Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong With Negative Liberty,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 211–29. [Google Drive Link]
First published in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 175–93.
The divisions in the summary are mine.
There clearly are two kinds of theories, “two families of conceptions”, of liberty: negative and positive, following Berlin. Both families contain a gamut of views within and this must be kept in mind as we tend to get fixated on the most extreme, and almost caricatural variants.
I propose to examine no more than two of these senses [of freedom]. ... The first of these political senses of freedom or liberty (I shall use both words to mean the same), which ... I shall call the ‘negative’ sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’ The second, which I shall call the ‘positive’ sense, is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?’ The two questions are clearly different, even though the answers to them may overlap.
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, in Liberty: Isaiah Berlin, ed. Henry Hardy. [Originally a lecture delivered in 1952]
When positive theories of liberty are attacked, the target is usually some Left totalitarian theory according to which freedom resides exclusively in exercising collective control over one’s destiny in a classless society and in which men are, to use Rousseau’s words, forced to be free.
So that the social pact not be a pointless device, it tacitly includes this engagement, which can alone give force to the others — that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book I, Chapter 7.
And when negative theories are attacked, it is the tough-minded version which sees freedom simply as the absence of external physical [à la Hobbes] or legal [à la Bentham] obstacles.
Both of these targets are caricatures and fail to appreciate the variety and nuance that the two families of conceptions have.
However, there is something strange that happens is such polemic. The forced-to-be-free caricature of positive freedom is what the opponents pin on positive theorists. But the absence-of-external-obstacles caricature is what negative theorists themselves embrace and espouse. Why?
Exercise- and Opportunity-Concept
The doctrines of positive freedom are exercise-concepts. That’s to say, they are concerned with a view of freedom which involves essentially the exercising of control over one’s life where one is free only to the extent that one has effectively determined oneself and the shape of one’s life.
The doctrines of negative freedom are, on the other hand, opportunity-concepts. That’s to say, for them, being free is a matter of what we can do, of what it is open to us to do, whether or not we do anything to exercise these options.
However, one of the most powerful motives behind the modern defence of freedom as individual independence is the idea that each person’s form of self-realization is original to him/her, and can therefore only be worked out independently. In this view, we can fail to achieve our own self-realization through inner fears, or false consciousness, as well as because of external obstacles. This goes beyond Hobbes and Bentham. It is what drives Mill’s defense of freedom.
Given this further nuance of negative liberty, it is impossible to hold that negative freedom is only an opportunity-concept. Here, some degree of exercise is necessary for a man to he thought free. Because being in a position to exercise freedom, having the opportunity, involves removing the internal barriers, which is not possible without having to some extent realized myself. A pure opportunity-concept is impossible.
This might suggest an answer to the paradox mentioned above. Negative theorists stick to crude [Hobbesian of Benthamite] versions of the doctrine because only then can they disable the troubling of positive liberty — the fact that it is an exercise-concept. If they embrace more nuanced versions of negative liberty, for instance, like Mill’s which need some extent of exercise to be called freedom, then they are ceding the ground to positive liberty from which it might grow, they fear, to monstrous and totalitarian proportions.
The advantage of sticking to the crude version is that it seems very simple and goes well with common sense: the basic intuition being that freedom is a matter of being able to do something or other, of not having obstacles in one’s way, rather than being a capacity that we have to realize.
“It naturally seems more prudent to fight the Totalitarian Menace at this last-ditch position, digging in behind the natural frontier of this simple issue, rather than engaging the enemy on the open terrain of exercise-concepts, where one will have to fight to discriminate the good from the bad among such concepts; fight, for instance, for a view of individual self-realization against various notions of collective self-realization, of a nation, or a class. It seems easier and safer to cut all the nonsense off at the start by declaring all self-realization views to be metaphysical hog-wash. Freedom should just be tough-mindedly defined as the absence of external obstacles.”
This position, which abandon the exercise aspect of freedom, fails to defend liberalism in the form we value it. Further, this Maginot Line mentality actually ensures defeat [“as is often the case with Maginot Line mentalities!”]
Discrimination of Motivations
One advantage of this position is it’s simplicity: it allows us to say that freedom is being able to do what you want; and what you want is, well, whatever the hell you want. In contrast, if one adopt’s an exercise concept, the entire burden shifts to the kinds of things what we want and with this comes the trouble of identifying which things we might legitimately/authentically/really want and which we might want only illegitimately/inauthentically/superficially. Being able to do what one wants can no longer be accepted as a sufficient condition of being free. Instead, freedom becomes being able to do not just anything but the kinds of things you really want, that accord your real will, that fulfill the desires of your own true/higher self.
Put differently, the point is that “the subject himself cannot be the final authority on the question whether he is free; for he cannot be the final authority on the question whether his desires are authentic, whether they do or do not frustrate his purposes.”
This might make more obvious and pressing the temptation to adopt the Maginot Line mentality. “For once we admit that the agent himself is not the final authority on his own freedom, do we not open the way to totalitarian manipulation? Do we not legitimate others, supposedly wiser about his purposes than himself, redirecting his feet on the right path, perhaps even by force, and all this in the name of freedom?”
No, we don”t. There may also be good reasons for holding that others are not likely to be in a better position to understand his real purposes. Those who know us intimately, and who surpass us in wisdom, are undoubtedly in a position to advise us, but no official body can possess a doctrine or a technique whereby they could know how to put us on the rails. Indeed, this is what liberalism values. Liberalism in the form that we value it considers self-realization highly. It also accepts that self-realisation can fail for internal reasons, but nonetheless believes that no valid guidance can be provided in principle by social authority. The crude version of freedom would not be able to defend this liberalism.
Still, it remains true that totalitarian theories build upon discrimination between motivations. The path from negative to positive liberty consists of two steps: the first moves us from a conception that talks of doing what we want to one that talks of doing what we really want, and the second introduces a doctrine that specifies a certain form of society in which we can do what we really want and outside of which we cannot.
The temptation is to stay put at the first step; to say that no discrimination of motivations based on some doctrine that identifies the real or true self/motivations is possible or desirable. But staying put in this first step cannot amount to in intelligible defence of an intelligible notion of freedom.
Firstly, even if one claims that freedom is the absence of external obstacles, it is not the absence of external obstacles simpliciter. That’s to say that not all external obstacles can be considered as equal obstacles. Or put differently, some obstacles are more serious and significant. Liberty is not concerned with trifles [De aninimis non curat libertas].
“Freedom is no longer just the absence of external obstacle tout court, but the absence of external obstacle to significant action, to what is important to man. There are discriminations to be made; some restrictions are more serious than others, some are utterly trivial.”
Surely, we cannot say that Tirana [the capital city of Albania] is freer than London based on the fact that there are fewer traffic lights per head in Tirana than in London. Of course this means that there are fewer external obstacles in Tirana than in London. But religion is abolished in Albania while it is freely practiced in London. [Context: Public religious practice was outlawed in Albania in 1967 under communism. The ban was officially lifted in 1990. Taylor wrote this essay for the volume The Idea of Liberty: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, published 1979.] We cannot say that because we can discriminate between what is trivial (in this case, the freedom to travel public roads whenever and however we like) and what is significant (the freedom to practice religion).
The point is that the application of even the crudest conception of negative liberty “requires a background conception of what is significant, according to which some restrictions are seen to he without relevance for freedom altogether, and others are judged as being of greater and lesser importance.”
Strong Evaluations/Import-Attributions
Of course, the negative theorist can simply add the stipulation that judgments of significance have to be made and still hold on to his central claim freedom just is the absence of external obstacles.
However, further troubles emerge when the following question is asked: on what are these judgments of significance based on? Certainly, the answer here cannot be quantitative: that the more significant purposes are those we want more.
What does wanting certain purposes more mean? If it means that those purposes are more significant, the claim is true but empty. If on the other hand it means that those purposes are more urgent or more desired, the claim is simply false because it is of the most banal experience that “the purposes we know to be more significant are not always those which we desire with the greatest urgency to encompass, nor the ones that actually always win out in cases of conflict of desires.”
Thinking of significance in this way gives rise to the fact that humans make strong evaluations; that human subjects are not only subjects of first-order desires, but of second-order desires, desires about desires. We experience some of our desires and goals as intrinsically more significant than others while some others as bad, not just comparatively but absolutely. We also desire not to be moved by spite, or some childish desire to impress at all costs. These judgments of significance are quite independent of the strength of the respective desires.
It is my view that one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person’s will. Human beings are not alone in having desires and motives, or in making choices. …[I]t seems to be peculiarly characteristic of humans, however, that they are able to form what I shall call “second-order desires”… Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are.
The point here that when a more significant desire (say, that of wanting to do well in studies) is thwarted by a less significant one (that of wanting to sleep/party), we might legitimately think that the latter is an obstacle and that we would be freer without it.
What has emerged here is that there are cases in which the obstacles to freedom are internal; and if this is so, then freedom cannot simply be interpreted as the absence of external obstacles. The fact that I am doing what I want, in the sense of following my strongest desire, is not sufficient to establish that I am free.
Clearly, the crude negative conception cannot be sustained. But can it be reconstructed such that it does not legitimate the kind of distinctions about true/real desires/motivations that positive liberty requires? “If our negative theory allows for strong evaluation, allows that some goals are really important to us, and that other desires are seen as not fully ours, then can it not retain the thesis that freedom is being able to do what I want, that is, what I can identify myself as wanting, where this means not just what I identify as my strongest desire, but what I identify as my true, authentic desire or purpose? The subject would still be the final arbiter of his being free/unfree.”
We should have sloughed off the untenable Hobbesian reductive-materialist metaphysics, according to which only external obstacles count, as though action were just movement, and there could be no internal, motivational obstacles to our deeper purposes. But we would be retaining the basic concern of the negative theory, that the subject is still the final authority as to what his freedom consists in, and cannot be second-guessed by external authority. Freedom would he modified to read: the absence of internal or external obstacle to what I truly or authentically want. But we would still be holding the Maginot Line. Or would we?
No, we can’t. For if we adopt this middle position between the crude negative conception and the positive conception, we rule out in principle that the subject can ever be wrong about what he truly wants for the simple reason that the subject is the final arbiter of his being free/unfree. “And how can he never, in principle, be wrong, unless there is nothing to be right or wrong about in this matter?”
This ultimately is the thesis that the negative theorist has to defend: that the subject is the final arbiter of his being free/unfree, and that insofar as he is the final arbiter, he can never in principle be wrong because if he could, he would not be the final arbiter.
For the crude negative theorist, our feelings are merely brute facts: they are simply facts about how we are affected in a certain way and there is nothing further that can be said about them as to whether they are potentially veridical or illusory, authentic or inauthentic. The difference in significance of certain actions/thoughts/feelings would simply be a matter of raw feel.
But there is no such thing as a raw feel. Sure there is the raw feel of pain when the dentist jabs into my tooth, or the raw feel of crawling unease when someone runs his fingernail along the blackboard. But there is no such raw feel of, for instance, shame or fear because these emotions involve our experiencing a situation as bearing a certain import/significance for us, i.e. as shameful and dangerous. Shame and fear can be inappropriate or irrational. We can, in other words, be in error in feeling shame or fear.
“When I am convinced that some career, or an expedition in the Andes, or a love relationship, is of fundamental importance to me (to recur to the above examples), it cannot be just because of the throbs, élans or tremors I feel; I must also have some sense that these are of great significance for me, meet important, long-lasting needs, represent a fulfilment of something central to me, will bring me closer to what I really am, or something of the sort.”
