Liberty’s Discontents: The contested history of freedom

Democracy is a tool, but doesn't reliably produce freedom or any other good outcome by itself. Individual rights and federalism go a long way to protecting freedom in the long term.

Democracy works best when dealing with details, where there is already basic agreement on where the country should go. In that case, you just want a basically fair process to get a decision made, and you can adapt later.

But when there's a fundamental split in the electorate, democracy just means tyranny of the 55%.

I would agree with the article that the idea of freedom is old precisely because it was misunderstood.

Freedom for most of history meant the degree one was free to act / work under the thumb of a capricious landowner / empowered polity (ie majority rule). There was no clearly defined line and that led to constant conflict.

Discussion of freedom prior to 18th century did not touch on the freedom of the state vs freedom of the individual precisely because it treated everyone as part of the same body of rights. There was no dividing line, and thus no freedom, as we know the term, today.

Is a benevolent dictator any different from a democracy that is unencumbered by constitutional rights ?

I'm sure the book discusses this at length, but some people have drawn conceptual distinctions between liberty and freedom:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom#Personal_and_social

This is complicated because not everyone makes this distinction consistently, and many languages use the same term for both concepts most of the time.

Apparently the Ben Franklin line about "essential liberty" is also originally kind of collectivist in meaning:

https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...

Subtle concepts!

Historically, freedom did indeed have different meanings.

For example, in the German Democratic Republic, you were shot when you wanted to leave. But it is just insufficiently sophisticated people that would conclude from that that they were lacking freedom.

They did have freedom, but just had a different definition for it.

Their definition of freedom was "understanding of the necessity" / "Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit". The definition comes from the famous German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, so surely it is more valid that the thought of some stupid redneck that thinks freedom means not being shot when you want to leave the country.

Being shot when leaving is consistent with this definition of freedom. It is not a shallow western individualist definition, with negative freedoms (freedom from...), but a collectivist definition. If you leave, you deprive the collective of your work, thereby reducing their positive freedoms. Surely it is just to shoot somebody for such an egregious violation of other people's freedom.

Rant over.

I am really sick of people trying to twist the meaning of terms to suit their own political agenda. If you want to argue that other things are more important than freedom, fine. But at least make up your own terms.

> Freedom did not entail escaping from government rule but rather making it democratic.

I don’t see how getting a fractional vote in choosing your oppressor can be equated with “freedom” by any means, just by the meaning of the word alone. This seems wholly absurd.

Individual vs. collective discussions often leave out the size of the collective, which is often the most important part. See:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110822151104/http://irl.cs.ucl...

> De Dijn argues, however, that this is not the only conception of freedom and that it is a relatively recent one. For much of human history, people thought of freedom not as protecting individual rights but as ensuring self-rule and the just treatment of all. In short, they equated freedom with democracy. “For centuries Western thinkers and political actors identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with exercising control over the way one is governed,” she writes. Liberty in its classic formulation was thus not individual but collective. Freedom did not entail escaping from government rule but rather making it democratic.

This is right out of Philip Pettit. Pettit is a living philosopher of Republicanism. His argument is that we should move away from Isaiah Berlin's negative/positive freedom dichotomy toward an ideal he calls "freedom as non-domination". He argues that this was, in fact, the pre-modern version of freedom that existed in Ancient Rome and in various Italian City states.

Non-domination is a synthesis of negative and positive liberty: it is negative in that it is against something (domination), it is positive in that it allows you to set goals for your government. Freedom as non-domination states that people should be free from arbitrary interference and from the possibility of arbitrary interference (i.e. even if you are not arbitrarily interfering with me, but you have the ability to, something is wrong). "Arbitrary" here means at the pleasure of the person doing the interfering. Pettit also, sometimes, considers interference to be arbitrary if the person being interfered with has no ability to contest the interference.

Pettit is explicitly making a left-wing argument. He wants to appeal to feminists, environmentalists, and socialists. He argues that all of these perspectives can be placed under the umbrella of freedom as non-domination.

> “Ideas about freedom commonplace today…were invented not by the revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but rather by their critics.”

This is also an argument from Pettit. Pettit points to Hobbes as the progenitor of freedom-as-non-interference (negative liberty) and notes that Hobbes was a monarchist, i.e. an enemy of democracy and republicanism. Pettit then argues that Hobbes failed to convince anyone but that, later, during the American Revolution, his ideas had a resurgence among opponents of American Independence (he puts William Paley and Jeremy Bentham in this group).

I would respond to Pettit (and this article) in a few ways. First, Isaiah Berlin is a value-pluralist not a freedom-as-non-interference theorist. He says there are more values than negative and positive liberty, that all of these values are sometimes worth pursuing, and that they are often incommensurate with one another ("freedom for the pike is death for the minnows"). Berlin is explicitly telling us not to do what Pettit is doing: trying to create a single ideal and use that ideal to harmonize society. For Berlin, this is (as the article says) what happened in the Soviet Union.

