authority that rests on a perfectionist political defense and promotion of liberty and autonomy.” However, this is not a brutish libertarianism, since freedom is ‘a distinct value, but one that is intimately intertwined with others, and cannot exist by itself.’ Raz in short is a foundationalist, who seeks to establish ‘continuity’ between a moral base and a political–legal superstructure. For someone to attain ‘the ideal of autonomy’ and live an autonomous life, certain conditions must be satisfied. These are the possession of ‘appropriate mental abilities,’ of an ‘adequate range of options,’ and of ‘independence.’ The ideal is positive and comprehensive. It constitutes the moral base of the system, but is not ‘moralistic.’ In particular, it does not involve a teleological conception of self-realization, since, as an autonomous person, one is free to choose whether or not to realize oneself. However, without teleology it is difficult to make autonomy foundational. If autonomy involves integrity (‘identification with one’s life’), self-awareness and commitment to a project, it can still be asked why it is valuable. It is insufficient to answer that ‘many people desire to be autonomous,’ since people’s desires are many, conflicting, and mutable. Rather, says Raz, “the value of autonomy does not depend on choice . the conditions of autonomy concern a central aspect of a whole system of values of a society ..” The kind of society in question is a pluralistic society, which both supports and is supported by this central value ‘valuing autonomy leads to the endorsement of moral pluralism.’ Other modern liberals, notably Rawls, are cautious about seeking to found political legitimacy on a particular understanding of freedom. They hold that particular individuals and groups can value freedom for different reasons, some welcoming it because it is a purely negative guarantee against interference, others because it embodies their highest aspirations. Against them Raz holds that most people in a liberal state must subscribe to the positive value of freedom as autonomy, otherwise its tolerant pluralism will perish.
Civic Republicanism In the fifth model of political freedom, the ‘liberty of the ancients’ reenters the modern debate. In both versions of ‘civic republicanism’ considered below, political participation plays a key role, a purely instrumental role in the first, and a constitutive role in the second.
The Instrumental Notion of Civic Republicanism: Skinner Skinner’s model, known variously as ‘civic republicanism,’ ‘classical republicanism,’ and ‘neo-Romanism’ is rooted in the Renaissance, in particular in the idea derived from Machiavelli that a state that is ‘free from all external slavery’ guarantees ‘personal liberty, understood in the ordinary sense . each citizen remains free from any elements of constraint, especially those that arise from personal dependence and servitude, free to pursue his own chosen ends . To be free . is simply to be
unconstrained from pursuing whatever goals we may happen to set ourselves.’ The independence of the state is linked to the freedom of the individual insofar as ‘a self-governing republic is the only type of régime under which a community can hope to attain greatness at the same time as guaranteeing its citizens their individual liberty.’ Such a state requires two capacities or virtues from it citizens, courage and determination to defend their community against external attack, and practical reason that qualifies them to play an active part in public life. This means that the state can, legitimately, force the citizen to be free. Despite appearances, this ‘strenuous view of citizenship’ is, according to Skinner (1990), consistent with NL in two respects. First, it does not presuppose any specific teleological theory of human nature. Second, when we are ‘forced to be free,’ we are being forced not to ‘reason about ends,’ but to ‘recognize the range of actions we have good reason to perform in order to bring about the ends we actually desire.’ Skinner illustrates the latter point by a contrast between ‘liberals’ like Hobbes and Locke on the one hand and Machiavelli on the other. The ‘liberals’ assert only that the law preserves A’s freedom by coercing B (the potential law-breaker). Machiavelli asserts this. But also asserts that the law also preserves A’s freedom by coercing A “into acting in a particular way . forcing us out of our habitual patterns of self-interested behavior . into discharging the full range of our civic duties and thereby ensuring that the free state on which our own liberty depends is itself maintained free of servitude.” In short, because “freedom depends on service and so on our willingness to cultivate the civic virtues . we may have to be coerced into virtue and thereby constrained into upholding a liberty that, left to ourselves, we would have undermined.” Skinner comments that “contemporary liberalism . is in danger of sweeping the public arena bare of any concepts save self-interest and individual rights.” Ideologies suspicious of the whole modern agenda of individual freedom have stepped in to fill that vacuum. Skinner (1998) thinks that ‘republican freedom’ provides a robust defense against such reactionary positions.
