About the Author - Paul McLaughlin teaches in the Philosophy Institute, Pedagogical Academy of Zielona Gora, Poland.

Discuss this Article

Submit a Rebuttal

Recommend this site

 

Search The Web

Philosophy Humanities History Classics Science Math

Social Sciences Literature Art Education Linguistics Religion

Free! Examined Life Philosophy Resource Browser

Free! Philosophy Quotations Program

Worldwide Philosophy Events Database

Philosophy Resource Search Engine

 

Click here for Printer Friendly Format

Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

2. The concept of liberty.

Waldron observes that ‘liberals believe there is something particularly important in the capacity of individuals to direct their actions and live their lives, each on their own terms. They believe [, that is,] in the importance of freedom – although what that belief amounts to’ is a major liberal controversy.[14] The first point to underscore, in connection with the previous section, is that, whatever freedom may amount to, it is the freedom ‘of individuals’, as our definition of liberalism makes clear. Thus, for example, Mill writes: ‘The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it’.[15]

In the historical or hypothetical pre-political society, if such it can be called, freedom appears to amount to the ‘natural right’ of individuals to pursue their own purposes (material, spiritual, or whatever) without the ‘intereference’ of other individuals. However, the extent of this natural form of freedom is so great that conflict between any number of individuals in pursuit of any number of purposes – including the same mutually exclusive purposes – is inevitable; a conflict of interests is unavoidable. Natural freedom therefore contains, as it were, the seed of its own destruction. The maximum residue of this freedom, as most would see it, is intended to be preserved within the confines of political society.

In political society, which again represents a fair resolution to or prevention of the many conflicts that arise or would arise outside the domain of the State, the maximum possible degree of ‘natural’ freedom to act in a particular way without intereference from other individuals – or for that matter now, without illegitimate interference from the State itself – is therefore secured, qua ‘political freedom’, by, for example, constitutional rule. For some ‘minimalist State’ or ‘minarchist’ liberals or would-be libertarians – for right-wing liberals - the emphasis is on restraint (though not abolition) of the State, which is regarded, contrary to anarchism, as a ‘necessary evil’: an evil necessary for the promotion of their interests or an evil necessitated by the inherent corruption or ‘crookedness’ of mankind (or, if you prefer, by original sin).[16] For other more ‘statist’ or ‘interventionist’ liberals – for left-wing liberals - the State is seen to have some role in advancing the general cause of liberty through various, but limited, methods of intervention (as opposed to the similar but negatively connoting term ‘interference’). So while freedom has been characterized in the liberal tradition largely in negative terms (as freedom from interference)[17], some liberals, such as T.H. Green, characterize it in positive terms (as freedom conveyed to some degree by something other than ‘freedom’, conceived in a strict liberal manner). This distinction is famously made by Isaiah Berlin – though he was by no means the first to make it.[18]

Though freedom is regarded as the value among values by liberals (by definition), some insist that they are ‘egalitarian’. Waldron writes, therefore, that there is ‘an egalitarianism [or ‘a commitment to equality’] that lies at the foundations of the liberal tradition’. He notes, sensibly enough, however, that ‘We have to be careful how we formulate this’, since ‘Liberal philosophers are not necessarily egalitarians in the economic sense’. They’re assuredly not. He continues: ‘But they are committed as a matter of the basic logic of their position to a principle of underlying equality of basic worth. People are entitled to equal concern for their interests in the design and operation of their society’s institutions; and they have the right to be equally respected in their desire to lead their lives on their own terms’.[19] Thus equality is presented in terms of the equality of all individuals with regard to certain ‘rights’ (or, literally, liberties, so that equality would seem to be reduced, in some sense, to liberty, or to equality of liberty). These rights or liberties may be ‘social’ (the equal right to privacy), political (equal voting rights and access to office), juridical (‘equality before the law’), or ‘economic’ (here restricted to ‘equality of opportunity’ rather than substantive material equality).

Such formal or ‘logical’ – that is, merely theoretical – egalitarianism is clearly distinct from the traditional egalitarian commitment to de facto or material equality. (Needless to say, it is difficult to see how one might reassure the marginalized of liberal society that, for all their hardship, they are, after all, naturally or logically equal – and therefore inherently or theoretically capable of becoming president, hiring the best lawyers, or setting up businesses.) A classical example of the thinking involved here is from Locke, when he writes: ‘there [is] nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species [should] be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection’; that is, that all should be equally free, though not necessarily materially equal.[20] This captures, once again, some notion of the liberal reduction of equality to liberty.

The most sophisticated – or sophistic – presentation of liberal egalitarianism is that of Rawls. The fact that he incorporates some principle of ‘equality’ in his theory of justice might be read as confirmation of his egalitarianism. Thus, in addition to his first principle, essentially the standard liberal principle of (equal) liberty, his ethico-political theory incorporates a second principle, a principle of ‘equality’ in some form. Hence, Rawls may manage to overcome what has been seen by critics as the one-sidedness of liberalism. Nevertheless, he maintains the ‘priority of liberty’, that is, ‘the precedence of the principle of equal liberty over the second [‘egalitarian’] principle of justice’. Equality, then, is at best a second-order ethico-political consideration (as the very definition of liberalism requires). In any case, regarded critically, the second principle itself, insofar as it includes the ‘difference principle’, is less a defense of equality (or a principle of equality) than a (qualified) justification of inequality (or a principle of inequality). (This implies, counter-intuitively if nothing else, that inequality is a component of social justice.) Rawls himself disagrees, claiming that ‘the difference principle is a strongly egalitarian conception’.[21] However, the idea that ‘inequalities in a society are only justified to the extent that they benefit the worst-off’ – that is, that inequality can be justified - has little in common with the strong traditional egalitarian principle or ideal of universal equality.[22] In fact, it reeks of an ideological attempt on the part of the privileged to justify their status and to placate the impoverished. (There has been a similar ideological trend in liberalism since Locke, who insists that private property is a public benefit: ‘he who appropriates land to himself by his labor, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind’.[23])

