Freedom
Freedom
Freedom, the capacity for self-directed thought and action, and the choice of one’s own goals, is one of the central values of western thought. Often closely tied to questions of free will, freedom is also seen as central to questions of moral responsibility, personality, and identity, and to democratic political life. Rule by others, such as political domination as well as social oppression, through established forms of authority or psychological restrictions, are all opposed by forms of freedom. The idea of liberation from the limits of nature of entrenched authorities or despotic rulers is a central theme of both literature and politics.
Freedom does not have a simple or single essence. It has developed sometimes haltingly in the history of thought. For the ancients, freedom was not equated with worldly accomplishment or goal-directed action; it was primarily an inner state of being. The free person was one who rules his desires (freedom applied mostly to males) rather than being ruled by them. For Plato, freedom meant to be liberated from base desires. Rather than a life of self-chosen ends, however, the ancients saw the highest form of life as contemplation of the order of the universe. The free man was released from desires that impeded this goal.
The Greeks originated the political idea of self-rule (koinonia ), but generally applied it only to a limited group of male, property-owning citizens. In Aristotle’s political philosophy, freedom requires active participation by citizens in the life of the polis. This, too, is not a form of goal-directed action, but of acting in concert: The citizen alternates with others in holding office and engages in deliberation about laws and public affairs. Although there were examples of wider democracy in ancient Greece, political theorists such as Aristotle supported a limited republican form. Only propertied male heads of household had the requisite self-control over their own desires to be capable of self-rule, they believed; the rest were only fit to be ruled by others. The Stoics living under the Roman imperium reemphasized a purely inner freedom based on deliberate self-mastery. Still, the Stoics also had early notions of a cosmopolitan humanity in which all were naturally equal.
The roots of the modern notion of freedom can be traced back to the late Middle Ages. The rise of independent city-states in Italy and other parts of Europe was accompanied by a revival of ancient republicanism. These newer forms of republicanism were more disposed to give a role to the people and inclined to stress liberty. The later Middle Ages also provided some sources of the modern notion of individuation. The Renaissance that followed developed a modern idea of the self as a “work of art,” and the development of individuality was the essence of freedom. In the seventeenth century there was a further elaboration of republican thought that stressed the relation of a free people to the new ideals of liberty.
LIBERAL THEORY
Modern philosophy rejected the idea that knowledge of the structure of the world could and must be achieved through individual human reason alone. Revealed religion or other idols had to be rejected. Although this philosophical ideal first justified only free scientific inquiry, it proved useful for politics as well. But the most influential notions of freedom in modernity are those associated with liberalism. Whereas the Aristotelian tradition saw humans as naturally political animals who realized their aims in community, the modern liberal view saw individuals as possessing natural liberty, prior to social relationships or attachments. Although this is certainly a fiction, it reflects the idea that the individual—not the social environment, the church, the state, or the family—is the source of social and political freedom. These forms of social and political freedom are now seen as a form of self-determination: the capacity to choose to decide upon and pursue one’s own goals or plans of life. The individual is an active agent whose freedom is seen in accomplishments. Freedom is also the ability to act freely to achieve these goals. The republican emphasis on deliberating with others was replaced in the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke by notions of self-interest. This conception was often linked to the new scientific consciousness, in which the individual was like all other things: a mechanism driven by material pursuit of interest, not by spiritual causality or teleology.
The liberal notion of freedom made a strong distinction between the public and the private that was quite different from what the ancients had conceived. Whereas Aristotle thought that freedom required public participation, liberals saw freedom first of all as applying to the private individual, who is free to act. Here freedom is the absence of constraint, or freedom from something. The idea of the social contract expressed the fact that legitimate political order is based on the freely given consent of the governed. This premise, emphasizing the equality and freedom of all, is the foundation of most modern democracies, where individuals are natural bearers of rights and freedoms that cannot be taken away by governments. In some respects, the liberal model of freedom as self-determination is restricted when combined with an economic model of human action, where the individual is a consumer rather than a creator, one who chooses between products on the market. As a maximizer of goods, the individual is primarily a possessive individual.
DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY
The theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was important in the development of a second conception of modern freedom. Rousseau held that the social contract (rejected by republican theories) was more than a contractual agreement—it created a general will that was the expression of a common moral will. In the romantic period this conception became what has been called a “developmental view of freedom.” The Romantics rejected the Enlightenment view of man, which was overly rationalist and mechanistic, and sought a broader notion of human freedom that stressed aesthetic and relational qualities of freedom. In the developmental view, humans express their freedom through the development of all their human powers. Freedom is self-realization, or positive freedom. Karl Marx’s notion of freedom embodied this view when he invoked the all-around development of capacities. Human action is not simply goal-directed, but includes many forms of human expression: artistic, expressive relations to others, and play, to name a few. Although this view draws on the Aristotelian tradition, it differs from it in its stress on individuality and its adoption of the modern view of the open-ended nature of capacities.
Developmental theories reject the atomism of liberal theory. They stress the interdependency of human activity. The development of freedom and capacities is not the result of individual initiative alone, but rather relies on a backdrop of prior social conditions: We are vulnerable, depending on a wide variety of conditions to develop and employ our human capacities.
Developmental theories have been central to radical democratic and socialist and social democratic conceptions of politics. Stressing the role of active citizen participation in politics, they agree with Aristotle that the fully realized individual has to be a participant in his or her own governance. Socialists extend this equal participation to models of economic production and reject liberal emphasis on private property. Socialized production, accordingly, is central to the development of selfhood and individuality.
For socialists and social democrats, political freedom rests on prior social freedoms, including a minimum of economic equality, retirement and unemployment benefits, health and safety, and other measures of human welfare. Conditions of complex human freedoms have become important not only for socialist states, but also for modern social democratic welfare states.
Critics of developmental views often have held that Rousseau’s ideal of the general will have inherently totalitarian elements that are contrary to the liberal ideas of individual freedom. They also criticize the idea of inner powers unfolding in a natural manner. Others see expressive freedom as a socially pathological emphasis on pleasure or aesthetics for its own sake. The exclusive stress on aesthetic freedom reduces the influence of the work ethic and moral responsibility on human conduct.
COMMUNICATIVE FREEDOM
A third notion of freedom responds to recent concerns with cultural integrity, identity politics, and recent social movements, and new conflicts over the ability of participants to form their own unique relations to themselves and to social worlds. Influenced by the growing emphasis of language as central to philosophy and social science, ideas of communicative freedom have become an important element in contemporary debates. Communicative models stressing individual self-realization take place in a context of intersubjective community. Extending the liberal idea of free speech and expression, freedom involves the very capacity to communicate in language to formulate and express ideas in discussion, but it also is an element in the formation of the identity of individuals and groups. This capacity can be impeded by forms of authority and power that exclude us from discussion and deliberation, or distort our relations to ourselves and others. Deliberative models of democracy attempt to remedy some of the deficiencies of liberal and republican notions by stressing the centrality of discursive rationality.
In the mid-nineteenth century Alexis de Tocqueville raised an objection that has persisted to the present. Although de Tocqueville generally approved of new democracies, as represented by the young American state, he raised questions about the quality of democratic citizens as conformist and mediocre. Democracy may increase political freedom, but it also leads to impoverished personality. At the end of the century Friedrich Nietzsche provided a more aggressive critique of democracies. Opposing the abstract individual of liberal theory and the Protestantism underlying Immanuel Kant’s notion of autonomy, Nietzsche argued that religion (namely Christianity) produced meek unfree subjects who feared authority and lacked the qualities needed for heroic struggle.
