Freedom is the constitutive value of European political life, in that slaves, lacking freedom, must submit to a master, while free persons, being equal in respect of being free, constitute for themselves a government which secures order by law, and not by the unchecked will of a master. It is on this basis that Europeans have always distinguished their civil societies from the despotisms of the Orient, in which (according to the account commonly given in western political thought) all submit to a master.
Among the ancient Greeks, eleutheria was the adult condition in which a free male left behind the tutelage of childhood and took his place among fellow citizens in the public life of the agora, ruling and being ruled in turn. For the Romans, libertas was the quality of the free plebeian and corresponded to the dignitas of the patrician. The concrete reality of freedom for the Romans lay in their intense constitutionality, and their aversion, for many centuries after the expulsion of the Tarquins, to submitting themselves to a king. When the civic humanists of the medieval Italian cities revived the republican ideal, Julius Caesar stood as the man who extinguished freedom and gave Rome at last a master.
Medieval Europe, however, had its own indigenous sources of freedom, derived from both Christianity and from the practices of the barbarians who replaced the Romans. Regarding the situation in which one person rules another as sufficiently unusual to require justification (omne potestas est a deo was a common statement of the sentiment), they explored the forms of consent and the constitution of authority with great inventiveness: parliaments, juries, inquests the principle of representation and much else in what we call ‘democracy’ descend from the civil experience of that period.
In early modern Europe, these monarchical institutions and the classical republican tradition of freedom supplied a joint inheritance, and by no means a harmonious one. In the monarchical tradition, freedom was essentially a condition sustained by public life but enjoyed within the private realm. It came to be defined as a set of rights, which could be distinguished as the civil rights of the subject and the political rights of the citizen. Freedom, argued Thomas Hobbes, is ‘the silence of the law’, and, in this tradition, freedom has always resided in the ability of individuals, as judges of their own best interests, to order their lives within a structure of rules which are clear, predictable and known to all. The republican tradition, by contrast, took freedom as the moral ideal which identified being fully human with participation in public life. Active citizens, thus understood, were self-determining in that they participated in making the laws under which they lived. This view ultimately rested upon ideal memories of the virtuous and public-spirited cities of the ancient world. From Montesquieu onwards, many writers have judged that modern freedom, which is individualistic, is quite different from the civic freedom of those earlier times, but the ideal of a truly participatory community has never lost its power to influence European thought.
It was Rousseau who most notably elaborated this latter view of freedom, with a clarity of mind which led him to the paradoxical implication that citizens who have been compelled to abide by a law for which they are in principle responsible are being ‘forced to be free’. In the extreme development of this view, individuals can properly be described as free only when they act virtuously, which seems, in terms of the modern view of freedom, to be self-contradictory. These two views of freedom are often discussed, following Isaiah Berlin (1969), as the negative and positive view of freedom. The negative view tends to be strongly associated with Anglo-Saxon societies, while continental life is more receptive to the positive view.
The issue is important because the ideal of freedom has become the ratchet of European social and political development. Philosophers and politicians alike make use of slogans and images developed from the contrast between slave and free. ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains’, begins Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762), while Marx and Engels end the Communist Manifesto (1848) by telling workers that they have nothing to lose but their chains. Hegel argued in his Philosophy of History (1837) that a universal freedom has been the great achievement of the modern Germanic world. In the despotisms of the east, he argued, one was free; among the Greeks and Romans, some were, but in modern Europe, all were free. Indeed, within a few decades of Hegel’s death in 1831, slaves had been freed throughout European possessions, and also in the USA. Paradoxically, it was in exactly this period that a new type of politician arose—communist, anarchist, nationalist and so on—to proclaim that modern Europe was, contrary to all appearances, the most cunningly contrived system of domination the world had ever seen. This doctrine launched the idea of liberation. But whereas freedom and liberty refer to the removal of arbitrary interferences with the way that individuals govern their lives, liberation was the project of removing all conditions thought to frustrate human satisfaction. It stands for a vision of human life in which desire flows freely and uninterruptedly into satisfying action. This is a vastly more ambitious project than that of liberty, and has appealed to a correspondingly less sophisticated audience.
Kenneth Minogue
London School of Economics and Political Science
Reference
Berlin, I. (1969) Four Essays on Liberty, London.
Further reading
Barker, E. (ed.) (1995) LSE on Freedom, London.
Cranston, M. (1953) Freedom: A New Social Analysis, London.