Thus, our emotional life is made up of what might be called import-attributing desires and feelings which might be mistaken. In cases where we want to repudiate them, for instance when I am afraid for no good reason, we certainly are mistaken in feeling fear.
Now consider the case in which there are two conflicting desires, that of wanting to do well in studies and the other of wanting to party all the time, one of which, the latter, hopefully, I repudiate and feel as thought it is not truly mine. What is it to feel that a desire is not truly mine?
To feel that a desire is not truly mine is precisely to think of it as mistaken, irrational, or inappropriate; that the import or the good it supposedly gives us a sense of is not a genuine import or good. The desire to party, party, and party is a fetter because the pleasure it gives is not genuine, does not last, is not healthy, and so on. Losing it, I lose nothing, because its loss deprives me of no genuine good or pleasure or satisfaction.
“It would appear from this that to see our desires as brute gives us no clue as to why some of them are repudiable. On the contrary it is precisely their not being brute” — their having some/a significance or the fact the we attribute importance to them — “which can explain this.”
If this is admitted, then the possibility of error, of false appreciation, is admitted as well. “How can we exclude in principle that there may be other false appreciations which the agent does not detect? That he may be profoundly in error, that is, have a very distorted sense of his fundamental purposes? Who can say that such people cannot exist?” Consider Charles Manson and Andreas Baader — two men with a very distorted sense of our fundamental purposes. Given such extreme cases, we cannot discount the possibility that the rest of mankind can suffer to a lesser degree from the same disabilities.
The point of all this for liberty is that man’s freedom can be hemmed in by internal, motivational obstacles, in addition to external ones. This is because attributions of freedom make sense against a background sense of more and less significant purposes which, we have seen, can be frustrated by our own desires where these are sufficiently based on misappreciation such that we consider them as not really ours, and experience them as fetters.
“[I]n the meaningful sense of ‘free’, that for which we value it, in the sense of being able to act on one’s important purposes, the internally fettered man is not free.”
If one still wants to stick to the crude definition, one will also have to admit that the man with a highly distorted view of his fundamental purpose — a Manson or Baader — is as free as the person who does not have internal fetters. A Manson who has overcome his last remaining compunction against sending his minions to kill on caprice would, on the crude account, be freer than when he had those compunctions. Would the crude theorist sympathise with this kind of freedom? I think not.
“Once we see that we make distinctions of degree and significance in freedoms depending on the significance of the purpose fettered/enabled, how can we deny that it makes a difference to the degree of freedom not only whether one of my basic purposes is frustrated by my own desires but also whether I have grievously misidentified this purpose? …[We cannot. And this being so,] the crude negative view of freedom, the Hobbesian definition, is untenable. Freedom cannot just be the absence of external obstacles, for there may also be internal ones. And nor may the internal obstacles be just confined to those that the subject identifies as such, so that he is the final arbiter; for he may be profoundly mistaken about his purposes and about what he wants to repudiate. And if so, he is less capable of freedom in the meaningful sense of the word.”
In all these three formulations of the issue — opportunity- versus exercise-concept; whether freedom requires that we discriminate amongmotivations; whether it allows of second-guessing the subject — theextreme negative view shows up as wrong. The idea of holding the MaginotLine before this Hobbesian concept is misguided not only because itinvolves abandoning some of the most inspiring terrain of liberalism,which is concerned with individual self-realization, but also because theline turns out to be untenable.
Thomas Hill Green, “On the Different Senses of ‘Freedom’ as Applied to Will and the Progress of Man,” in Works of Thomas Hill Green, ed. R. L. Nettleship, vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), 308–333. [Google Drive Link]
I assume you are aware of the debate on freedom (or liberty). If not, this essay will be very difficult, essentially useless. At the very least, check out the first two sections of this lecture transcript of Quentin Skinner’s “A Genealogy of Liberty”, i.e. the sections, The Liberal Concept and The Hegelian Concept. Green’s ideas on freedom is located, along with those of Plato, Kant, Hegel, the Stoics, etc. within what has been rendered, in that transcript, as the Hegelian Concept, and what Isaiah Berlin has popularised as the positive concept of liberty. In arguing for positive liberty, Green is positioning himself against the what Skinner explicitly calls the Liberal Concept, what Berlin calls negative liberty. This liberal tradition is given classical expression by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke (Green cites Locke but not Hobbes) and taken up further by Bentham and Mill and is alive, as Skinner points out, to this day. [Skinner by the way is arguing for a third concept of freedom, which he calls the Neo-Roman concept and which is popularly known as republican freedom.] In addition to familiarity with this debate, some general familiarity with the ideas of Plato, Kant and Hegel along with Stoic and Christian ethics is recommended as Green engages with them.
“[One] way of imposing an undue strain [on the reader],” Brand Blanshard writes in On Philosophical Style (1954: 53) “is to arrange the stepping-stones in groups so that one must skip about at awkward angles in one group before going on to the next.” The example that Blanshard chooses to illustrate this type of difficulty frequently seen in philosophical writing is a 112-word Green sentence which makes a rather pedestrian point that could be made using a lot fewer words. The point is that Green can be frustrating to read. The style (and the vocabulary) will be familiar to anyone who has read any translation of Hegel. Be ready for the challenge.
Also please read the subsection The Theory of the Will in the entry on him at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and get the meanings of and the connections between “willing”, “freedom”, “objects” and “self-satisfaction”. Green’s idea of the will must be grasped in order to make sense of this essay.
Very briefly, I might illustrate them thus. When I make a choice to do or be something from amongst many other options, that activity of choosing might be called “willing”. “By ‘will’,” Green writes, “we mean the effort of a self-conscious subject to satisfy itself.” Whatever it is that I choose to do or be is the “object” of that willing. And of course, it is always me or my mind doing this “willing”. Hence, in this sense, “willing” is always free. (Take note to distinguish this notion of being free, which is a necessary state of the mind/soul, from that familiar, negative, notion of freedom having to do with societal or political relations, which is that of not being interfered with or frustrated by other persons or the state in doing the things that one wants to do.) But my “willing” could also be such that its “objects” frustrate my nature (my reason, the will of God, the law of man’s being, etc. however we define it.) And if my willing is such that it frustrates these, then it will not lead to “self-satisfaction” or “self-realisation”. To the extent that I am so frustrated, I am, for Green, unfree.
We can finally proceed with the summary.
1. “Since in all willing a man is his own object, the will is always free.” That’s to say, everything that one wills is ultimately directed towards himself whether the will is connected to the objects of desire [what he wants to have/do] or being [what he wants to be]. The nature of these objects differ and because the nature of these objects differ, the nature of freedom also differs. These objects might either frustrate self-satisfaction or they might contribute to its realisation. In the former, the act of seeking the object is always free in one sense because it is afterall the agent who wills the object. But if the object frustrates his self-satisfaction, if it does not conform to “the law of his being”, the agent is unfree in another sense. “His will to arrive at self-satisfaction not being adjusted to the law which determines where this self-satisfaction is to be found, he may be considered in the condition of a bondsman who is carrying out the will of another, not his own.”
From this bondage he emerges into real freedom ...by making its [the law of his being] fulfilment the object of his will; by seeking the satisfaction of himself in objects in which he believes it should be found, and seeking it in them because he believes it should be found in them. For the objects so sought ... have the common characteristic that, because they are sought in such a spirit, in them self-satisfaction is to be found; not the satisfaction of this or that desire, or of each particular desire, but that satisfaction, otherwise called peace or blessedness [or freedom], which consists in the whole man having found his object.
To break free from this bondage, the agent would have to, adapting Green, seek satisfaction of himself in objects in which he believes his self-satisfaction should be found. And the agent should seek satisfaction in those objects because he believes his self-satisfaction should be found in those objects. That’s to say, the agent must be aware of what his nature or the law of his being demands and seek those things (or objects) which will lead him to realise that law (or ‘contribute to the realisation of self-satisfaction’). It is only in this latter case that the agent may be necessarily and properly said to be free.
2. The original use of the term freedom denotes a metaphor that expresses a social and political relation between persons. (For the classic statement of this original, or liberal, or negative view of freedom for which Green uses the adjectives “juristic”, “outward” and “primary”, see Thomas Hobbes, “Of the Liberty of Subjects”.) This original use implies some exemption from compulsion by others. Even in this use, the meaning of freedom is altogether uncertain. The extent and conditions of non-coercion or non-interference — “exemption from compulsion” — that might connote freedom will be different in different societies.
When the term freedom comes to be applied to the relation that men have with their, say, inner life of self-consciousness, as opposed to other members of the society, its meaning fluctuates even more. We might, like Plato, establish, for instance, a relation between man and his impulses which frustrate the attainment of his true good and assert that man is free when he is a master of these impulses and unfree when the impulses are master of him. But such impulses are as unlimited as they are varied. To use the metaphor then is quite arbitrary. It might lead one to say only freedom is to be found in a life of absolute detachment from all interests. And indeed this is what happened with the Stoics and to the Christians.
With St. Paul, the relation established is between man and the (divine) law. “With him ‘freedom’ is specially freedom from the law, from ordinances, from the fear which these inspire.” Law as an external command binds man in a double sense by (a) making him obey for fear of punishment, and (b) in forcing him to obey, by obstructing the enjoyment of his desires which might frustrate the law. In a word, law renders man unfree by forcing him to do what he wouldn’t, and forbidding what he would.
[Here’s a classic example of Green’s long-windedness. He expresses the sense conveyed by the last line of the previous paragraph with the following sentence:
Presenting to man a command which yet it does not give him power to obey, it destroys the freedom of the life in which he does what he likes without recognising any reason why he should not (the state of which St. Paul says ‘I was alive without the law once’); it thus puts him in bondage to fear, and at the same time, exciting a wish for obedience to itself which other desires (φρόνημα σαρκὸς {phronema sarkos, from Romans 8:6}) prevent from being accomplished, it makes the man feel the bondage of the flesh.]
From this bondage of the law, man is freed, according to St. Paul, when the spirit expressed by the (divine) law the principle upon which man acts. He comes to identify himself and his acts with the law. He obeys the law willingly. In this movement, man stops being a subject/a servant and becomes a son. “He is conscious of union with God, whose will as an external law he before sought in vain to obey, but whose ‘righteousness is fulfilled’ in him now that he ‘walks after the spirit.’”
3. Of course, this is similar to Kant’s idea of freedom in that the statement “He is free because he conscious of himself as the author of the law which he obeys” can equally apply to both. The difference however is that for Kant, as for Plato and the Stoics, the bondage is not to a divinely ordained law but to impulses of pleasure that inhere in man as a merely natural being. Freedom, or autonomy of the will, for Kant is consciousness of what should be which leads to imperatives for action that are determined/authored by reason. Such consciousness is rare and what we are looking for usually, and what Green thinks Kant’s views amount to, is to “be[] conscious of the possibility of such determination (emphasis added).”
4. Hegel’s quarrel with Kant was of course that the latter’s idea of freedom was essentially unrealisable. Hegel makes freedom more concrete and identifies it with and in the state. Because for him, the state is the perfect expression of reason, the self-determining (or autonomous, to use Kant’s term) principle operating in man. This is a way of thinking about freedom and about the state which is not familiar to Englishmen (Hobbes and Locke, two of the most important philosophers writing in the English language and who propounded the opposite, i.e. negative view of freedom). But it would be familiar to the ancient Greek philosophers (like Plato and Aristotle) who thought of the polis as a society governed by laws and institutions and established customs which secure the common good of the members of the society — enable the citizens to make the best of themselves — and are recognised as doing so. It is in such a state — the modern state, more precisely Prussia, for Hegel and the city-states for the Greek philosophers — that freedom is realised.