A third objection focuses on the distortions of democratic freedoms inherent in the concentration of power in mass democracies. Agreeing with developmental democrats such as John Stuart Mill and John Dewey that democratic citizenship requires an educated and informed public, critics argued that mass democracies are characterized by a manipulated mass culture. This mass culture is a product of the ownership and concentration of media in the hands of powerful economic and political interests that maintain their power positions, restricting political and social freedom, by controlling the production and reception of information. Access to the means to make sense of and deliberate about public issues remains a major concern for the health of democracies.
Max Weber’s work on rationalization and bureaucracy raised another concern over the compatibility of large liberal democracies and freedom. Weber saw in social rationalization the increasing centrality of instrumental rationality. Bureaucratic authority became prominent in political regulation for reasons of efficiency or technical expertise, and it has come to displace not just deliberation and citizen participation but also the development of personality and social freedom. Bureaucracy itself further interprets the needs identified by developmentalists in an instrumental fashion, with resources of money or power rather than freedom or mutual understanding; citizens become subjugated clients and dependents.
In complex modern societies, democracies have grown in territory and population. The possibility of face-to-face democracy—the “town meeting” tradition with its stress on citizen participation—is difficult to maintain. Most modern democracies are representative, but the process of representing the varied subpublics of a democratic public can lead to conflicts. For critics, liberal and pluralist democracies are also thought to be dominated by interest groups and hence incapable of formulating a common good. Individual freedom does not lead to social or political freedom. This objection, which comes from all political outlooks, tends to see liberal democracy as a form driven by self-and group interests. For example, the conservative jurist Carl Schmitt thought that parliamentary systems were unworkable because of the conflict of interest groups, and contemporary communitarians see liberalism as lacking any orientation to a common good or moral core. This objection has some merit. Many proponents of the interest-group position devalued citizen-ship—already little more than voting. For some proponents, nonparticipation in even a minimum of democratic citizenship is seen as dysfunctional or unnecessary.
Conservative and communitarian objections, however, require a notion of sociocultural unity or homogeneity that is incompatible with the diversity of publics found in multicultural societies. These new challenges to liberal democratic society reflect a conflict between the claims of cultural integrity, which is not generally acknowledged in classical liberalism, and civil and political rights typical of liberal democratic notions of freedom. They also apply to newly important categories such as gender. Other conflicts between a developmental politics of distribution and the newer politics of resignation raise questions of the ways that liberal democracies reconcile the needs for solidarity, which are necessary for communicative freedom, with other freedoms producing a conflict between developmental politics of distribution and the newer politics of recognition. How do liberal democracies reconcile the need for solidarity, which is necessary for communicative freedom, with other freedoms? The renewal and reform of freedom in modern democratic societies rest with the healthy respect for and space for political protest and dissent. Freedom is not a fixed essence; instead, it has to be renewed and transformed in ever-changing social circumstances. Social movements have instituted new regimes, as in revolutions, but also have pressed claims for rights in established democracies, as in labor movements, movements for equal rights for women, racial minorities, and gays and lesbians, and even antiwar movements. The ability of a society to respond to dissent and protest is an important feature of a functioning democracy. In modern societies this often goes beyond mere tolerance to what postmodernists have called “openness to the other.” Societies have to recognize that dissent takes place in the context of a broader solidarity: We have to be aware of and open to others who seem different, yet we must also accept the need for discussion that may or may not vindicate their claims.
Cultural movements can also be sources of freedom movements. These can often be generational conflicts, as in the Sturm und Drang movement in Germany in the romantic era, and the counterculture movement in the 1960s. Both of these challenged what they saw as repressive social and cultural practices well before they became forces for political change. It could also be argued that cultural resistance had a decisive if largely unacknowledged role in maintaining subterranean political resistance in Eastern Europe prior to the fall of Soviet Communism.
