February 10, 2010
It’s like rain, on your wedding day
Libertarians come in many shapes and sizes. Some are ignorant, knee-jerk fools. Many are erudite, intelligent and insightful. Via Hayek’s influence on Thatcher, and Ayn Rand’s influence on American conservatism, libertarians of varying quality have had more of an impact on real-world politics than snooty leftists remarks about libertarianism “only existing on the internet” can account for.
Although there’s fierce disagreement between rival libertarian camps, one thing that surely binds them together is the belief that liberty is of the utmost importance. And that liberty is best served if the state gets out of the way to an enormous extent.
Sensible libertarians don’t want a Mad Max dystopia without any sort of legal structure and lacking common police and defence forces. After all, the capitalist dream libertarians espouse only works if property rights are enforced and contract law exists and is meaningful.
But libertarians will typically see any sort of “big government” action – the provision of welfare safety nets, public education, redistributive taxation and so forth – as harmful. Frequently, these things will be seen as harmful precisely because they require the government it intervene in people’s lives and restrict their liberty. (Though other reasons may also be put forward).
A typical objection advanced by anti-libertarians – say, “liberal egalitarians” in the mould of Rawls and Dworkin – is that libertarians employ a “moralised” conception of freedom. That is, libertarians are preoccupied with the way the actions of a state interfere with the freedom of citizens, yet pay comparatively little heed to the interference in people’s lives generated by market forces or oppressive capitalist structures.
I’m not going to take a stand on that debate. What I am going to note is that libertarians (and liberal egalitarians) subscribe to one of two major traditions of thinking about freedom in the intellectual legacy of western philosophy. Those traditions were identified by Isaiah Berlin in his seminal Two Concepts of Liberty as being between “positive” and “negative” freedom.
Although the distinction is tricky and at times threatens to collapse in on itself, “negative” freedom roughly means that one is free purely and simply so long as one is not being interfered with, or being prevented from acting. To simplify horribly, If I want to go to Dover and nobody is preventing me from going to Dover, then I am free to go to Dover.
“Positive” freedom (again, over-simplifying horribly) takes a different tack. It’s the idea that one isn’t really free unless one acts in accordance with one’s “true” (or possibly “higher”) self or desires. So, for example, on a positive freedom conception even if nobody is preventing me from going to Dover, I may not be (truly) free to go to Dover if my desire to go to Dover issues from some irrational passion to stare listlessly at the White Cliffs, when what my “true” (/”higher”) self desires (or demands) is that I go to the political meeting that’s taking place and actualise my latent essence as a political animal.*
Libertarians (as far as I know, universally) reject positive conceptions of freedom. For them, one is free if one is not being interfered with, and nothing more. The less the state intrudes on one’s life, the more liberty one has.
Yet there’s a funny irony of intellectual history to be noted here, and it lies in where the notion of “negative” freedom predominantly comes from.
In his masterpiece Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes stated that:
“LIBERTY, or freedom, signifieth properly the absence of opposition (by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion); and may be applied no less to irrational and inanimate creatures than to rational.”
[...]
“And according to this proper and generally received meaning of the word, a FREE-MAN is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to.”
Hobbes’ primary target wasn’t so much “positive” liberty theorists (though he thought little of them) but English “republicans” like John Milton who claimed that they could only be free if they ruled themselves and weren’t subjected to the arbitrary power of a King. Indeed, Hobbes’ claim that one is free so long as one is not being prevented from moving allowed him to ridicule those who claimed they needed self-rule to be free:
“There is written on the turrets of the city of Luca in great characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS; yet no man can thence infer that a particular man has more liberty or immunity from the service of the Commonwealth there than in Constantinople. Whether a Commonwealth be monarchical or popular, the freedom is still the same.”
Hobbes’ conception of freedom has been profoundly influential – indeed, it pretty much knocked-out the republican contention. The conception of liberty as simply being free to move permutated – via 19th Century thinkers like Jeremy Bentham – into modern conceptions of “negative” liberty-as-non-interference. The very conception of freedom that modern libertarians now subscribe to.
Hence an amusing irony of history. Those who currently most protest the actions of the state on the grounds that it restricts freedom by interfering with people’s lives have inherited their conception of freedom from probably the greatest defender of absolutist state power ever to have put pen to paper; who claimed that one is as free under the laws of democracy as of despotism.