5. There is some truth to this view. Both the Greek polis and the modern state contribute to the freedom understood as autonomy of the will in so far as they “actualise in [men] the possibility of [determining] objects conceived as desirable in distinction from objects momentarily desired” so that “man seeks to satisfy himself, not as one who feels this or that desire, but as one who conceives, whose nature demands, a permanent good.”
6. But of course, it is difficult to speak of freedom except in the case of individuals. This talk of freedom as realised in the Greek polis would be unintelligible to the Greek slave who is forced to gratify his master’s lust. Nor would Hegel’s idea of freedom as realised in the modern state be intelligible to “an untaught and under-fed denizen of a London yard with gin-shops on the right hand and on the left.”
What Hegel says of the state in this respect seems as hard to square with facts as what St. Paul says of the Christian whom the manifestation of Christ has transferred from bondage into ‘the glorious liberty of the sons of God.’ In both cases the difference between the ideal and the actual seems to be ignored, and tendencies seem to be spoken of as if they were accomplished facts.
7. In the discussion thus far, freedom has been understood positively. It has meant “a particular kind of self-determination; the state of the man who lives indeed for himself, but for the fulfilment of himself as a ‘giver of law universal’ (Kant); who lives for himself, but only according to the true idea of himself, according to the law of his being, ‘according to nature’ (the Stoics) ; who is so taken up into God, to whom God so gives the spirit, that there is no constraint in his obedience to the divine will (St. Paul) ; whose interests, as a loyal citizen, are those of a well-ordered state in which practical reason expresses itself (Hegel).”
Two issues may be raised against this idea of [what Isaiah Berlin calls positive] freedom. First, is this a good way of thinking about freedom, i.e. as a state of the soul, of having reconciled our wills to the law of our being, as opposed to a civil relation whereby we are not physically or otherwise interfered with by others? Second, what is this law of being that man is supposedly subject to?
[Comment: This paragraph is actually from the end of paragraph 1. But it makes sense to put these questions here for reasons that should be clear if you have reached this far in the summary.]
8. Perhaps, it’s not a good way of thinking of freedom given the problems and confusions (section 6) associated with such a notion of freedom. It is tempting then to confine talk of freedom to the popular sense of the power to do what one wills without being interfered with. But then, we must ask whether we can understand freedom in the popular sense (as acting without interference) without reference to freedom as autonomy of will. That’s to say, how can we understand our freedom to do what we wish to do without understanding from where the direction/preference to do what we wish to do comes from: from us ourselves? or from something else?
John Locke thinks that freedom is merely the power to do or not do a certain act of preference. And to will, for him, is simply to have a preference. As such, to ask if this will is free is to ask an absurd question, like asking whether freedom is free (see paragraph 1). But it can, for Locke, properly be asked if a man is free to will or to act. Liberty in other words has to do with the man and not with his will or act (which are necessarily free).
So far as a man has power to think or not to think, to move or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a man free. Wherever any performance or forbearance are not equally in a man’s power; wherever doing or not doing will not equally follow upon the preference of his mind directing it, there he is not free, though perhaps the action may be voluntary.
Liberty belongs not to the will. If this be so, (as I imagine it is,) I leave it to be considered, whether it may not help to put an end to that long agitated, and, I think, unreasonable, because unintelligible question, viz. Whether man’s will be free or no? For if I mistake not ... the question itself is altogether improper; and it is as insignificant to ask whether man’s will be free, as to ask whether his sleep be swift, or his virtue square.
Volition, it is plain, is an act of the mind knowingly exerting that dominion it takes itself to have over any part of the man, by employing it in, or withholding it from, any particular action. And what is the will, but the faculty to do this?
It is plain then that the will is nothing but one power or ability, and freedom another power or ability so that, to ask, whether the will has freedom, is to ask whether one power has another power, one ability another ability; a question at first sight too grossly absurd to make a dispute, or need an answer.
Liberty belongs not to the will but to the agent, or man. To return, then, to the inquiry about liberty, I think the question is not proper, whether the will be free, but whether a man be free.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690, Book II, Chapter 21, paragraphs 8, 14, 15, 16, (20,21).
9. It is alright to ask if a man is free to act. But if we cannot ask if a man’s will is free, can we properly ask if he is free to will? It is difficult to see how anyone would be free or unfree to will because the will is not something that can be acted on like your body might be acted on. If it is indeed acted on, it is no longer your will or preference but the will or preference of whatever is acting on it, whether it be another person. So that the question whether one is free to will is as absurd as the question that asks whether ones will is free.
10. Perhaps this is a mere quibble with words. For the meaning of “power” when we say that a man is has power over his will, i.e. when he is free to will, is different from when we say a man has power over his actions, i.e. when he is free to act. But it has to be accepted that asking the question in the form asked (Is a man free to will as well as to act?) has deeply muddled our thinking about free-will. It has led us to think that the man doing the willing is somehow separate from or subject to the motive or object of the will, in the same way that a natural event might be subject to (or caused by) another. This has led to the further thought that the will, if man is not to be subject to arbitrary or immoral motives/objects, must also be separate from or independent of the objects/motives. However, such distinctions are meaningless. “[A man’s] will is himself. His character necessarily shows itself in his will.” For Locke and others, there is some uncertainty when we ask whether a man has power over determinations of his will, i.e. whether he will act or forbear when given a choice; and if he chooses to act, which one he will choose.
11. But there is no such uncertainty. If we answer that the man has no power, then according to the common scheme, i.e. the negative view, it would presumably be because that action has been determined by his strongest motive(s) and not by his will. We are forced to conclude that the will is determined like any natural phrenomenon: by causes external to it (here, motives).
[But such motives, in the only sense intelligible, are determined by himself. These motives are objects of his own making.]
12. This unsavoury conclusion can be avoided if we say that the man indeed has power over the determinations of his will. But saying this would mean that his will is determined by something else, that “behind and beyond the will as determined by some motive there is a will, itself undetermined by any motive, that determines what the determining motive shall be. …But an unmotived will is a will without an object, which is nothing (emphasis added).”
If those moral interests, which are undoubtedly involved in the recognition of the distinction between man and any natural phenomenon, are to be made dependent on belief in such a power or abstract possibility, the case is hopeless.
13. The only way to get out of this trouble is to realise that the question whether a man is free to will is a question that cannot be answered because the question presupposes that there is some agency beyond the will which determines it such that man could be free or unfree to will. No such agency exists. The will is the self-conscious man. The self-conscious man is determined by objects which are already, and necessarily so, in his consciousness — otherwise they would not be his objects.
To say that [man’s objects] have power over him or his will, and that he or his will has power over them, is ... misleading. Such language is only applicable to the relation between an agent and patient, when the agent and the patient (or at any rate the agent) can exist separately. But self-consciousness and its object, will and its object, form a single individual unity.
14. If a person however persists in asking this question, the answer must be both “yes” and “no”. “Yes” in that nothing external to him has power over him and “no” in that he is nothing other than his will.
15. The discussion thus far has lead to this conclusion: that a man’s will is nothing other than himself and that to ask if he is free to will is to ask an absurd question for given that his will is himself, his will is necessarily free. [Comment: This is the sense in which the will is always free (paragraph 1).] But now, it might be considered what is the character of the objects that are willed. To those inspired by Locke, freedom has been claimed or denied for the will irrespective of the objects willed, on whose nature the goodness or badness of the will depends.
If they decide that a man is ‘free to will,’ they mean that he is so in all cases of willing, whether the object willed be a satisfaction of animal appetite or an act of heroic self-sacrifice; and conversely, if they decide that he is not free to will, they mean that he is not so even in cases when the action is done upon cool calculation or upon a principle of duty, as much as when it is done on impulse or in passion.
16. On the other hand, for the Stoics, St. Paul, Kant, and Hegel, freedom of the will is intimately connected to the nature of the objects willed. Only that will which wills good objects is free but that which wills bad objects, is unfree. Obviously, this requires that we make a distinction between good and bad will but also, and this is important, that an element of identity be found to establish them as wills in the first place. This element of identity is ignored by Plato as well as by St. Paul. But it is present in Kant and Hegel. And this is what has been stressed before: that “[willing] is not a determination from without, like the determination of any natural event or agent, but the realisation of an object which the agent presents to himself or makes his own.”
17. Whether this use of freedom is proper is a secondary matter. If it becomes common enough, the common man would easily understand it just as he easily understands the popular notion of freedom as non-interference by others.
Freedom construed both as expressing the condition of a citizen of a civilised state [as Plato and Hegel do], and as expressing the condition of a man who is inwardly master of himself [as Kant and St. Paul do] share a community of meaning for both leads to “his becoming what he should be, what he has it in him to be, in fulfilment of the law of his being.” This is the fulfilment of the demand for freedom. And this is the same demand of freedom which is expressed by the common juristic conception of freedom.
18. The juristic conception of freedom, it might be said, lies essentially in the feeling of a possibility rather than a reality. To a captive just liberated or to a child in early life, the freedom (to act in whatever way he likes) might seem boundless, but in reality, this freedom does not amount to much. Everywhere we go, our actions are constrained. “Thus to the grown man, bred to civil liberty in a society which has learnt to make nature its instrument, there is no self-enjoyment in the mere consciousness of freedom as exemption from external control.” This makes the quest for freedom, understood as non-interference, important.
In the same way, ‘freedom’ is the natural term by which to characterise the the state in which man shall have become all that he has in him to be after having defeated those wants and impulses that interfere with the fulfilment of his possibilities.
19. Now, we can turn to the “essential question as to the truth of the view … that freedom is in some sense the goal of moral endeavour … such that there is some will in a man with which many or most of his voluntary actions do not accord, a higher self that is not satisfied by the objects which yet he deliberately pursues.”
This notion of the higher self has been put forth in various forms by St. Paul, Kant, and Hegel. Here, it has been put forth as follows: “that a man is subject to a law of his being, in virtue of which he at once seeks self-satisfaction, and is prevented from finding it in the objects which he actually desires, and in which he ordinarily seeks it (emphasis added, see paragraph 1).” That’s to say there is a law of man’s being whose satisfaction is prevented by the objects that we ordinarily desire. We might understand this by differentiating, as Kant did, between the pure autonomous will which concerns itself with the law of his being and the empirical heteronomous will which concerns itself with those objects which he actually desires, and in which he ordinarily seeks satisfaction. But these are separate wills. Can we sensibly, then, ascribe man’s quest for self-satisfaction as directed to certain objects (i.e. that informed by his empirical will) to the same law of his being (i.e. that which is at one with his pure will) which prevents it from finding it there?
20. Well, the pure will, which is a consciously self-realising principle, and the empirical will are not separate but one. The latter is just the former except in that it appears in this or that state ofcharacter.
By a consciously self-realising principle is meant a principle that is determined to action by the conception of its own perfection, or by the idea of giving reality to possibilities which are involved in it and of which it is conscious as so involved; or, more precisely, a principle which at each stage of its existence is conscious of a more perfect form of existence as possible for itself, and is moved to action by that consciousness.
21. How do we understand this unity and difference? The unity lies in that it is the same self-realising prinicple that works in both the pure and empirical will. The difference lies in the extent to which they realise the principle. The pure will, whose reality might be ascribed only to God, realises it fully, is fully reconciled with it. But in men, the empirical will at best only tends towards realisation and reconciliation with the form that the pure will takes, which is reason. Put in different words, in men, “the object of [the empirical] will is intrinsically or potentially, and tends to become actually, the same as that of reason.” He is thwarted from realisation by natural impulses: ‘the objects which he actually desires, and in which he ordinarily seeks it’. These impulses are the result of the work of the self-realising principle and not to be extinguished or denied but rather fused or reconciled with those higher interests “which have human perfection in some of its forms for their object.”