A deliberative model of democracy employing the insights of communicative freedom seems to propose a different model of democratic freedom. Political order is not constituted by a unified general will, but by a web of symbolic interactions in which solidarity and commonality is established through participation in social and political life, not in a reestablished common good. A healthy democracy requires a well functioning parliamentary or representational system, and significant civil rights and economic and social equality. But it also requires a substantial measure of private and public freedom, supported by extra-governmental publics who are able to discuss and actively challenge existing practices. It has to pay equal attention to the claims of solidarity and cultural integrity. It requires a greater interchange between the knowledge of experts and the judgment of citizens in the formation of policy and the formation of public policy. It also requires a truly democratic educational system open to all and a free system of media that promotes knowledge and discussion of significant issues.
Theories of freedom are associated with different institutional arrangements for the maximization of freedom. Theories of negative freedom have been linked most often to liberal political institutions such as constitutional governments with representative political institutions; elected representatives; free, fair, and frequent elections with a competitive party system; and an independent judiciary; along with extensive freedom of information and communications and a network of voluntary associations.
Developmental theorists argue that the institutional framework associated with negative freedom tends to negate the very conditions of freedom that it intends to facilitate. When combined with market economic institutions, liberal political institutions create large-scale inequalities of economic and social power that make the exercise of equal liberty impossible. Poverty, powerlessness, and forms of disrespect all combine to make the exercise of freedom difficult. A commitment to freedom requires maintaining a minimum satisfaction of human needs. In market societies, developmentalists have advocated extensive welfare measures to compensate for the effects of power. They contend that rather than restricting freedom, as classical and neoclassical liberals might think, extensive public support in fact enhances freedom, by providing a basis for equal employment to all. However, for develop-mentalists, such institutions have to include the promotion of civic equality as well. Developmentalists go beyond welfare-state reform to advocate replacing the private-property market system with social production, or radically democratizing areas of work education and communications.
Despite the triumphalism of neoclassical liberals in the post–cold war era, democracy has not increased. Only about half of the world’s nations, consisting of less than half its population, can be considered democracies, and all of them do not meet all the criteria discussed above. The dissolution of the Soviet Empire has led to a rise in fundamentalist movements and ethnic conflicts that threaten to undermine democratic institutions in some newer states and to prevent their establishment in others. Some well established democracies have succeeded in accommodating ethnic diversity by forming “consociation democracies,” but these require special conditions not achievable in all countries. Attempts to design constitutions or democratic institutions through planning or by “shock therapy” have not led to large-scale democratic movements in these countries—they have simply reinstituted the pathologies already present in advanced societies.
Pathologies of democratic freedom have sometimes resulted from restricted conceptions of representative institutions in the twentieth century. Examples include competitive elitism, which reduces democracy to a form of choosing leaders, and corporatist representation, which limits popular participation and substitutes consultations with large organized groups. Although contemporary democratic societies provide some room for competing groups, they are characterized by deepening asymmetries of power and wealth that limit the effective equal freedom of all. Actual capitalism, unlike the myth of self-equilibrating markets, requires concentration of economic and social power. The growth of corporations beyond nation-states is another important factor in the growth of poverty and income disparity. Many commentators question whether the nation-state and its conception of democratic freedom is a feasible model in light of the increasing global power of corporations. The nation-state, it is argued, no longer has the autonomy from the economic system to direct its own affairs and achieve its own goals.
In the developing world democratic freedom faces these obstacles and others. The subaltern economic status of developing nations has made them vulnerable to forced political and economic restructuring in order to obtain funds for development projects, and for the most part, attempts to create a civil society from above by local leaders or outside groups has led to limited democratization with a limited role for popular democratic initiatives.
SEE ALSO Aristotle; Bureaucracy; Civil Liberties; Civil Rights; Constitutions; Cosmopolitanism; Democracy; Elitism; Hobbes, Thomas; Individualism; Kant, Immanuel; Liberalism; Liberation; Libertarianism; Liberty; Locke, John; Mill, John Stuart; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Participation, Political; Philosophy; Philosophy, Political; Plato; Political Culture; Political Science; Private Sector; Public Sector; Republicanism; Revolution; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Self-Determination; Social Movements; Tocqueville, Alexis de; Weber, Max
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Brian J. Caterino