Liberty’s Discontents: The contested history of freedom
&gt; 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.<p>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&#x27;s negative&#x2F;positive freedom dichotomy toward an ideal he calls &quot;freedom as non-domination&quot;. He argues that this was, in fact, the pre-modern version of freedom that existed in Ancient Rome and in various Italian City states.<p>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). &quot;Arbitrary&quot; 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.<p>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.<p>&gt; “Ideas about freedom commonplace today…were invented not by the revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but rather by their critics.”<p>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).<p>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 (&quot;freedom for the pike is death for the minnows&quot;). 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.<p>Berlin links this tendency to try to harmonize society with the idea that you should be able to choose &quot;what other people should rationally want&quot;. As a result of this, Berlin is sometimes seen as &quot;being against positive liberty&quot;. But this isn&#x27;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.<p>A second objection to Pettit&#x2F;de Dijn comes from Paley. Petitt is aware of it, but doesn&#x27;t see it as a significant obstacle. I do. Paley argues that &quot;freedom as non-domination&quot; 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&#x27;s more realistic in a society where everyone can vote. I agree with Paley that it&#x27;s impossible to ensure freedom-as-non-domination in a modern mass society, though perhaps it&#x27;s possible in small, rich societies (in fact, this seems to be the case).<p>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&#x27;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.<p>A fourth objection: Pettit&#x27;s arguments are excessively legalistic. He envisions &quot;sanctions, screens, and contestability&quot; 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.<p>Finally, Pettit&#x27;s weakest argument has to do with &quot;information&quot;. 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&#x27;s the exactly the point. But we don&#x27;t agree and the idea that we could all be convinced is laughable, that&#x27;s the whole point, we just don&#x27;t agree.