22. When this reconciliation or fusion happens, a man may be said to be truly free. He is free in the sense “he is the author of the law which he obeys … from that impulse after self-perfection which is the source of the law or rather constitutes it.” He is also free not only in the sense that he“‘delights in the law after the inward man’ (to use St. Paul’s phrase) while his natural impulses are at once thwarted by it and thwart him in his effort to conform to it, but [because] these very impulses have been drawn into its service, so that he is in bondage neither to it nor to the flesh.”
There is an appearance of equivocation, however, in this way of speaking, because the ‘will’ which is liable not to be autonomous ... is not this self-realising principle in the form in which this principle involves or gives the law. On the contrary, it is the self-realising principle as constituting that effort after self-satisfaction in each of us... The equivocation is pointed out by saying, that the good will is ‘autonomous’ in the sense of conforming to a law which the will itself, as reason, constitutes.
23. In God (or the ideal man), reason and the will are one. But in the historical man, the latter only tends towards the former, i.e. they only tend to unite. “The moral progress of mankind has no reality except as resulting in the formation of more perfect individual characters.”
24. How does/can the reconciliation between reason and will happen?
“A certain action of the self-realising principle … result[s]… in a [conventional morality, a] system of recognised rules (whether in the shape of law or custom) as to what the good of society requires, which no people seem to be wholly without.
The moral progress of the individual, born and bred under such a system of conventional morality, consists (a) in the adjustment (which it is the business of education to effect) of the self-seeking principle in him to the requirement of conventional morality … which is … a determination of the will as in the individual by objects which the universal will has brought into existence.
It consists (b) in a process of reflection, by which this feeling in the individual of what is expected of him becomes a conception of something that universally should be, of something absolutely desirable, of a single end or object of life.”
25. It finally consists in (c) “the growth of a personal interest in the realisation of an idea of what should be, in doing what is believed to contribute to the absolutely desirable, or to human perfection, because it is believed to do so. Just so far as this interest is formed, the reconciliation of the two modes in which the practical reason operates in the individual [i.e. reason and will] is effected.”
There can be no real determination of the will by reason unless both reason and will are operating in one and the same person. A will is not really anything except as the will of a person, and, as we have seen, a will is not really determinable by anything foreign to itself: it is only determinable by an object which the person willing makes his own.
Thomas Hobbes, “Of the Liberty of Subjects.” In Leviathan, Reprint of the 1651 Edition, (London: Clarendon Press, 1929) 161–171.
This Chapter from the Leviathan is the germ of the liberal (negative) notion of freedom. The first four sections along with a little excursion into Chapter VI for making sense of Hobbes’ understanding of the will (especially important as a contrast to the views of theorists of positive freedom such as Kant and Green) should be sufficient. The rest of Chapter relates this idea of freedom to his larger philosophical project. I leave out the what is really the last section that inventories the liberties that the individual subject is left with after making the covenant.
Liberty What
Liberty, properly understood, is the absence of “Opposition”. Opposition means “externall Impediments of motion”. Note three aspects of Liberty: (a) liberty has to do with (the lack of) an impediment or interference; (b) that impediment is external i.e., the source of that impediment is someone or something else; and (c) the impediment “stops” motion, i.e., the impediment is physical. This idea is as applicable to rational subjects as to inanimate objects. A man chained to a bed is unfree in the same way that water in a vessel is unfree. If the impediment is not external, say a man is so sick that he us unable to move, it is not liberty that is wanting but merely the power to move.
What It Is To Be Free
A FREE-MAN, thus, is “he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindred to doe what he has a will to.” Liberty has relevance only with respect to movable bodies [stone, water, man] but not to non-bodies because what cannot be moved [free gift, free way, free speech] cannot be impeded. Consider especially free-will. It makes sense to talk about free-action [meaning there is “no stop” or impediment] of a person arising from his will but it makes no sense to talk about free-will in itself as a faculty.
When in the mind of man, Appetites and Aversions, Hopes and Feares, concerning one and the same thing, arise alternately; and divers good and evill consequences of the doing, or omitting the thing propounded, come successively into our thoughts; so that sometimes we have an Appetite to it, sometimes an Aversion from it; sometimes Hope to be able to do it; sometimes Despaire, or Feare to attempt it; the whole sum of Desires, Aversions, Hopes and Feares, continued till the thing be either done, or thought impossible, is that we call DELIBERATION.
In Deliberation, the last Appetite, or Aversion, immediately adhaering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that wee call the WILL; the Act, (not the faculty,) of Willing.
[Leviathan, Chapter VI: Of the Interiour Beginnings of Voluntary Actions]
Feare And Liberty Consistent
“Feare and Liberty are consistent.” To act out of fear is nevertheless to act freely. Consider a sailor throwing overboard his goods so that the ship may not sink. Consider further a person who obeys the laws of the Commonwealth for fear that he might be punished. Both are not impeded externally from throwing the goods overboard or from disobeying the laws. Their actions are those of a free person.
Liberty And Necessity Consistent
“Liberty and Necessity are Consistent.” All actions that men perform are ultimately necessary actions. The Liberty of man “in doing what he will, is accompanied with the Necessity of doing that which God will”.
[E]very act of mans will, and every desire, and inclination proceedeth from some cause, which causes in a continuall chaine (whose first link in the hand of God the first of all causes) proceed from Necessity.
Artificiall Bonds, Or Covenants
Men have made an Artificial Man (i.e., the Common-wealth) for the preservation of peace and have made Artificial Chains (i.e., Civil Laws) to which they have tied themselves through mutual covenants or contracts. These chains/bonds hold because of the danger that arises in breaking them.
These Bonds in their own nature but weak, may neverthelesse be made to hold, by the danger, though not by the difficulty of breaking them.
Liberty Of Subjects Consisteth In Liberty From Covenants
[I]n all kinds of actions, by the laws praetermitted [intentionally disregarded], men have the Liberty, of doing what their own reasons shall suggest, for the most profitable to themselves.
If we understand liberty properly [see the first section], then men are manifestly free and it is absurd for them to clamour for liberty. Therefore, it is in the context of the artificial bonds (or civil laws) that liberty will be discussed. But the existence of these bonds is, “without a Sword in the hands of a man, or men”, no guarantee for liberty. “The Liberty of a Subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which in regulating their actions, the Soveraign hath praetermitted.”
Liberty Of The Subject Consistent With Unlimited Power Of The Soveraign
To say that the sovereign has disregarded certain things which men are at liberty to do does not mean that the sovereign “Power of life, and death, is either abolished, or limited”. Nothing that the sovereign does to a subject can be unjust or injurious for the subject himself is the author of the sovereign’s actions. David did no injustice in killing Uriah for, by the covenant, Uriah had given David the right [2 Sam. 11].
The Liberty Which Writers Praise, Is The Liberty Of Soveraigns; Not Of Private Men
The liberty that finds frequent and honourable mention in historical and philosophical discussions is the liberty of the the Common-wealth and not of particular men. In a state of nature without civil laws, the same liberty would indeed be available to private persons. But such a state no longer exists. This liberty of the Common-wealth, which corresponds to the liberty of individuals in the state of nature, must not be mistaken for a “Private Inheritance, and Birth right”. Such deception leads to sedition and destabilises governments.
And by reading of these Greek, and Latine Authors [Hobbes explicitly mentions Aristotle and Cicero], men from their childhood have gotten a habit (under a false shew of Liberty,) of favouring tumults, and of licentious controlling the actions of their Soveraigns; and again of controlling those controllers, with the effusion of so much blood; as I think I may truly say, there was never any thing so deerly bought, as these Western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latine tongues.
Gerald C. MacCallum, “Negative and Positive Freedom,” The Philosophical Review 76, no. 3 (1967): 312–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183622.
I
Disputes about freedom have been about what it constitutes, how its attainment relates to the attainment of other “social benefits” like “economic and military security, technological efficiency”, where it may be ranked among such benefits, and what consequences policies may have on the attainment of freedom.
Once one admits that freedom is not the only benefit a society may secure its members, disputes about reconciling it with other benefits or values may arise. We may legitimately ask whether reconciliation is possible; and if possible, whether it is desirable. However, in practice, these questions are often obscured by disputes about the implications of policy on these values.
It has also been common for “partisans” of all kinds to claim for themselves special affinity to freedom in light of the policies or forms of organisation that they advocate, while reserving the opposite treatment to their rivals. This is why freedom has come to be associated with so wide an array of social and individual benefits as to utterly obscure its meaning. This has suited the “purposes of the polemicist”.
The distinction between negative and positive liberty must be seen against this backdrop of confusion, and being influenced by it, the distinction itself is confused because it fails to fully understand the conditions under which the use of the concept of freedom is intelligible.
II
Freedom is always freedom of something (an agent or agents), from something, to do, not do, become, or not become something; it is a triadic relation which can be expressed as: “x is (is not) free from y to do (not do, become, not become) z,” where x ranges over agents, y ranges over such “preventing conditions” as constraints, restrictions, interferences, and barriers, and z ranges over actions or conditions of character or circumstance. Not all of the three terms need be explicitly stated because the missing term can often be inferred from the context.
It must not be construed that the claim that freedom is a triadic relation is about what we say. Rather, it is about conditions under which what we say may be intelligible. In other words, simply saying something is free or not free does warrant the application of this claim. To put it even more concretely, the claim does not apply to the statements such as “The sky is now free of clouds” or “His record is free of blemish”. The two statements are not intelligible as claims about freedom. The first does not deal with agents at all and in the second, it is not clear whether the statement is about the freedom of the agent or of something/someone else.
Let us look at some troublesome cases where not all the terms of the triadic relationship are clear.
(a) Cases where agents are not mentioned: Consider expressions of the form “free x” where x does not clearly refer to an agent — “free will” — or where x clearly does not refer to an agent — “free beer”. These cases, even if the agents not explicitly mentioned, nevertheless are concerned about agents and are intelligible only if they are understood as such. “Free will” for example is obviously concerned with the freedom of persons or selves. While not as obvious, “free beer” still refers to beer that “people are free from the ordinary restrictions of the market place to drink without paying for it.”
(b) Cases where it is not clear what corresponds to the second term: Consider the expression “freedom of choice”. The preventing conditions are usually clear from the context. In political matters, they are usually legal. In Mill, they were social pressures.
(c) Cases where it is not clear what corresponds to the third term: Consider the expression “freedom from hunger”. It could simply mean being rid of hunger. This doesn’t conform to the triadic schema. However, it could also mean that to be free from hunger is to be free to do the things one can’t do when hungry. Even more satisfactorily, it could mean “a world in which people would be free from barriers constituted by various specifiable agricultural, economic, and political conditions to get enough food to prevent hunger”. This last view of “freedom from hunger” both makes perfect historical sense and conforms to the triadic schema of freedom.
The conventional characterisation of the difference between negative and positive freedom as “freedom from” and “freedom to” does not distinguish between two genuinely different kinds of freedom. Rather, it serves to emphasise one or the other of two features or variables that are present in every kind of freedom.
III
The next problem is how, or if, the differing answers to the question “When are persons free?” survive the agreement that freedom is a triadic relation. For example, differing views on what is the “true” identity or desire of an agent or on what counts as a constraint or on the range of things agents might be free (or not free) to do (or become) might offer dramatically different accounts of when persons are free. Given the variables involved, accounts of freedom can diverge in many ways. It is therefore crucial to get the range of the variables quite clear.