The Constitutive Notion of Civic Republicanism: Pettit In the second version of civic republicanism, espoused by Pettit (1997), Berlin’s dichotomy of the positive freedom of selfmastery and the negative freedom of noninterference is not exhaustive. Beyond those two lies republican freedom, which means absence of domination, not absence of interference. Domination differs from interference in important respects. Domination is a function of the relationship of unequal power between persons or groups of persons. It relates to the capacity of one person or group of persons to interfere in the choices of other persons or groups, rather than to actual instances of interference. However, that would not be enough to pick out the undesirable character of domination, since any nonanarchist social order will empower certain persons or groups, giving them authority over others in given circumstances. So domination is not just the possession of power, but the possession of arbitrary power. The goal of republican freedom, then, is that ‘no one is able to interfere on an arbitrary basis – at their pleasure – in the choices of the free person.’ With this formula Pettit seeks to extract the rational kernel of both negative and positive freedom, while showing that neither is
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sufficient in itself. On the one hand, freedom as nondomination ‘will facilitate the achievement of autonomy,’ as positive freedom requires. On the other hand, it will respect people’s empirical choices, as negative freedom requires, but it will go beyond by showing that dominated people are not really free even if they have the good fortune to suffer no interference when their dominators choose to refrain from exercising their arbitrary power. Insofar as republican freedom is tied to power, it is essentially egalitarian. It is held to protect each individual against arbitrary power, and also to be a ‘communitarian good,’ allowing people to identify with a state that protects their freedom. This version of republican freedom is heavily influenced by Rousseau, purged of totalitarian accretions, and updated to the advanced capitalist societies of the late twentieth century. They are now explicitly inclusive, bestowing their benefits on all members of society, and also multicultural, displaying liberal neutrality toward different substantive conceptions of the good. How far such societies can provide a stable balance between the participatory core of republican freedom and the centrifugal drives of modern pluralism remains to be seen.
See also: Analytical Marxism; Autonomy, Philosophy of; Economics and Ethics; Justice (Philosophical Aspects); Libertarianism; Republicanism: Philosophical Aspects.
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Bibliography Berlin, I., 1958. Two Concepts of Liberty. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Cohen, G.A., 1995. Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Constant, B., 1988. The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns. In: Fontana, B. (Ed.), Political Writings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Dworkin, R., 1981. What is equality parts 1 and 2. Philosophy and Public Affairs 10, 185–246, 283–345. Dworkin, R.M., 1977. Taking Rights Seriously. Duckworth, London. Guest, R., 1997. Ronald Dworkin. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, UK. Honohan, I., 2002. Civic Republicanism. Routledge, London. Nozick, R., 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Blackwell, Oxford, UK. Pettit, P., 1997. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK. Rawls, J., 1971. A Theory of Justice. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Rawls, J., 1993. Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press, New York. Raz, J., 1986. The Morality of Freedom. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK. Sandel, M.J., 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Sen, A., 1992. Inequality Reexamined. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK. Skinner, Q., 1990. The republican idea of political liberty. In: Bock, G., Skinner, Q., Viroli, M. (Eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Skinner, Q., 1998. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Taylor, C., 1979. What’s wrong with negative liberty? In: Ryan, A. (Ed.), Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Van Parijs, P., 1995. Real Freedom for All. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK.
Abstract Political liberty or freedom is an essentially contested concept, as Berlin emphasized. He distinguished positive liberty (the ‘liberty of the ancients,’ exercised in political participation, as well as in Kantian moral autonomy) from negative liberty (the ‘liberty of the moderns,’ the ‘right to be let alone’ in one’s private life). That distinction has been refined, criticized, rejected, and resurrected in the subsequent debate. In the light of it, five rival approaches are distinguished within the English language literature. These are (1) welfare liberalism (Rawls and Dworkin), (2) libertarianism (Nozick), (3) freedom, economics, and power (the neo-Marxism of Cohen, the post-Marxism of van Parijs, and the neo-Aristotelianism of Sen), (4) freedom as attaining autonomy through community (Raz), and (5) civic republicanism, i.e., freedom as involving political activity (the instrumental version of Skinner; the constitutive version of Pettit).
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Two Concepts of Liberty Discussions of political freedom since the mid-twentieth century have rotated around two separate but related themes: on the one hand the slogan of the French Revolution ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ and on the other hand Benjamin Constant’s distinction between ‘the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns,’ transformed and transmitted to the Englishspeaking world by Isaiah Berlin in Two Concepts of Liberty.
Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity Since the French and American Revolution modern states have been committed, at least formally, to the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. However, from the start it became evident that those three aspirations are by no means automatically compatible. Attempts to balance them have taken different forms. Libertarian advocates of the laissez-faire market have argued that any attempt to promote greater equality of resources involves the illegitimate restriction of the right of individuals freely to pursue their own interests, whatever they may be. For some Marxists formal ‘bourgeois’ liberties are valueless until the inequality between social classes is abolished. Many others, who may be labeled social democrats in Europe or liberals in the United States, have sought to show that the three aspirations, far from being incompatible, are linked by ties of mutual entailment.
Two Concepts of Liberty The most influential contribution to the topic of political freedom in the English language literature of the twentieth century remains Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty, delivered as an inaugural lecture at Oxford University in 1958. In it he distinguished ‘positive liberty’ (PL), exercised in political participation, as well as in Kantian moral autonomy, from ‘negative liberty’ (NL), the ‘right to be let alone’ in one’s private life. The author made some changes to the later edition, but the core distinction remained intact. Berlin’s lecture is an unsystematic mixture of different elements: conceptual analysis, political engagement in the postwar antitotalitarian struggle,
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and a rich, if eclectic, essay in intellectual history. But for all its shortcomings, it made the opposition between PL and NL central to much subsequent discussion. Berlin’s political task was to unmask the perversion of language by Stalinist ideologues, who presented the worst forms of oppression as ‘real (socialist)’ freedom, as opposed to ‘mere bourgeois (formal)’ freedom. Berlin aligned the former with ‘positive’ liberty and the latter with ‘negative’ liberty and reasserted the value of the latter against its critics. Historically, Berlin identified NL with liberalism, the tradition that defended the individual against ‘interference,’ particularly when exercised by the state. However, the idea of ‘interference’ is hard to tie down. Berlin himself was ambivalent as to whether the interference must be deliberate or not, but he was adamant that an inability caused by the social structure (e.g., the inability of the worker to control the means of production in traditional Marxist theory) is not a case of unfreedom. He agreed that the ‘classical English political theorists’ were ‘prepared to curtail freedom in the interests of other values and indeed of freedom itself.’ They held that without law, ‘freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.’ A natural interpretation of that insight is that the law positively creates freedom for the minnow, allowing it to do things it would otherwise be unable to do. In the words of Locke (a quintessential negative libertarian for Berlin): “the end of Law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.” Berlin could agree that the pike’s freedom is restricted for the sake of the minnow’s freedom (‘curtailed in the interests of liberty itself’), but his polemical drive was against partisans of PL who would maintain that the pike’s freedom too is (really) enhanced by the restriction. Another ambivalence within NL concerns the connection between freedom and wishes. Berlin began by tying the two together directly, defining oppression as “the part I believe to be played by other human beings . in frustrating my wishes.” Later he rejected the definition of freedom as “the ability to do what one wants” because it is compatible with a situation in which all one’s wants are restricted by brainwashing or the removal of desirable objects. At the heart of NL lies ‘the right to be let alone,’ but that right turns out to be remarkably elusive. If NL is hard to tie down, PL is even more so. PL contains both (1) political elements (PL-pol) and (2) moral elements
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(PL-mor). (1) is essentially the freedom to participate in the political process; (2) includes the ability to be the autonomous master of one’s own drives, which is associated with the romantic notion of the divided self. Rousseau says that both (1) and (2) are the outcome of entering civil society, but he is careful not to identify them. When Constant (1988) introduced the distinction between the ‘liberty of the ancients’ and the ‘liberty of the moderns,’ he was concerned with (1). His polemical claim was that the ‘liberty of the ancients’ nowadays meant the unbridled exercise of popular sovereignty (PL-pol) to the detriment of NL. For Berlin, the danger of modern totalitarian ideology is that it harnesses (1) to (2). It suggests that, through laws endorsed by ‘the people,’ irrational empirical selves should be forced to coincide with rational ends (their ‘real selves’). In response to the two themes identified earlier, five broad approaches to political freedom can now be distinguished. In each of these, the three fundamental values of liberty, equality, and fraternity are addressed. Writers inspired by Berlin focus on incompatibilities between those values. Others seek to show that when they are more clearly understood, it will be seen either that they are compatible or that the very idea of balancing one against the other must be abandoned. In their analyses, the terminology of PL and NL frequently recurs, but the distinction made above between dimensions (1) and (2) of PL frequently is ignored. The approaches to be considered are (1) welfare liberalism; (2) libertarianism; (3) freedom, economics, and power; (4) freedom and community; and (5) civic republicanism.