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* This is a caricature of a position usually attributed to Aristotle
Dan said,
February 10, 2010 at 11:04 am
Isn’t it much more reasonable to say that the libertarian conception of liberty draws upon Locke, rather than Hobbes? That is certainly the tradition in which most libertarian philosophers have taken themselves to be writing in. Hardly any philosophers, let alone libertarian ones, hold something like Hobbes’ “pure” negative conception (Hillel Steiner being the interesting exception), and far more prefer a Lockean conception (recall his famous distinction between liberty and license).
Paul Sagar said,
February 10, 2010 at 11:08 am
Dan,
I thought you said you’d never read the Second Treatise :P
Sure, most libertarians take far more of a direct influence from Locke.
But Hobbes is the thinker from whom the basic conception of liberty that Locke and post-Lockean liberals employ ultimately comes from. Note that Locke’s “liberty vs license” distinction is a “negative freedom” conception, at root.
I’m not trying to say that Libertarians are Hobbists. Obviously they’re not.
I’m just noting a rather amusing irony of (intellectual) history. The same point, obviously, applies to Rawls and Dworkin – hardly sovereign absolutists themselves – but it’s just more pronounced with libertarians because of the fierce opposition to the state on the grounds of personal liberty, given that the original formulation of “negative” style freedom comes from a thinker who denied that subjects had any right to dictate to the sovereign his rightful limits of interference, which were classed as (almost completely) absolute.
Of course, Libertarians owe more to Locke than Hobbes in the way they frame and think about a lot of issues. But on the question of liberty, Hobbes is (mostly) the originator.
Paul Sagar said,
February 10, 2010 at 11:11 am
When I say “the original formulation” that obviously has to be qualified somewhat – but Hobbes is a major source for the negative freedom tradition.
And what’s more, his conception of what the state is has turned out to be pretty much the only game in town.
So we all owe him an intellectual debt on that score.
clay barham said,
February 10, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Ayn Rand’s “Selfishness” really reflects what we mean by self-interest. Obama says community interests are more important than are individual interests, which is the kind of Rousseau to Marx view of the people in the herd, Obama and his elite few being the rulers of the herd. If you look at Roark’s jury summation from FOUNTAINHEAD, you find self-interest which focuses on his art, his creations, which, like the woman he loved, are outside of him. That is not “selfish” or self-centered, but outer-centered where the circle of interests are smaller than proposed by socialists. See The Changing Face of Democrats on Amazon and claysamerica.com.
Bill le Breton said,
February 11, 2010 at 10:44 am
I have long thought that the most powerful barrier to freedom is our notion of what is often called ‘my gut instinct’. Or ‘hey, common sense tells me …’ There are many things that we do and say and believe because the voice within suggests that ‘that feels right’.
Gut instincts are a result of socialisation, not some magical human resource of insight with which we are in danger of losing touch. Social systems persist when members of the particular society think, behave and think they know things in ways that support and replicate the system. The gut instincts and perceived logicalities that are produced operate to maintain the social system.
What we think is dangerous and what we believe triggers dangers is one of the most obvious areas where we are vulnerable to our gut feelings. That is why there was such a strong reaction to Andrew Wakefield’s interpretation of a cause of autism. There was something about the idea that a ‘mixture’ of vaccines all administered in ‘one concoction’ that felt logical to many, many people.
Social systems are often about borders, their maintenance or their breach. About not losing members or assessing what to do about newcomers. About finding or providing partners. So, what happens at the border is something that all social systems have settled and determined in a way that their members believe is normal, common sense and which feels right. We welcome strangers or we fear strangers. Marry in or marry out. These decisions are reinforced throughout the social system by a system of powerful symbols. So, if borders have to be rigid things, then, many other examples of categorisation are rigid. Mixtures are ‘dangerous things’. So even in the late C20th when almost the whole of the medical profession said otherwise, one person seen as a shaman in a white coat was able to convince thousands of parents that the MMR vaccine was the cause of danger and not a protection.
The thousands of children exposed for longer to the dangers of measles, mumps and rubella and those who have suffered from the consequences of those diseases because their parents’ gut instincts told them to follow Wakefield’s professional warning have had their freedoms diminished, their life chances reduced. Even the parents’ period of deception was itself a period of diminished freedom.
Paul, am I talking here of freedom from domination or freedom from interference?
Apologising for the Leviathan « Bad Conscience said,
February 24, 2010 at 10:19 am
[...] man called Commonwealth, or State (in Latin, Civitas) is now an integral part of all our lives. Again, how ironic that the central ideas of history’s greatest proponent of absolutism should come [...]