The distinction between negative and positive freedom has made this difficult by encouraging the wrong questions. It is often asked which one of the two is correct, or desirable. Instead, what should be asked is what the range of the variables are. In other words, “[i]t would be far better to insist that the same concept of freedom is operating throughout, and that the differences, rather than being about what freedom is, are for example about what persons are, and about what can count as an obstacle to or interference with the freedom of persons so conceived”.
This insistence is necessary. Consider the differences between negative and positive freedom. Once the distinction between them as “freedom from” and “freedom to” is debunked (see above), the differences appear to be the following.
Writers adhering to the concept of “negative” freedom hold that only the presence of something can render a person unfree; writers adhering to the concept of “positive” freedom hold that the absence of something may also render a person unfree.
The former hold that a person is free to do x just in case nothing due to arrangements made by other persons stops him from doing x; the latter adopt no such restriction.
The former hold that the agents whose freedom is in question (for example, “persons,” “men”) are, in effect, identifiable as Anglo-American law would identify “natural” (as opposed to “artificial”) persons; the latter sometimes hold quite different views as to how these agents are to be identified (see below).
These differences break down or, at least, become less dramatic when probed. With respect to the first, would proponents of “negative” liberty be disallowed from saying that a chained man is unfree because he lacks a key (absence of something), and not only because he is chained (presence of something)? Or would proponents of “positive” liberty be disallowed from saying that an untrained person failed to get a job because of existing economic or educational systems (presence of something) which led to the person being deprived of training (absence of something)? The answer to both is: no. They can, and do, give those answers. The point of difference, then, is not as dramatic as it is made out to be.
Also, the organisation of thinkers into two camps is ill-considered.[1] Locke’s views on liberty as those actions that man “himself wills it” (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. 11, ch. xxi, sec. 15) or his view that law should not just “abolish or restrain, but … preserve and enlarge freedom” (Second Treatise of Government, sec. 57) should make him a serious candidate for inclusion in the “positive” camp but instead, he is made the poster boy of the “negative” camp.
Who is the proper agent whose freedom is in question? What is the proper range of obstacles or constraints? And what is the proper range of what that agent may be free (or not free) to be (or become)? For the adherents of negative freedom, the proper agent is a “person” understood in the most ordinary sense of the word. The proper range of obstacles is populated by just what we would ordinarily call “obstacles” which are arrangements made by human beings. The proper range of what an agent may be free (or not free) to be (or become) are what he “wants” to do or be, and what he wants to do or be can be “determined by what he says he wants to do, or by what he manifestly tries to do, or even does do.”
For adherents of “positive” liberty, the answers to the three questions are anything but ordinary. The proper agent is not the ordinary person but the “real”, or “moral”, or “rational” person who is often hidden within the ordinary person. The agent could also incorporate “the institutions and members, the histories and futures of the communities” of which he is an extricable part. This contraction of the meaning of the proper agent is the result of a worry that what we ordinarily want may not be what we “really want” in so far as they may be detrimental to our own interests. It’s expansion, on the other hand, stems from the idea that what we “really are” may be determined in part by our association with our families, communities, and so forth.
Given the radical departure in understanding who the proper agent is, what counts as an obstacle to that agent, unsurprisingly, is very different from that of “negative” freedom. While adherents of “negative” freedom see as obstacles only those arrangements which are the “made by human beings”, their “opponents” might not consider this qualification as relevant. In other words, the presence of obstacles, whether placed by humans or otherwise, is quite inessential. What is important for them is whether human arrangements can remove them.
As regards the third variable, proponents of “positive” liberty “emphasise conditions of character rather than actions”. The range of character conditions and actions are necessarily bound up with the idea of who an agent is and what obstacles are, of which there are, as already seen, many.
All of these divergences can be managed only if they are seen as disagreements on the range of variables that are part of the same idea of freedom as a triadic relationship.
IV
This approach has been neglected because philosophers have made the mistake of asking unadorned questions like “When are men free?” or, alternatively, “When are men really free?”. These questions take it for granted that persons can be simply free or not free.
“One might suppose that, strictly speaking, a person could be free simpliciter only if there were no interference from which he was not free, and nothing that he was not free to do or become.” Given that societies invariably exercise some form of coercion and given the disputes regarding the proper range of the variables of the triadic relation, it should be obvious that persons in cannot be free or unfree simpliciter.
Perhaps, “in certain (conceivable) societies there is no activity in which men in that society are not free to engage, and no possible restriction or barrier from which they are not free.”
The burden of such an argument is to demonstrate that what is ordinarily considered as an interference or a barrier is actually not so, and that everything a person is ordinarily considered not free to do or become is actually irrelevant to freedom. However, other pitfalls remain. Often, questions regarding the legitimacy of interference are reduced to questions concerning genuineness as interference. Also, questions concerning the desirability are reduced to questions about possibility.
‘Perhaps, however, the claim that certain men are free simpliciter is merely elliptical for the claim that they are free in every important respect, or in most important respects, or “on the whole.”’ This, however, does not remove the need of asking, in “the most important aspects”, for example, what they are free from and what they are free to become. And straightforward answers to these questions will enable evaluation of whether men are free as claimed.
V
“Freedom is always and necessarily from restraint; thus, in so far as the adherents of positive freedom speak of persons being made free by means of restraint, they cannot be talking about freedom.” Let us examine the implications of this argument made by friends of “negative” freedom by investigating how we can we can make sense of the alleged claim of adherents of “positive” liberty that, for example, Smith is (or can be) made free by restraining (constraining, coercing) him.
The first interpretation is that “restraining Smith by means a [say, a regulation] from doing b [that prevents his crossing the streets wherever he likes] produces a situation in which he is now able to do c [but allows him to have a right of way over automobile traffic at pedestrian crossings] because restraint d [while abolishing the automobiles having general right of way over pedestrians] is lifted. He is thereby, by means of restraint a, made free from d to do c, although he can no longer do b.”
This interpretation is straightforward. It presents problems only if it is assumed that persons are free or not free simpliciter and also that the claim in question is that Smith can be made free simpliciter. If these assumptions are made, the following interpretation might be appropriate. Smith is not being “restrained” but being helped to do what he really wants to do or what he would do if he were reasonable (moral, prudent). The “constraint” put on him actually lifts a genuine constraint (ignorance, passion) that was upon him.
This is not at all straightforward. However, it can be disentangled by insisting on the specifications of the triadic relationship being advanced. What, for instance, is Smith being made free from? Perhaps he is made free from the constraint produced by the arbitrary uncontrolled actions of other residents, or perhaps it is the “constraint” arising from his own ignorance or passion, or perhaps it’s both. If it’s the former, the specification is straightforward. If it’s the latter, further argument will be needed for it is difficult to find the range of passion or ignorance that might limit freedom.
Who, for another, is the “true” Smith? The answer will be met if the third specification of the triadic relationship, what Smith is made free to do, is examined. Apparently, he is made free to do as he wishes, really wishes, or would wish if he were reasonable. But there is obviously something he is not free to do. That is the whole point of restraining Smith. But what is he not free to do? The problem with this question is realised when we realise that what usually appears as a “restraint” is not a restraint at all.
These comments do not seek to analyse in depth the claim made by “friends” of negative liberty. Rather, they are being made to examine and draw attention to the variety of interpretations that the analysis of freedom as a triadic relationship throws up. And these are interpretations that the “friends” of negative liberty do not consider or anticipate.
VI
“In the end, then, discussions of the freedom of agents can be fully intelligible and rationally assessed only after the specification of each term of this triadic relation has been made or at least understood. The principal claim made here has been that insistence upon this single “concept” of freedom puts us in a position to see the interesting and important ranges of issues separating the philosophers who write about freedom in such different ways, and the ideologies that treat freedom so differently.”
Notes
[1] “Identified [by Isaiah Berlin in Two Concepts of Liberty]… as adherents of “negative” freedom, one finds Occam, Erasmus, Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Constant, J. S. Mill, Tocqueville, Jefferson, Burke, Paine. Among adherents of “positive” freedom one finds Plato, Epictetus, St. Ambrose, Montesquieu, Spinoza, Kant, Herder, Rousseau, Hegel, Fichte, Marx, Bukharin, Comte, Carlyle, T. H. Green, Bradley, Bosanquet.”
Title: A Genealogy of Liberty
Presented by: Quentin Skinner
Presented on: October 27, 2016
Presented at: Stanford Humanities Center as part of its Harry Camp Memorial Lectures
This is a sanitized transcript intended for reading. The video is embedded at the end if you’d rather watch it.
Sections in square brackets are digressions which can be skipped. Those between parentheses are corrective or complementary additions.
Images are screenshots from the lecture video.
Introduction
As has been noted, the requirement of the occasion is that the lecturer should address “an issue concerned with the dignity and worth of the individual, both in its historical development and in its present significance”. And that was what decided me to try to say something about the concept of liberty which is surely the core concept in our thinking about the dignity and worth of the individual. Since, in speaking of liberty or freedom — I shall use those terms interchangeably — we are undoubtedly referring to one of our core moral and political values, it would be good if I could work towards a definition of the term on which we might, at least in principle, be able to agree.
But here, I am a Nietzschean and that’s, of course, reflected in my title. And what Nietzsche has to say about these definitions in On the Genealogy of Morality (is that) concepts that have histories cannot have definitions. This is a really deep point.
Today it is impossible to say for sure why we actually punish: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically summarized elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen., Second Essay, Chap. 13, lines 10–14.
Of course, some concepts have definitions but if they have a history, they can’t. Freedom is unquestionably one such concept because the meaning and the application of the term have been contested throughout the history of the modern world. So, there is a big methodological question how, in such a case, should we proceed. And I am going to follow Nietzsche’s suggestion: which is, by genealogy — trying to see how the concept evolved in our culture but also how it was contested, how rival understandings of how to think about it emerged and did battle.
[Nietzsche loves this idea that concepts… I mean Wittgenstein tells us that these concepts are tools. Nietzsche prefers to say: No, they’re weapons. We are doing battle here and these are all ideological conflicts. So, this kind of genealogy is what I shall attempt.]
However, this is obviously a vast undertaking and I am going to have to do something arbitrary to bring my materials under some kind of control. So, what I have decided to do — it is arbitrary — is to concentrate on the genealogy as it unfolds in the English language tradition of classical liberal political philosophy. Why? Because if I make that my focus, I am not simply tracing a descent or a series of descents. I am also pointing to a set of views that are alive in our culture here and now and which help to supply many of us with an element of our moral and political identity.
The Liberal Concept
(Non-interference)
To begin, within the classical liberal tradition, the earliest treatise in which the concepts of civil and political liberty are systematically analysed is also, as it happens, one of the most important works of political philosophy in the English language. And that is Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, first published in 1651. Chapter 21 of Hobbes’s Leviathan is entitled ‘Of the Liberty of Subjects’ and that really inaugurates the modern discussion. I don’t think that’s in dispute and that’s why I am going to start there.
A further merit of beginning with Hobbes is that his understanding of civil liberty has turned out to be extraordinarily influential so that his analysis is also a very familiar one as this shows us at once.
Within the classical liberal tradition, the earliest treatise in which the concepts of civil and political liberty are analysed is (in) Hobbes and we’re looking at the analysis. And I have called this ‘The Liberal Concept’.
A FREE-MAN, is he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindred to doe what he has a will to.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, Chapter XXI.