Welfare Liberalism For theorists of welfare liberalism, political freedom is exercised in a context of representative democracy constrained by constitutional checks to protect individual rights and by a fluctuating sense of obligation to redress the inequalities thrown up by the operation of the market. The two outstanding proponents of this approach are John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin.
Rawls Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) is the most comprehensive, systematic work of modern political philosophy. In it the author expounds the moral basis of pluralist welfarism, combining the three elements of liberty, equality, and fraternity into a coherent whole. At the heart of the book lie the two principles of justice. The first principle states that “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.” ‘Basic liberties’ are specified as “roughly speaking, political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law.” These are what Marxists called ‘bourgeois liberties.’ The list is not equivalent to NL-pol, since they include certain ‘positive’ political elements, even if the ‘negative’ liberties of privacy may be more important than ‘positive’ ones to modern citizens. In subsequent work, Rawls (1993) has responded to Hart’s criticism that the idea of ‘maximizing freedom’ is incoherent. He
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has rewritten the first principle to read: “Each person has a claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.” He has also added the ‘integrity’ (physical and psychological security) of the person to the list of basic liberties to be protected by the first principle. However, he has not modified the central claims of A Theory of Justice that the modern liberal state must (1) guarantee ‘basic liberties’ and (2) strive to maximize the welfare of the worst-off members of society by redistributive mechanisms, and that the first principle must not be sacrificed to the second, since ‘liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty.’ Most of the other important revisions have concerned structure and methodology rather than content. Rawls has anchored the two principles more explicitly in a conception of citizens of a modern pluralist state, as it has developed since the Reformation. They are ‘regarded as free and equal persons,’ endowed with “two moral powers . namely a capacity for a sense of justice and a capacity for a conception of the good.” Such citizens display their freedom in the following ways. They have ‘the moral power to have a conception of the good’ and are ‘capable of revising and changing this conception.’ They ‘regard themselves as self-authenticating sources of moral claims.’ They are capable of taking responsibility for their ‘ends.’ The two principles of justice remain unaltered and are still subject to attack from both left and right. Left-wing critics charge that first principle ‘bourgeois’ liberties are hollow and worthless for the mass of the population. To them Rawls had already responded in A Theory of Justice by distinguishing equal liberty from equal worth of liberty, acknowledging that it is the latter that is important, and predicting, perhaps optimistically, that it would be enhanced by the application of the difference principle. Rightwing ‘libertarian’ critics reject all redistributive mechanisms, because they infringe the individual’s unrestricted right to accumulate property. Rawls’ response to them is also contained in A Theory of Justice, namely, that individuals have a basic right to own personal property, but that right does not entail any particular property system, whether capitalist or socialist. In each particular case the choice of system will be determined by its ability to maximize the welfare of the worst-off.
Dworkin Dworkin’s political philosophy is an attempt to ‘fine-tune’ both the methodology and the political recommendations of Rawls’s welfare liberalism. Methodologically, Dworkin denies that liberalism must balance liberty against equality. That image wrongly presupposes that liberty can be quantified, so that ‘fundamental’ liberties weigh more heavily than trivial ones. Instead, ‘the fundamental liberties are important because we value something else that they protect.’ That ‘something else’ is, unexpectedly, a form of equality, the principle that a government should treat all its citizens with ‘equal concern and respect.’ The ‘fundamental’ liberties, then, are entailed by the equality principle itself, according to which ‘the government (should) treat all its citizens as free, or as independent, or with equal dignity.’ Dworkin accepts the Rawlsian requirement that “political decisions must be . independent of any particular conception of the good life ..” Thus governments are bound by the negative requirement to be neutral between
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lifestyles, and also by the positive requirement to ‘respect’ the ‘dignity and independence’ of its citizens. In terms of political recommendations, Dworkin proceeds from a tension at the heart of Rawls’s two principles. While the first principle defends the conditions of basic freedoms, and addresses people as autonomous agents, the second principle might undermine people’s motivation to exercise their freedom to ‘better themselves,’ addressing them as passive recipients of benefits. In response to this tension, Dworkin introduces a key modification. He follows Rawls in compensating people for ‘irrelevant differences, like differences in talent.’ However, he argues that people should be ‘responsible for the costs of their choices.’ The system, in short, must be both ‘ambition sensitive’ and ‘endowment insensitive.’ However, Dworkin’s modification may have introduced a new tension of its own, since, however finely tuned it is, its two requirements must work against one another: “the more we try to make the distribution sensitive to people’s ambitions, the more likely it is that some people disadvantaged by circumstances will be undeservedly penalized, and vice versa” (Guest, 1997). Everything now hinges on the possibility of making a realistic distinction between ambition and endowment, between ‘personality’ and ‘circumstances.’ The fact that this is so difficult suggests that the tension between freedom and equality may still be unresolved.