Berlin links this tendency to try to harmonize society with the idea that you should be able to choose "what other people should rationally want". As a result of this, Berlin is sometimes seen as "being against positive liberty". But this isn't quite right. For Berlin, positive liberty is not bad, just dangerous. It is a value that we should pursue, but in a measured way. Positive freedom is associated with self-mastery and democracy.

A second objection to Pettit/de Dijn comes from Paley. Petitt is aware of it, but doesn't see it as a significant obstacle. I do. Paley argues that "freedom as non-domination" is simply impossible in a society where everyone is a citizen. The subtext here being that, in ancient Republican societies, only rich men were citizens and that their non-domination was secured by literal slavery. Freedom-as-non-interference may not be as good as freedom-as-non-domination, but it's more realistic in a society where everyone can vote. I agree with Paley that it's impossible to ensure freedom-as-non-domination in a modern mass society, though perhaps it's possible in small, rich societies (in fact, this seems to be the case).

A third objection is that, to me, it seems that we are all dominated by nature (disease, hurricanes, floods, fires, etc), and that we dominate other people in attempt to escape domination by nature. In some sense, this domination is justified (keep in mind, at-will employment is domination, I'm not talking about owning slaves). Pettit includes no discussion of nature at all: he is only interested in people dominating people. To me, this misses a fundamental truth about the human condition.

A fourth objection: Pettit's arguments are excessively legalistic. He envisions "sanctions, screens, and contestability" as the main institutional tools in his proposed republic. In short, rewards are used to encourage good behavior, public figures are vetted in various ways, punishment is usually unnecessary because most people are good (hah), and everything is contestable. In my mind, this is the blueprint for a massive, inefficient bureaucracy where no one is responsible for anything, where dominating power absolutely exists but is hidden away in the folds of a massive government.

Finally, Pettit's weakest argument has to do with "information". To Pettit, it is likely to be a matter of public agreement whether someone is dominated. The only grounds for the assertion as far as I can tell is that, in a society where people think of freedom in terms of non-domination, we will simply agree about whether someone is dominated or not because we agree about what freedom is. But that's the exactly the point. But we don't agree and the idea that we could all be convinced is laughable, that's the whole point, we just don't agree.

Reminder that The Nation carries a strong Left bias (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings). They've featured Professor Annelien de Dijn's work in an interview previously in 2020 (https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/annelien-de-dijn-f...), and it's clear from that interview that her core perspective on freedom aligns with The Nation's left-leaning worldview that state actions restricting individual liberties don't constitute a violation of freedom. De Dijn's work is funded by the ISRF, a Netherlands-based organization that funds (typically progressive) social science work via grants.

Of course, de Dijn's words can be interpreted on their own merit without regards to her bias or the bias of these publications. My opinion, however, is that her writings seem to amount to an unconvincing claim that state-imposed restrictions do not constitute a violation of freedoms, because the state is a collective representation formed via a Democratic process. Essentially, she does not place value on the notion of the individual, or on concepts like tyrannies of the majority, which an emphasis on individual freedoms protects against. This is clearest in her pro-lockdown articles (https://theconversation.com/why-lockdowns-dont-necessarily-i...), where she says "even the strictest lockdown can count on broad democratic support, and the rules remain subject to scrutiny by our representatives and the press, they do not infringe on our freedom".

The rest of her support for her opinions about freedom seems rather arbitrary - appeals to historical authorities like selectively chosen philosophers, and vague dots connected across historical events to trivialize the value of individual freedom and place collectivist rule on a pedestal. This type of historical framing to justify or vilify a contemporary political position just feels too speculative to be helpful. I've seen this in other contexts as well, for example when people will claim that zoning laws are "racist" because they were used by racists in a discriminatory manner many decades ago - I'm simply not sure what relevance it bears on the conversation today.

In this article, the author presents de Dijn's book as a balanced and comprehensive analysis of the history of freedom. But the article's author's bias is clear in sentences like "she challenges conservatives who wrap their ideology in the glorious banner of freedom, revealing the long history of a very different vision of human liberation, one that emphasizes collective self-government over individual privilege". Individual freedom is recast as "privilege", a scary negative term to The Nation's readers, while restrictions of freedoms by the state are recast as "collective self-government" when really it should be seen more as "collectivist rule".

Ultimately, I'm not sure an academic debate on this topic is worth it. It's pretty simple - do you believe a large government should dictate how every individual, every jurisdiction, every organization within its borders should live? Or should it err on the side of being permissive and granting local and individual freedoms? It's a question of personal values, and not something that has to be justified using selectively chosen elements of Western history.