And as you see, it’s a very simple concept: it just has two components. It proposes that for an individual to enjoy freedom as a citizen of a state, there must be power on the part of the individual to act in pursuit of a given option or, at least, alternative and there must be no interference on the exercise of that power by any external agency.
So, let me take these two ideas in turn. First, power. Hobbes insists — and this is a valuable insistence — that it makes no sense to talk about freedom except in a relation to whether you have a power to perform that action or not. That’s contrary to a very strong tendency in contemporary Anglophone political philosophy which is to suppose — I mean I quote Gerald Allen Cohen, for example, in his essay “Freedom and Money” — that “inability is a sufficient condition of unfreedom” or — Amartya Sen makes the same claim in his great treatise, Development as Freedom. I quote — (that) “if you are unable to perform an action, you are unfree to perform it.”
My principal contention ... is that lack of money, poverty, carries with it lack of freedom. ... To put the point more precisely — there are lots of things that, because they are poor, poor people are not free to do, thingsthat non-poor people are, by contrast, indeed free to do.
Gerald Cohen, “Freedom and Money”, 1995.
Now, Hobbes suggests, avant la lettre obviously but usefully, that that is not a good way to think about the relationship. He would want to say that if you lack the power to act in a certain way — I don’t know what… the power to walk on water — then you are neither free to do that nor are you unfree to do that because you are simply unable to so it. And if you are simply unable, the question of freedom does not arise: you are not free but you are not unfree; we’re in the wrong discourse; you are just unable. You can put that point the other way around and if you do so, you bring out it’s philosophical significance; which is that if you are unfree to act in some particular way, that must be because you have been disempowered by some identifiable agency. This is the point that Foucault, in his discourses of power, has made important, made famous, in our time. All talk about freedom is nested within discourses of power and that seems, to me, right. And that’s the Hobbesian thought — Foucault, of course, taking it from Hobbes.
I turn secondly to this idea of interference. Hobbes’s claim, here, is, in effect, about how to understand this idea of disempowerment. You’re said to be disempowered, and hence unfree, if and only if someone has interfered with your capacity to exercise a power. So, on this analysis, freedom simply consists in absence of interference by such external agencies.
[By the way… I mean that explains why in current political theory freedom is so often defined as a negative concept. Not wrongly because the suggestion that we have got here is that the presence of freedom is always marked by an absence. And if you ask me what absence? the answer is absence of interference. That marks the presence of liberty.]
So, there’s Hobbes’s view. But obviously, that doesn’t get us very far because if freedom turns out to consist in absence of interference, then what is interference? That’s not a clear concept at all. But it turns out that freedom is the blank: freedom is the negative concept. What we’ve actually got to understand is interference. That’s where all the conceptual work is being done.
Of course, Hobbes hasn’t failed to notice that and he goes on to give us an account of interference. And again, it’s an extremely straightforward one. Here’s Hobbes’s understanding of the concept of interference.
External agencies are said to interfere when they act on the body of the individual in such a way that an action within the power of the individual is prevented or compelled. Notice (that there are) always two modalities for taking away freedom. You can stop someone from acting or you can prevent them from doing anything else. So, limiting choices. Two modalities of limiting choices due to the application of physical force by the external agency in such a way that any alternative is rendered impossible.
So, we have arrived at Hobbes’s definition of freedom. Freedom is, I quote the beginning of Chapter 21, “absence of external impediments to motion”. There is the Hobbesian analysis.
May we just contemplate it for a moment and as you do so, you’ll immediately notice one very important implication which I need to underline. It is said to be only bodily interference that takes away freedom of action. So, the implication here is that if it is only your will that is coerced… I mean, if, for example, you only obey the law because you are frightened of the consequences of disobedience — which is the state’s standard assumption about you — then what Hobbes wants to say is that when you obey the law, you are nevertheless acting freely and you are always free to disobey. Because this is only coercion of the will and that does not take away freedom.
Again, Chapter 21 of Leviathan, “Fear and liberty are consistent.” Hobbes really means that and he doesn’t illustrate but one can illustrate it with an example which is extremely common in early modern philosophy — John Locke, for example, uses it — and this is the example of the highwayman. The highwayman is the person who points the gun and says Your money or your life? Hobbes says You’re being offered a choice! That’s what you have to recognise. You’re being offered a choice. You could decide to hand over your money or you could decide to hand over your life. But choice is freedom and that’s a choice. And Hobbes summarises this in a nasty joke when he says that when you decide to hand over your money, you not only do it willingly, and therefore freely, but very willingly.
So, there’s the Hobbesian analysis of what I am calling the ‘Liberal’ view of freedom. It’s a version of that view. And it’s important for me to add because I am doing genealogy this evening, that this way of thinking remains widely endorsed in contemporary political philosophy. For example, you’ll find exactly this view elaborated and defended in two of the most ambitious recent works on the theory of individual freedom. I am thinking of Ian Carter’s book with Oxford, The Measure of Freedom, or Matthew Kramer’s book, also with Oxford, The Quality of Freedom. So, this genealogical strand runs right down into our own time.
Looking at this though, you might think, look, something has obviously gone wrong in the Hobbesian analysis because something is amiss with this analysis that there is compatibility of freedom with coercion of the will. And the view that there is something amiss with that thought was what got taken up in the next generation after Thomas Hobbes. So, I now… my genealogy is already on the move. I am moving down into this next generation and in particular in the criticism to be found in the most celebrated work of political philosophy in the Anglophone tradition of that next generation, namely John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government first published in 1689.
I want to say a word about Locke’s retort to Hobbes. Locke agrees, of course, that you’re unfree to act if you’re prevented bodily from exercising a power. It would be remarkable to deny that. You’d get into the Stoic paradoxes of freedom if you denied that. But Locke wants to insist that you will also be rendered unfree whenever your will is coerced. Here is Locke in Paragraph 176 of the Second Treatise: “Should a robber break into my house and with a dagger at my throat make me seal documents to convey my estate to him? Would that give him title?”
The question is purely rhetorical because what Locke wants you to agree is that in such a predicament, you really do not have an alternative. It’s really idle to say that you have an alternative. So, coercion of the will may not render the action impossible — which of course is Hobbes’s condition, the impossibility condition — but it certainly renders it, what Locke calls, “ineligible”. Ineligible: that’s to say, it’s not an object of choice. You’d never choose it. So, to that degree, you just are not free. The addition of Locke’s critique makes the genealogy look like this.
We now have Thomas Hobbes over on the extreme left wing — he doesn’t want to be there but that’s where I have put him. There is Hobbes’s analysis coming down on the left-hand side. — or most people within the classical liberal tradition have wanted to say that a bending of the will by coercion also takes away freedom of action. Notice, however, that we are now dealing with a concept that makes no appearance in Hobbes’s analysis as it’s coming down the left-hand side here — that of coercion. And indeed, according to this view, if you’re going to understand freedom, that is one of the fundamental concepts that you’ve got to understand.
Now, you see how clever Hobbes was. Because what do we mean by coercion? That’s not a clear concept at all but it’s suddenly being made central to the liberal analysis. You’d think that Locke — the founder, as it were, of the Anglo-American liberal story — would have something to tell us about coercion. He gives no analysis of this concept in the Treatises of Government. It is a very surprising omission. All he does is to give us some of what he takes to be clear examples of coercion. So — the usual fatal move in analytical political philosophy — he invites you to consult your intuitions and you think Yes, that’s definitely coercion. He gives four examples: threats, promises, offers, bribes. All of these, he says, ‘bend the will’ and, in that way, take away your freedom.
But don’t those examples point to the need for an analysis because if we were consulting our intuitions we would surely want to say This list is looking a bit dubious. Consider, for example, the fact that the list includes bribes. Is it really true that if I offer you a bribe I coerce you into acting in a certain way? Suppose a politician accused in court of having accepted a bribe assures the judge that he should not be held responsible because the sum of money involved was simply so enormous that he had no choice. (And that) he couldn’t fail to take it. That’s not going to be a legal defence, oddly enough. What this shows is that the Lockean account needs something that Hobbes deliberately keeps free of. We’ve got to engage with this idea of what it means for the will to be coerced. That’s to say, what’s to count as the sort and extent of the bending of the will that we do want to say takes away freedom. That’s not something that Locke provides and as far as I can see, there’s no one in the Anglophone classical liberal tradition who really faces this squarely until Jeremy Bentham does in his great treatise written in the 1780s called On the Limits of the Penal Branch of Legislation.
So, the genealogy is now moving from the late 17th-century down towards the late 18th-century. Bentham proposes that we need to distinguish two different ways in which you can bend someone’s will. Fundamentally two opposed ways. One is that you can promise that you will reward them for compliance with your will. So, I say something like If you do what I want, I’ll give you a million dollars. Now, if you refuse you’re no worse off. If you accept you’re better off. You’re a million dollars better off. Contrast that, Bentham says — he doesn’t give the dollars example — with a case where I threaten you with penalties for non-compliance with my will. So, for example, I say If you don’t do what I say I’ll kill you. So, in that case you either comply with my will in which case you’re no better off or you don’t comply with my will in which case you’re substantially worse off. In fact, you’re dead!
Bentham’s proposal is that coercion, we can only properly speak of in the second type of case. The second type of case is coercion — that is, threatening me with penalties for non-compliance — as long, Bentham adds, as certain features of the threat itself are fulfilled. And these are, I think, ingenious and important. One is the threat must be credible. That’s to say, you’re going to have to avoid this threat. Secondly, the threat must be serious. That’s to say, well worth avoiding it. And thirdly, it’s got to be immediate. So to speak, you can’t run away; you’re going to have to face it. So, if there is a threat which fulfils those three criteria, then coercion is what we are facing.
Now, in contemporary political philosophy, there’s been a lot of work done on coercion. Some of the classic work was done by Robert Nozick, especially a major essay of his called Coercion. And he, of course, uses Bentham’s analysis — everyone has used Bentham’s analysis — and he ingeniously points out that it doesn’t quite work because you can think of cases where there would be a reward which is nevertheless coercive. But what I think we’d have to say — and which even Nozick agrees with — is that Bentham has isolated the paradigm case of coercion and so I think we can incorporate the refinement.
Coercion is rendering alternatives ineligible standardly and basically by means of threats so long as the threats are credible, immediate and serious.
Is that perhaps the analysis of freedom that you want? If so, this is a very short lecture. It’s worth asking that question because within the classical liberal tradition the answer that we have unhesitatingly been given for a long time was Yes, that is it. That’s the analysis we want of the idea of freedom. And indeed, you might reflect on the most celebrated single contribution in our time to my subject this evening, namely Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, Two Concepts of Liberty. Among the two concepts that he analyses, Berlin has a preferred account of freedom. So, what is his favoured account? You’re looking at it. That’s his preferred account. So, it’s entitled to our very respectful attention because notice again the genealogy has come right down to our time.
However, within the liberal tradition there arose a further complicating moment with the publication of what is undoubtedly the most celebrated text on my exact topic this evening, namely John Stuart Mill’s essay called On Liberty of 1859. One of the moves that Mill makes in that very original text is to point out that that the liberal tradition thus far — and he is thinking of what I have been talking… he’s thinking about Hobbes, he’s thinking about Locke, he’s thinking about the utilitarians, of course, and especially Bentham — endorses one principle that Mill considers questionable. And there it is … at the middle at the top of the chart: that freedom consists in the absence of interference with the exercise of your powers by external agencies. That’s to say, by another person, or by a group or, important of course for these writers, natural agencies: anything that threatens to leave you powerless.
