Political freedom

• 1. Introduction

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  Political freedom is one of the most contested ideas in all of political thought, and almost no one defining it agrees with anyone else. It is also called political autonomy or political agency, and it sits at the center of how democratic societies understand themselves. Some describe it as freedom from oppression or coercion. Others call it the absence of disabling conditions, paired with the fulfillment of enabling ones. Still others frame it as the absence of life conditions of compulsion in society, including economic compulsion. The trouble is that each of these definitions quietly points in a different direction. Does freedom mean being left alone, or being given the means to act? Can a person be free while poor, sick, or starving? Is freedom something the state protects, or something the state threatens? Thinkers across the political spectrum have answered these questions in ways that flatly contradict one another. What follows traces those answers, the people who fought over them, and the moment one philosopher located the very birth of the idea in the politics of ancient Greece.

• 2. Negative And Positive

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  Freedom from unreasonable external constraints on action is the version most people reach for first, the so-called negative reading of political freedom. Yet the same concept can point the other way, toward the positive exercise of rights, capacities, and possibilities for action, including the exercise of social or group rights. The idea stretches further still. It can mean freedom from internal constraints on political action or speech, the pressure of social conformity, the demand for consistency, the pull toward inauthentic behaviour. These threads bind political freedom tightly to civil liberties and human rights. In democratic societies those rights usually carry legal protection from the state itself, the same authority that elsewhere might be the source of constraint.

• 3. The Left And The Market

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  Left-wing political philosophy generally fuses freedom with positive liberty, the enabling of a group or individual to determine their own life or realize their own potential. In that frame, freedom can include freedom from poverty, starvation, treatable disease, and oppression, alongside freedom from force and coercion, from whomever they may issue. Friedrich Hayek, the neoliberal philosopher and economist, attacked exactly this move. He said the socialist argument defined individual liberty as freedom from obstacles, and that this only confused the real aim of securing individual freedom. The danger, in his view, was the identification of freedom with power. Once collective power over circumstances stood in for the physical ability to do what I want, Hayek warned, a totalitarian state could form, one where liberty has been suppressed in the name of liberty. Milton Friedman pressed a related point in his book Capitalism and Freedom. He split freedom into two kinds, political and economic, and insisted that without economic freedom there can be no political freedom.

• 4. Answering Friedman

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  Robin Hahnel set out to dismantle Friedman's economic freedom in his article Why the Market Subverts Democracy. His claim was direct. Whenever anyone exercises their own economic freedom, that exercise infringes on the freedom of others. Those infringements breed conflicts, and the conflicts get settled through property rights systems. So the real question, Hahnel argued, is which property rights system is better or worse. Friedman, he charged, simply takes the existing property rights for granted and never thinks to question them. Social anarchists came at the puzzle differently again. They treated negative and positive liberty as complementary, two halves of a single concept of freedom. That view can demand utilitarian trade-offs, like surrendering the right to the product of one's labor or freedom of association in exchange for less racial discrimination or more subsidies for housing. They had a sharp name for the negative-liberty view endorsed by capitalism. They called it selfish freedom.

• 5. Many Voices

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  Alasdair MacIntyre theorized freedom through our social interdependence with other people, locating it not in the isolated individual but in the web of relationships around them. Nikolas Kompridis proposed that the modern pursuit of freedom splits into two motivating ideals. One is freedom as autonomy or independence. The other is freedom as the ability to cooperatively initiate a new beginning. Michel Foucault theorized political freedom in its opposition to, and as a condition of, power relations, what he called the power of action upon actions. A separate lineage tied freedom to artistic and cultural practice, a thread running through Cornelius Castoriadis, Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Rancière, and Theodor Adorno. Gerald C. MacCallum Jr. tried to broker a compromise between positive and negative freedoms. He held that an agent must have full autonomy over themselves, and described freedom as a triadic relationship. It involves three things at once: the agent, the constraints they need to be free from, and the goal they are aspiring to.

• 6. Freedom And The Earth

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  Environmentalists insist that political freedoms should carry some constraint on the use of ecosystems. There is no such thing, they argue, as a freedom to pollute or a freedom to deforest. Such activities create negative externalities, which violate other groups' liberty not to be exposed to pollution. The popularity of SUVs, golf, and urban sprawl has served as evidence that certain ideas of freedom collide with ecological conservation. Those collisions can turn into serious confrontations and clashes of values, sometimes spilling into advertising campaigns, such as the one run by PETA over fur. John Dalberg-Acton offered a measuring stick that cut across all these debates. The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free, he said, is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

• 7. The Greek Origin

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  Hannah Arendt traced the conceptual origins of freedom to ancient Greek politics, where the concept was historically inseparable from political action. Politics, in this account, belonged only to those who had freed themselves from the necessities of life, leaving them free to enter the realm of political affairs. Around the 5th century CE, Arendt says, freedom became attached to the Christian notion of freedom of the will, an inner freedom, and from then on freedom as political action was neglected. She resisted that drift, calling freedom the raison d'être of politics. For Arendt, political freedom historically stood opposed to sovereignty or will-power. In ancient Greece and Rome it was inseparable from performance and never arose as a conflict between the will and the self. The notion of freedom as freedom from politics, she argued, is a modern invention. Against it she set freedom as the capacity to begin anew, a corollary of what she called natality, our nature as new beginnings and hence beginners. Political action, in her view, interrupts automatic process, whether natural or historical. The freedom to begin anew is therefore the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known.