Libertarianism, Freedom as the Unrestricted Right to Own Private Property: Nozick Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) was a polemical response to Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. At the time of its publication, there was a backlash against welfarism and state intervention in the economy. That backlash was driven by the economic theory that managed markets are inefficient, since redistribution through taxation takes away incentives. However, although Nozick’s book was congenial to that theory, his philosophical position is independent of it. Nozick would defend his position on the grounds that it was the correct one, even if it were inefficient. He would in fact reject appeals to economic efficiency as improperly utilitarian. Although labeled a ‘libertarian,’ Nozick’s starting point is not the idea of ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom,’ but rather the Lockean one of ‘self-ownership.’ This has polemical value because it allows Nozick to proceed against Rawls’ (and other welfarists’) programs of redistribution by appealing to a hatred of slavery shared by all across the political spectrum since the ‘bourgeois revolutions,’ and suggesting, by a rhetorical sleight of hand, that “taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.” The slide has some source in Locke’s ‘labor theory of property,’ the idea that one has a property right to something if one has ‘mixed one’s labor with it.’ However, Locke did not suggest that that right is absolute in the same sense that one’s right to bodily integrity is. The sleight of hand at the heart of libertarianism is this. We all agree that if A has the right to make use of B’s body, of which B is the rightful owner, without B’s consent, then B is A’s slave. By parity of reason, it is suggested, if A has the right to make use of B’s property, of which B is the rightful owner, without B’s consent, by taxing B, then B is A’s slave. The sleight of hand depends on accepting the extension of self-ownership from
ownership of one’s own body to ownership of whatever one has acquired legally, an extension that is not evidently justified. Nonetheless, libertarians may be able to deploy a ‘slippery slope’ argument against welfarism without making this particular sleight of hand. Rawls’s two principles of justice are intended ‘to balance the twin demands of (1) respecting choices and (2) rectifying circumstances.’ Rawls intends (1) to be applied to individuals, (2) to groups. However, according to the libertarian, there is nothing within Rawls’s theory to prevent the radical welfarist from extending rectificatory treatment to individuals too. How is one to define what intervention is legitimate in order to rectify circumstances? If the line is to be drawn around the body, it would seem to mean that any nonbodily interference is at least in principle legitimate in order to rectify circumstances. That sounds sinister even to those who are not extreme ‘libertarians.’
Freedom, Economics, and Power In the past, egalitarians, Marxists, and non-Marxists alike derided ‘bourgeois freedoms’ for masking from the workers their real enslavement. The modern egalitarians considered in this section all take seriously the demand for real equality of freedom. However, unlike their predecessors, they all also take seriously the importance of the ‘basic’ freedoms that lie at the heart of liberalism. The three positions considered in this section are linked by the insight that freedom and equality are linked intimately, and that the conditions of equality and inequality are zero-sum relations of economic power. In each of the three, real freedom is ‘positive’ in the sense that it requires more than just the ‘right to be let alone.’ On the other hand, it is not the ‘liberty of the ancients,’ since it recognizes the importance of private life in the modern world.