But what Mill asks in Chapter 3 of the essay On Liberty is this: Is it true that freedom is necessarily interpersonal in this way that we’re looking at? or Could it be the case, somehow, that the agent who takes away your freedom could be you? It’s not interpersonal… that you could be the agent of the destruction of your own freedom. As soon as you entertain that thought, the liberal tradition begins to look a lot more complicated and this complication is one of the major nodes of late 19th-century social and political philosophy as people begin to ask Can we make sense of this radical extension of the classical liberal tradition? So here it is with the extension added.
No interference by external agencies or, some people want to add, by the self. The self can prevent or compel its own actions due to the operation of… what? How are we going to start to fill this out? That’s the analytical challenge that we now face. Here we are wading into extremely deep philosophical waters about the notion of the self. And is it a divided notion in the way that this is presupposing? But the writers that I am interested in this tradition this evening are resourceful about this and have a number of answers and here is the first.
The suggestion is that the will, so to speak, can ally itself either with reason or with some passion of the soul — as Descartes would call it, some passions de l’âme: anger or envy or hatred or something that just blows you away. Where the resulting action is motivated not by one of those passions but by reason conquering those passions, the resulting action is said to be free. That’s a free action. Notice very strong conceptual connection being suggested here between freedom and reason. Where on the other hand it is passion that has blown you away, the resulting action is held to be not fully free.
The writers who like to think in these terms from the 17th-century onwards make a distinction between liberty and license. If you’re acting out of passion, that is not free action. That is licentious action. It’s only if you’re acting according to freedom as your motive that you act freely. There are deep roots for that view. For example, what I just said is a paraphrase of what John Locke already says in his An EssayConcerning Human Understanding of 1690. Mill certainly alludes to this idea especially when he is comparing the higher and lower pleasures when he is criticising Bentham. But Mill isn’t so much interested in (passions). Mill is much more interested in what he takes to be a second possible internal constraint on our freedom and it’s this.
Mill introduces this suggestion with the claim that, as he says at the start of the essay, “In our time,” — he’s speaking of mid-Victorian England — “the yoke of law has become lighter but the yoke of opinion has become heavier.” I think that’s right in as much as most of the protests that were offered in the name of freedom in the early modern period were offered in the name of freedom as against the state. But Mill, who is here closely following his elder contemporary Tocqueville, is much more impressed by the power not of the state but of civil society within the state to limit your freedom. And that that happens through demands for conformity to convention. Demands of civil society — they are implicit demands of civil society — for you to follow certain norms and conventions of behaviour. And Mill thinks that where that demand is very strong, as he thought it was in 19th-century Britain, then the effect will be to cause you inauthentically to internalise those social norms until you follow them in preference to your authentic desires. He is very concerned about this point. I quote Chapter 3 — it’s a beautiful epigrammatic passage of the essay On Liberty: “The people of England think themselves free but they choose what is customary in preference to their inclination until it does not occur to them to have any inclination except for what is customary.”
So, people — this is Mill’s point — are not reflecting on their choices and if you don’t stand back in this Socratic way that he always asks you to do from your choices, then they’re not genuinely free choices because you’re simply allowing the circumpressures of your society to dictate what you think are your choices.
I have spoken of Mill as the great spokesman for that view in the Anglophone classical tradition of liberalism and I think that is correct. But notice that that came down to our time in existentialist moral philosophy which is an enormous extension of just that idea of how the self can enslave the self through inauthenticity.
Let me round up this part of my discussion by adding a word about one other possibility in late 19th-century social philosophy although I have to say that this will cause me to skid off my purely English language track just for a moment although the works I want to talk about are all translated into the English language. So here is the possibility that I want to put before you.
The idea that you might undermine your own freedom by acting with a consciousness which is false. False to what? False to your own true or real interests. Maybe not false to your phenomenal desires but false to your real interests. Notice how close Mill comes to this when he talks about the permanent interests of men — he’s talking about men always, I am sorry — as progressive beings.
But the classic expression in late 19th-century social philosophy of this view is in Karl Marx. And Marx’s key suggestion is, as you know, that social being determines consciousness. If your consciousness is determined by society in which freedom of action is conceived of in bourgeoise terms, then you will become the agent of your own servitude. Because you will be endorsing a bourgeoise — and Marx would wish to say a false — understanding of what is in your real interest. And I don’t need to tell you that that strand of genealogy has also come powerfully down into our own time especially through the German tradition. But Habermas — the great exponent of the distinction between phenomenal desires and real interests in social philosophy in our time — has of course been in the English language since the 1960’s and so this part of the liberal story also comes down to our time.
[I seem to be in a Foucauldian mood this evening — Foucault of course famous for the claim that there’s no such thing as an exhaustive taxonomy. That must be right! And in any case, I want to leave the enquiry as open as we can possibly leave it. We are talking about freedom. So, I would be very happy if people had more say about that in the discussion.
By the way, the most obvious thing that’s going to occur to us is the unconscious. Freud always saw himself as a theorist of freedom and very unfortunately sexist way of putting it but he said the aspiration of his theory was to make people a master in their own house again. That’s to say… well, you all know the theory and it skids away from social philosophy so I haven’t talked about it but there might be other candidates besides Freud’s theory.]
We know have — I think you’d agree — an array of different conceptions of freedom and it’s definitely beginning to look like a genealogy in that some choices are required, there are disputes here which are going to be irresolvable: some people are going to say We don’t want to add the self; some are going to say We have to add the self; some are going to say The external interference has to be only bodily; some are going to say It includes the will. So, there is no way of turning this into a narrative now. This is the collision that Nietzsche talks about.
However, we should notice that all of what you’re looking at have one basic element in common as they explicate freedom. They all think of it as absence of interference. Notice, interference turned out to be an incredibly complex concept. There it is at the top. It’s doing all the work. It’s all about what it means for there to be interference. Intrusions of various kinds — they may well up from you, they may be circumpressures of your society, they may come from the state: they’re all intrusions — are all interferences.
The Hegelian Concept
(Self-realisation)
But towards the very end of the 19th-century — which is where my genealogy has now reached — a number of Anglophone political philosophers begin to argue that what you’re looking at is radically incomplete. And these are the people who are drawing on the philosophy of Hegel who had argued that to think of liberty like this — as Hegel says in a wonderful passage in The Philosophy of Right — only the English could be so crude. This is freedom? You haven’t even started!
This is the negative moment of a dialectic. Freedom is a dialectical moment. You are free from something but you’re also free to do something. Of course, the liberal tradition is not without a response to Hegel. And you find the response at the top of the chart. We want to be impeded. If you ask impeded from doing what? The answer is impeded from doing whatever you want. That’s the glory of the liberal tradition. It doesn’t block that off.
You could say, therefore, that there’s always kind of positive element in the notion of freedom because you can always ask why you want to be free from impediments. I mean, what is this freedom for? Why is it a value for you? And that is a positive question. But I so think it’s a great strength of this tradition that I have so far laid out that it answers the Hegelian question with whatever you want. Although, of course — and Mill is famous for this — within the bounds of what he calls the ‘harm principle’: whatever you want, provided it doesn’t harm others.
But I need at this stage to notice a very different answer that rose to prominence in English language political philosophy at the very end of the 19th-century. And according to the view of things that I now want to say a word about, we want to be free not in order merely to act at will so that it’s a kind of blank space but rather, in order to act in such a way — and here’s the Hegelian thought — as to realise the essence of your nature.
In Anglophone political philosophy, the leading exponent of this view was the philosopher T.H. Green (and also) of course, F.H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet (and) a large number of philosophers at the turn of the 19th– into the 20th-centuries. Green wrote an essay called On the Different Meanings of Freedom. And he ends by saying: “To be free is to have realised that which we have in ourselves to become.”
So, being and becoming (are) very important in this Hegelian way of thinking about freedom. And according to this view, we ought, therefore, to characterise as free — that’s to say truly free, wirklich, real freedom as Hegel would say — only those persons who, as Green puts it, have in fact acted in such a way as to realise the essence of their nature.
Notice that a wide conceptual gulf has now opened up at this point between this view and everything that we’ve so far looked at. The Hegelians do not think of freedom as absence of interference on any understanding of interference. Rather, they’re claiming that freedom is self-realisation.
What has happened is that this tradition of thinking has helped itself to a massive additional premise which is that human nature is normative. There’s a normativity in human nature which this is saluting. And that’s Hegel’s objection to the liberal tradition. It doesn’t accept the normativity of human nature.
You may not think it makes sense to say that human nature is normative although we do talk like this. We say of certain things that is completely inhuman. So, it’s in our thinking that human nature might be normative. And if you’re willing to entertain that thought, then, obviously, there are going to be as many different theories of liberty as self-realisation as there are coherent views about what constitutes the essence of what it is to be truly human — that normative essence of human nature.
So, we need to ask what view about the normativity of human nature did these writers actually espouse. You could espouse many I guess but if you think about the western way of traditional thinking about this in very general terms, we really only ever espouse two large pictures at this point. One is classical and one is Christian. Now, Green is a Christian and he is very taken with the idea — this Christian paradox — that what freedom might be is service. Service to God might be freedom because it’s in service to God that you realise the essence of your nature.
There’s a very strong story. Of course, it’s the one the Nietzsche is denouncing, isn’t it? — in On the Genealogy of Morality, that’s the slave morality. But that’s not a political theory. On the contrary, that’s sort of a rejection of politics. If we’re talking about a political theory of this kind, then we are driven back into the classical story that the way in which we most fully realise ourselves — that’s to say, the arena for our talents, the arena for our virtues — is the civic arena. And it is not service of God but service of fellow human beings that discloses you as a free person. So, I am suggesting we’ve inherited two principle views about his idea that liberty has this positive concept and one is essentially the Arisotelian view that we are the ‘zôion politikòn’ or the political animal. And that’s what it is to be free — it’s to realise that that’s your nature.
And here of course is the superceding view that No, our true nature is spiritual.
Again, I want to emphasise that this way of thinking has come right down right down into our time. Amongst recent philosophers who have unambiguously taken up position A — which of course is all I am talking about because I am talking about politics this evening — the most prominent has been Hannah Arendt, hasn’t it? Especially in her wonderful essay called What is Freedom? I quote it: “Freedom is politics.” Now that is a wonderful remark. She’s not saying freedom requires politics or… she’s saying the activity of politics is the arena in which your virtues and your talents are put to work in such a way as to make you most fully the free person that you have it in yourself to become. So, there is your self, realised.
[Another Hegelian which… I mean…. I think this is… I suppose… mediated through Heidegger in Hannah Arendt’s case but] A pure Hegelian writing in the English in our time is Charles Taylor. Charles Taylor, in his great treatise Sources of the Self, has this distinction where he wants to say freedom is usually understood as an ‘opportunity concept’, as he calls it. That’s to say, to be free is just to have options which, of course, is what we are seeing all over the left-hand side of this genealogy. But he wants to say (that) that’s not how to think about freedom. Freedom is not an opportunity concept. It is an ‘exercise concept’. That’s to say, I can only tell if you are a free person once I have seen how you conduct yourself.
The Neo-Roman Concept
(Non-dependence)
I want to pause at this juncture because I think it would be quite generally agreed — [and you’d have to be a quite wide minded contemporary analytical philosopher in political theory to think that we need to incorporate so much: I mean, what is the currently the latest and therefore in bold would be unhesitatingly crossed out by a lot of the people I have talked about down the left-hand side] — that this (is) where we’ve now got the genealogy.