Other liberals, such as Berlin, have at least had the honesty to dissociate liberalism – with its principle of liberty (satisfactory or otherwise) – from egalitarianism and the principle of equality. Thus Berlin writes: ‘Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice…’.[24] This Parmenidean preference for ‘identity thinking’, as Berlin’s Hegelian enemies might observe, easily transforms into a Parmenidean belief in the impossibility of (social) change: liberalism and conservatism easily converge. Furthermore, such a commitment to liberty in itself could be said to have culminated in Margaret Thatcher’s at best ambiguous ‘neo-liberal’ proclamation that ‘It is our job to glory in inequality’.[25] (Of course, to be fair to Berlin, the ‘Thatcherite’ heritage ought to be traced back through Hayek to von Mises, who writes – in characteristically racial (or racist) fashion – that ‘Nothing… is as ill-founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race. Men are altogether unequal. Even between brothers there exist the most marked differences… Men are and always will be unequal… Liberalism never aimed at anything more than [‘the equality of all men under the law’], nor could it ask for anything more. It is beyond human power to make a Negro white. But the Negro can be granted the same rights as the white man’.[26] The confusion of equality and identity or inequality and difference, which we might well ‘glory in’, says much about von Mises philosophical ability.)

Equality is the principle that, conceived in itself, animates the socialist tradition. In itself, however, abstracted from the principle of liberty, it appears just as partial and unfulfilling as the liberal principle. Both liberals and orthodox socialists insist on a principle which they hold to be peculiarly their own and, in itself, irreconcilable with its ‘opposite’, having, without any justification to date, abstracted it from the unified formula of the French Revolution – Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité – and having divorced themselves from a genuinely progressive tradition which pursued and continues to pursue an integral vision of justice. Hence it is liberals and socialists rather than their opponents - those on the radical Hegelian left who strive for the reintegration (and realization) of values - who are guilty of abstraction. Such opponents argue that to pick apart the ethical category of justice (which, in various forms, has inspired social progress from ancient times) in order to suit particular (individual or class) interests (specifically those of bourgeois ‘individuals’ or the proletariat) is to negate it. Aside from the spuriousness of the abstract theoretico-ethical approach, history seems to have condemned both liberalism and socialism, though, of course, not necessarily to the same extent, which is why liberals defend themselves by cynical reference to barely-ethical ‘lesser of two evils’ arguments. Basically, assuming that both achieve something in the way of liberty and equality respectively, liberal regimes tend to create unequal conditions of poverty and exploitation, while socialist regimes tend to create conditions of extreme oppression. Thus, to quote the words of Bakunin, the following conclusion rings true:

… liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice… socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.[27]

[14] op. cit., §3; emphasis added.

[15] On Liberty, p. 81; emphasis added.

[16] The concept of human ‘crookedness’ is constantly brought up by Berlin, who dubiously cites Kant in the context. For example: ‘No more rigorous moralist than Kant has ever lived, but even he said, in a moment of illumination, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made”’ [‘The Pursuit of the Ideal’, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, pp. 15-16; emphasis added]. This concept is plainly antagonistic not only to the vision of human perfectibility that Berlin warns against (sometimes with good reason), but also to the vision of progress and the concept of meaningful freedom that even a liberal should have some sense for: that is, it is a wholly conservative concept, derived, clearly enough, from the theological tradition and therefore hardly irrefutable.

[17] Hobbes writes: ‘A free man is he that... is not hindered to do what he has a will to do’ [Leviathan, Chapter XXI; emphasis added]. (Berlin quotes this in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, p. 195.)

[18] For example, Bakunin, toward whom Berlin is especially hostile, writes: ‘by freedom we mean, on the one hand, the fullest possible development of all the natural faculties of each individual, and, on the other, [the individual’s] independence – not vis-à-vis natural and social laws, but vis-à-vis all the laws imposed by other human wills, whether collective or isolated’ [L’Instruction intégrale, Le Socialisme libertaire, ed. Fernand Rude (Paris: Denoël, 1973), p. 138]. Bakunin labels these two aspects ‘the positive condition’ and ‘the negative condition of freedom’ elsewhere [in Trois Conférences faites aux Ouvriers du Val de Saint-Imier, Archives Bakounine, VI, ed. Arthur Lehning (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974)]. For Bakunin these indivisible conditions of freedom are, of course, not equivalent to Berlin’s distinct, separable concepts of freedom; neither is the concept of freedom separable from the concept of equality, as we will see. Herein lies the great difference between them.

[19] op. cit, §3; emphasis added.

[20] The Second Treatise of Government, p. 263.

[21] A Theory of Justice, pp. 244, 76.

[22] This formulation is from Ben Rogers, ‘The Good Life’, New Statesman, 20 September 2000, p. 56.

[23] The Second Treatise of Government, p. 279; emphasis removed.

[24] ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, p. 197.

[25] Quoted in Susan George, ‘A Short History of Neo-Liberalism’, conference paper at the Conference on Economic Sovereignty in a Globalizing World, Bankok, 24-26 March 1999 [available on-line at http://www.zmag.org].

[26] Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, Chapter 1, §4; emphasis added.

[27] Fédéralisme, socialisme et antthéologisme, Oeuvres, I, ed. Max Nettlau (Paris: Stock, 1972), p. 96; emphasis in original.

Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

Click here for Printer Friendly Format