Neo-Marxism: Cohen In the most sophisticated version of neo-Marxism, that of Cohen, “there is . a conflict between social equality and the liberty of some people,” but that should not stand in the way of “the pursuit of social equality, since a humane concern for liberty must first of all direct itself to the condition of those who enjoy hardly any of it.” Neo-Marxists thus agree with liberals that freedom of the individual is the most important political value, and that modern capitalism delivers it to all members of society, including proletarians, in several important ways. First, all members of a capitalist society (worker and capitalist alike) are legally free. Second, any particular worker is always legally free, and often economically free, to leave the proletariat and become a petty bourgeois or even a capitalist. However, within a capitalist society, ‘although most proletarians are free to escape the proletariat, indeed even if all are, the proletariat is an imprisoned class.’ Third, capitalism has delivered ‘important freedoms beyond that of buying and selling.’ These include ‘freedom of speech, assembly, worship, publication, movement, and political participation.’ The neo-Marxist Cohen is agnostic about ‘how accidental the connection between capitalism and those freedoms has been and is,’ but is committed to the view that only ‘freedom to buy and sell belongs to
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capitalism’s inmost nature.’ However, Marxists must still acknowledge that ‘bourgeois freedoms’ really are freedoms: “. when socialists suggest that there is no real liberty under capitalism, or that socialism promises liberty of a higher and unprecedented kind . their line is theoretically incorrect and politically disastrous. For liberty under capitalism is, where it exists, just that, liberty; and if socialism will not give us plenty of it, we shall rightly be disappointed.” In recent writings, Cohen (1995) has begun to investigate the idea of real freedom, understood as ‘autonomy, the circumstances of genuine control over one’s own life.’ With this turn, neo-Marxism returns to the old site of conflict, since we must ‘ask what kind and degree of control over external things a person must have to enjoy autonomy, and then to ask whether such control is compatible with socialist equality.’ Cohen’s project now is to translate the idea of real freedom into terms that are applicable to the real world, and, where possible, quantifiable. His model of ‘equal access to advantage’ now stands alongside Van Parijs’s (1995) and Sen’s (1992) models. It thus forms part of a rich developing research program. Whether it should still be called Marxist is another question.
Post-Marxism: van Parijs In the post-Marxist program of van Parijs, the normative goal of equalizing access to freedom is maintained. At the same time, the Marxian theory of exploitation is abandoned, and the capitalist market is now seen as the only vehicle that can deliver ‘real freedom for all’ in practice. The goal is to ‘empower’ the greatest number of people. The method is to guarantee them an unconditional ‘basic income’ that will prevent personal dependence and allow individuals to make meaningful choices between life styles. The ‘basic income’ project has now entered the real political agenda in Western Europe. The goal of the post-Marxists is to reconcile freedom and equality by the principle to ‘maximization of an unconditional income, subject to formal freedom being protected and to no one’s endowment being unanimously found worse than someone else’s.’ That would guarantee the widest, and fairest, distribution of ‘real’ freedom that could also be delivered by a ‘sustainable’ economic system. Van Parijs maintains that that system would be a highly regulated, interventionist form of capitalism. His reasons are fourfold. First, it is (probably) more efficient than socialism. Second, it can (probably) guarantee a higher basic income than socialism can. Third, it can (certainly) guarantee formal freedoms, whereas socialist régimes have still to prove that they can. Last, and this is a decisive consideration, even if there are reforms of international economic affairs, it will be impossible to promote an ‘autarkic’ socialist régime in one country without imposing unacceptable restrictions on the movement of its people to other (higher paying) countries.