If you think that, then, I think you’re missing an element in the genealogy which has indeed been largely successfully effaced by the ideological triumph of classical liberalism but which needs crucially, I think, to be added to the picture. And my desire to add something to the picture which is not there — we’ve left Isaiah Berlin very far behind, haven’t we? — is really my excuse for standing before you this evening and it’s with this further force that I want to end.
I can best begin by suggesting that we can see what’s missing by making a point about Hobbes’s argument that commentators on Hobbes philosophy never seem to point out which is that when he gives you this story — which I have put all the way down the left-hand side — this is extremely polemical. It begins a story which has become our story. So, we are prone not to see that this a fiercely polemical thing that he is doing in talking about freedom. He is trying to discredit a completely a completely different way of thinking about freedom. And look how successful it was. I mean, this is a story that rolls through right down into contemporary political theory. So, what Hobbes was objecting to has rather got effaced.
To see the contention that Hobbes is trying to discredit, I think the best thing to do is to go back to what is in fact one of the founding texts of modern western political theory. And that is The Codex of Roman law, which has an extraordinary influence in all our cultures, begins by making a distinction between the figure of the free man or woman, liber homo, and the figure of the slave.
According to this view, ex hypothesi, a slave is unfree. But notice that in order to understand what freedom is, on this account, what you crucially need to understand is what makes a slave unfree. Then, you’ll understand freedom. It’s crucial to see that the answer has nothing to do with interference. This was something that was very prominent in Roman comedy and in classical reflections on slavery. (We have) slave characters in Plautus whose master is either completely benign or is always away: they do whatever they want. This was put on the Roman stage. They’re not interfered with in the pursuit of their goals. But they are still slaves. That’s what makes those comedies so uneasy.
A slave who only ever did his master’s bidding and did it willingly would never suffer coercion and so you’d have a deep paradox of a free slave. By contrast, many free citizens in antiquity would have had extremely circumscribed lives, especially circumscribed by poverty. So, what is this distinction between the free and the slave? The answer given in the Roman law — and it’s extremely influential — is that it’s the mere fact of having a master that makes you unfree. The mere fact, that is, of living in a state of dependence on the arbitrary will of somebody else. As the digest of the Roman law expresses the point, it’s the fact of living in potestate, that is to say within someone’s power and hence at their mercy: that’s what takes away freedom. That’s what takes away your status as a liberhomo — homo of course in Latin meaning man or woman — a free man or woman.
It’s nothing to do with non-interference. It’s absence of dependence. It’s the core idea of what it means to be free. And the reason is that you will not be a liber homo, free man or a woman, but you will be a slave if there could be interference contrary to your interests and undertaken with impunity because of your dependence on the arbitrary will of someone else. There’s the fundamental claim.
Notice here that there is a continuity with most liberal accounts of freedom, that’s to say the presence of freedom is still said to be marked by an absence. But it’s not absence of interference, it’s absence of dependence. But there’s also a major contrast here with the classical liberal story because it’s possible on this account to be unfree even if there is no interference with the exercise of your powers and not even any threat of any such interference. You could still be unfree. That claim looks absurd to some contemporary political theories. For example, Matthew Kramer, in his book The Quality of Freedom, which by the way is the longest book review I have ever received, says how can there be loss of freedom when there is no interference?How can that be?
According to the writers I am, talking about whom I want to call neo-Roman writers on freedom, it can be the case. And in two related ways. First, there’s an epistemological point to be made. If you are wholly dependent on the goodwill of someone else, then you never act according to your own will which is what freedom requires. Any action you perform will be the outcome both of your own will and of the silent permission of the person on whose goodwill you depend who could with impunity have stopped you but chose not to. That’s always going to be there. That permission. So, all of what look like free action are actually permissions. So, you never act autonomously. There’s the first claim.
It is the fact of dependence that takes away freedom. You’re never autonomous.
The second point that the neo-Roman writers make stems from the consideration that it’s obvious that you couldn’t live subject to the arbitrary will of someone in any domain of your life let alone if you are a chattel slave in every domain of your life… you couldn’t remain for long ignorant of being in someone’s power in any domain of your life without noticing it. You are quickly going to notice that. But as soon as you notice it, what’s going to happen? It’s going to generate self-censorship. It cannot fail to generate self-censorship. And there’s the second way in which your freedom is going to be undermined.
Let me just spell that out. This is really a core claim I think. The first claim is very important because it’s about how power is silent. You could say classical liberalism is very bad about power being silent. It always wants to see the interference… see the noise. But some power is completely silent. This is what this tradition is more sensitive to I think. And the way this core claim works is that if you know that your predicament is that you are in somebody’s power, you never know what might happen to you. You are in their power. You don’t know what could happen. Anything could happen. Maybe nothing will happen; or maybe nothing bad will happen; but anything could happen. You’re going to want to do everything, in respect of the person at whose mercy you’re living, to keep out of trouble. So, you cannot fail to self-censor systematically in the hope of keeping out of trouble. You don’t know what the trouble is but you have to mould yourself in such a way that you do your best to keep out of trouble. Summarised by Tacitus in a very unpleasant epigram — but you see what he’s saying, as he says — (that) there is no chance for a slave — he means a true slave, a chattel slave — not to be slavish. How could you be other than slavish? Because that’s your existential predicament.
As you have seen, with the rise of — what you’ve got on the board which I have now pushed over to the right wing which is where it all belongs — this story that I have told you, (the neo-Roman concept) mainly gets effaced but not entirely. There’s a kind of rocky descent that we can end this lecture by looking at. Because we can ask this question. I am not talking about chattel slavery. This is… the question is very precisely formulated.
Who live as slaves in some domain of their life(sic) — some domain or other — in someone’s power? If that’s true in any domain in your life, then you are living in that domain as a slave. Let’s see what the answers that were given to that question.
The main answer given in the 17th-century — the answer given by James Harrington to Hobbes in the most important English language 17th-century treatise on Republicanism, James Harrington’s Oceana of 1656 — was this: anyone who lives as the subject of a monarch lives as a slave in certain domains of their lives.
Because all monarchs — as Harrington says — have prerogatives; but prerogatives are, ex hypothesi, discretionary powers. To the extent that a monarch has discretionary powers, their subjects depend on that monarch’s will. It’s arbitrary. But to live in any domain of your life in the state of dependence on someone’s arbitrary will is what it is to lack freedom.
The next claim we find becomes very important with the emergence of the empires of the enlightenment period.
All who live in colonies under imperial powers live as slaves. That is the argument used against the British by the 13 American colonies in 1776. And it’s the argument used by such defenders as the American colonies in England as Joseph Priestly, Richard Price and, above all, Thomas Paine. The common core of their argument — best known as Paine’s argument — is that if you are governed, and especially if you are taxed, by a colonial power, and thus have no representation in the legislative that’s imposing those taxes, that’s to say that in that domain of your life, you are entirely dependent on the goodwill of that representative assembly for the level of taxation that is imposed.
But this dependency, as the colonists claim in the Declaration of 1776, serves in itself to take away freedom in that domain because they’re entirely at the mercy of the English parliament as to what level of taxation will be imposed and so their property is in permanent jeopardy: because they’re subject to arbitrary power.
So, that explains why the declaration of 1776 was called, and still is called, The Declaration of “Independence”. Independence from what? Well, from dependence, of course. Declaration of not being dependent on the arbitrary powers lodged the British constitution. So, notice that this country is founded on this view of what it is to be a free person.
Further quick answer comes powerfully to the fore in the revolutionary decades of the 1790s.
All women who lack independent means live as slaves. This is Mary Wollstonecraft’s central theme in the pioneering remarkable text of 1792, The Vindication of the Rights of Women. The starting point is with the fact that most women or at least very many women are or were at the time economically dependent on men. “The effect is that in order to survive, such women have to learn how to become the sort of people that men like.” And to the extent that that is how they are obliged to form their characters, they cannot act autonomously. In a number of domains in their lives, these people are not free.
John Stuart Mill writes the last of his major political texts in 1869, ten years after the essay On Liberty, and his tract as I am sure you know is called The Subjection of Women. It’s a little-observed fact about John Stuart Mill that he appears as the 19th-century apostle of classical liberty but he changes his mind. He comes over to this view and he begins the tract on The subjection of women by saying that because women do not have testamentary will — which was true in England at that time, they couldn’t make their own will, so he’s punning on will — they can’t make their own will. So, in that domain of their life they don’t have a will. And he says at the beginning of Chapter 1, “I see no such difference between the position of such women and that of bond slaves.” So, Mill, the great apostle of liberalism in his late life becomes what I am calling a neo-Roman theorist of liberty.
Now, how about this?
Have they been eliminated? What about this?
Deunionised labour forces, bosses who have it within their power to dismiss at will and with impunity — there are certain examples of that in my country, I am sure this is a more virtuous country than mine. We have to ask if these citizens are on this account living in that domain of their lives as free men and women. What about this?
Many democratic states — certainly mine and, again, I am sure America is more virtuous — possess extensive powers of surveillance over their citizens that can be exercised without the consent or even the knowledge of those citizens. So far, criticism has tended to focus on the exercise of those powers and it’s agreed that exercise of these powers is an affront to privacy. But that the payoff is security. And that’s a quotation from Obama. But on the view of liberty that I am now considering, this is not at all the right way to analyse the costs and benefits. On the neo-Roman account, it’s not exercise of these powers but the existence of these powers which matters and is the affront. And the affront is not to privacy, it’s an affront to liberty. Both because it is arbitrary — we don’t know what use could be made of it — and because since we don’t know what use could be made of it, we are very liable to start to self-censor. So, there’s a paradigm of unfreedom on this account.
Well here I draw to a close. In fact, I am a minute over 7 o’clock but I [have got one… Is that alright if I…? Because I really want this extra minute because I] want to place before you a compete genealogy with all the bits and pieces taken out — that’s to say all the bold which introduced each section and there it is.
Conclusion
And with the whole thing in front of us, the reason I want this final minute is to say: Well, what is the point of these remarks? What is the point of genealogy? I want to make two points here in fact and the first is that genealogy — in the way that I have been laying it out — is always critique. Genealogy is critique. Critique of what? Conceptual analysis. And the way that that works in the present instance is as follows. We are repeatedly told in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy that there is, I quote John Rawls, “one coherent way of thinking about liberty. It is a negative concept and it consists in the absence of interference.” That is the analysis of freedom that underlies Rawl’s account of justice as equal freedom.
But there isn’t just one way of coherently analysing the concept of freedom in our time. I have spoken of writers like Arendt and Taylor who don’t think about it in these terms at all but they think coherently. And I have spoken of a legal tradition which insists that even if liberty is seen as negative, it’s not to be seen in terms of interference but, on the contrary, of domination and dependence. Each of these positions — we end up with three major features of the genealogical tree — are, I think, coherent in their own terms.
My other and final point is that while each of these accounts is, I think, coherent in its own terms, you can’t combine them. This in genealogy. You can’t get it to be a concept… the concept of liberty. You’re going to have to make some choices because they don’t fit together. So, what choice should you make?
And that brings me lastly to the most important point I want to make in this lecture which is that I do not think that university teachers should go around telling people what to think especially not in very great universities like this one. You can all think. You all know this. This is what Wittgenstein calls ‘assembling reminders’. So, that’s what I have done. I have assembled reminders for a particular purpose. And that I think is the task of the teachers — to try to clarify what it is that one needs to be reminded of in order to think about it. And that’s all I have tried to do in this lecture. I have tried to present you with information relevant to answering the question: how should we think about freedom? But as to the answer, I leave that to you.
Clueless Political Scientist 
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