Neo-Aristotelian Freedom as Capability: Sen The third egalitarian model combines sophisticated economic theory with a deep philosophical anthropology derived from Aristotle. The leading proponent of this model is Sen. The aim here is to construct a model of freedom that is sufficiently objective to be used in cross-cultural comparisons,
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but that is also sensitive to the different weightings given to the elements of a flourishing life in different cultures. Sen (1992) draws up a list of ‘functionings’ that include ‘being adequately nourished’ and ‘having self-respect,’ and defines ‘well-being freedom’ as the capability to achieve those functionings. However, there is also ‘agency freedom,’ defined as the capability to achieve whatever one’s objectives are. Since many people have objectives other than their own well-being, these two freedoms may conflict. It is agency freedom that has been at the center of most liberal discussions. Sen acknowledges its importance, but weighs it alongside well-being freedom in evaluating the totality of a person’s life. Even within agency freedom, Sen advises liberals not to exaggerate the importance of the agent’s direct control of an outcome. Instead, he proposes a counterfactual formula, “I am free when control is exercised in line with what I would choose.” That formula can be generalized to cover all forms of freedom, even when the term ‘freedom’ is extended to cover ‘freedom from hunger,’ ‘freedom from malaria,’ etc.: ‘One values living without malaria, desires such a life, and would have chosen it, given the choice.’ Society has different obligations to its members concerning their well-being and their agency. It has an evident ‘responsibility to a person’s well-being, especially when it is in some danger of being particularly low,’ which it does not have for that person’s particular agency objectives. In advanced liberal societies at least, ‘in which the focus is on the freedom that people have,’ no patterned outcome can be imposed. For ‘even when complete equality of well-being freedom is . entirely realized, this need not lead to an equality of well-being achieved, since different individuals may give different priority to the pursuit of their own well-being.’ In rejecting patterned outcomes, Sen has shown that the capability model does not conflict with the central values of liberalism expounded by Rawls and Dworkin. The capability model inherits from Aristotle the idea that human beings are endowed with specific capacities that can be more or less fully realized in a flourishing life. In his presentation of the model, Sen is concerned that Aristotle’s particular ‘view of human nature (with a unique list of functionings for a good human life) may be tremendously overspecified.’ He prefers to leave open ‘both . the exact grounds underlying the determination of relative weights, and the actual relative weights chosen.’ This gives Sen’s version of the ‘capability approach’ not only a degree of incompleteness relative to Aristotle’s but also, he thinks, a “considerable ‘cutting power’” for use in the real world of cultural diversity.
Freedom as Attaining Autonomy through Community: Raz Communitarian critics including Taylor, MacIntyre, and Sandel brought two charges against liberalism. At the level of theory, they claimed that it is based on a methodological individualism that in turn derives from an impoverished, atomistic conception of human nature. At the level of practice, they argued that because the liberal order fails to provide a satisfactory sense of identity for its members, ‘intolerance flourishes most where forms of life are dislocated, roots unsettled, and traditions undone.’ Along with the communitarians, Raz (1986) rejects methodological individualism, but against them he argues that this
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does not entail a rejection of liberal values. Raz’s liberalism, ‘the doctrine of limited government,’ is rooted in a ‘nonindividualist conception of morality.’ In opposition to Rawls’s antifoundationalism, Raz propounds a “doctrine of political authority that rests on a perfectionist political defense and promotion of liberty and autonomy.” However, this is not a brutish libertarianism, since freedom is ‘a distinct value, but one that is intimately intertwined with others, and cannot exist by itself.’ Raz in short is a foundationalist, who seeks to establish ‘continuity’ between a moral base and a political–legal superstructure. For someone to attain ‘the ideal of autonomy’ and live an autonomous life, certain conditions must be satisfied. These are the possession of ‘appropriate mental abilities,’ of an ‘adequate range of options,’ and of ‘independence.’ The ideal is positive and comprehensive. It constitutes the moral base of the system, but is not ‘moralistic.’ In particular, it does not involve a teleological conception of self-realization, since, as an autonomous person, one is free to choose whether or not to realize oneself. However, without teleology it is difficult to make autonomy foundational. If autonomy involves integrity (‘identification with one’s life’), self-awareness and commitment to a project, it can still be asked why it is valuable. It is insufficient to answer that ‘many people desire to be autonomous,’ since people’s desires are many, conflicting, and mutable. Rather, says Raz, “the value of autonomy does not depend on choice . the conditions of autonomy concern a central aspect of a whole system of values of a society ..” The kind of society in question is a pluralistic society, which both supports and is supported by this central value ‘valuing autonomy leads to the endorsement of moral pluralism.’ Other modern liberals, notably Rawls, are cautious about seeking to found political legitimacy on a particular understanding of freedom. They hold that particular individuals and groups can value freedom for different reasons, some welcoming it because it is a purely negative guarantee against interference, others because it embodies their highest aspirations. Against them Raz holds that most people in a liberal state must subscribe to the positive value of freedom as autonomy, otherwise its tolerant pluralism will perish.
Civic Republicanism In the fifth model of political freedom, the ‘liberty of the ancients’ reenters the modern debate. In both versions of ‘civic republicanism’ considered below, political participation plays a key role, a purely instrumental role in the first, and a constitutive role in the second.
The Instrumental Notion of Civic Republicanism: Skinner Skinner’s model, known variously as ‘civic republicanism,’ ‘classical republicanism,’ and ‘neo-Romanism’ is rooted in the Renaissance, in particular in the idea derived from Machiavelli that a state that is ‘free from all external slavery’ guarantees ‘personal liberty, understood in the ordinary sense . each citizen remains free from any elements of constraint, especially those that arise from personal dependence and servitude, free to pursue his own chosen ends . To be free . is simply to be
unconstrained from pursuing whatever goals we may happen to set ourselves.’ The independence of the state is linked to the freedom of the individual insofar as ‘a self-governing republic is the only type of régime under which a community can hope to attain greatness at the same time as guaranteeing its citizens their individual liberty.’ Such a state requires two capacities or virtues from it citizens, courage and determination to defend their community against external attack, and practical reason that qualifies them to play an active part in public life. This means that the state can, legitimately, force the citizen to be free. Despite appearances, this ‘strenuous view of citizenship’ is, according to Skinner (1990), consistent with NL in two respects. First, it does not presuppose any specific teleological theory of human nature. Second, when we are ‘forced to be free,’ we are being forced not to ‘reason about ends,’ but to ‘recognize the range of actions we have good reason to perform in order to bring about the ends we actually desire.’ Skinner illustrates the latter point by a contrast between ‘liberals’ like Hobbes and Locke on the one hand and Machiavelli on the other. The ‘liberals’ assert only that the law preserves A’s freedom by coercing B (the potential law-breaker). Machiavelli asserts this. But also asserts that the law also preserves A’s freedom by coercing A “into acting in a particular way . forcing us out of our habitual patterns of self-interested behavior . into discharging the full range of our civic duties and thereby ensuring that the free state on which our own liberty depends is itself maintained free of servitude.” In short, because “freedom depends on service and so on our willingness to cultivate the civic virtues . we may have to be coerced into virtue and thereby constrained into upholding a liberty that, left to ourselves, we would have undermined.” Skinner comments that “contemporary liberalism . is in danger of sweeping the public arena bare of any concepts save self-interest and individual rights.” Ideologies suspicious of the whole modern agenda of individual freedom have stepped in to fill that vacuum. Skinner (1998) thinks that ‘republican freedom’ provides a robust defense against such reactionary positions.
The Constitutive Notion of Civic Republicanism: Pettit In the second version of civic republicanism, espoused by Pettit (1997), Berlin’s dichotomy of the positive freedom of selfmastery and the negative freedom of noninterference is not exhaustive. Beyond those two lies republican freedom, which means absence of domination, not absence of interference. Domination differs from interference in important respects. Domination is a function of the relationship of unequal power between persons or groups of persons. It relates to the capacity of one person or group of persons to interfere in the choices of other persons or groups, rather than to actual instances of interference. However, that would not be enough to pick out the undesirable character of domination, since any nonanarchist social order will empower certain persons or groups, giving them authority over others in given circumstances. So domination is not just the possession of power, but the possession of arbitrary power. The goal of republican freedom, then, is that ‘no one is able to interfere on an arbitrary basis – at their pleasure – in the choices of the free person.’ With this formula Pettit seeks to extract the rational kernel of both negative and positive freedom, while showing that neither is
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sufficient in itself. On the one hand, freedom as nondomination ‘will facilitate the achievement of autonomy,’ as positive freedom requires. On the other hand, it will respect people’s empirical choices, as negative freedom requires, but it will go beyond by showing that dominated people are not really free even if they have the good fortune to suffer no interference when their dominators choose to refrain from exercising their arbitrary power. Insofar as republican freedom is tied to power, it is essentially egalitarian. It is held to protect each individual against arbitrary power, and also to be a ‘communitarian good,’ allowing people to identify with a state that protects their freedom. This version of republican freedom is heavily influenced by Rousseau, purged of totalitarian accretions, and updated to the advanced capitalist societies of the late twentieth century. They are now explicitly inclusive, bestowing their benefits on all members of society, and also multicultural, displaying liberal neutrality toward different substantive conceptions of the good. How far such societies can provide a stable balance between the participatory core of republican freedom and the centrifugal drives of modern pluralism remains to be seen.
See also: Analytical Marxism; Autonomy, Philosophy of; Economics and Ethics; Justice (Philosophical Aspects); Libertarianism; Republicanism: Philosophical Aspects.
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