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0:00
Wonderful. Well, thank you very much Philip and David for this invitation and many thanks also Alice for crucial technical help. So my title is Three Concepts of Liberty and as you can see from that title I do not myself believe that if we want to try to understand the concept of Liberty we can hope to proceed in what you might call traditional philosophical style, that's to say by attempting to provide an analysis of how the concept needs to be defined. It seems
0:33
to me that the concept of Liberty has been so endlessly debated and contested in the history of anglophone political argument that I don't see how he can hope to arrive at a definition that will somehow enable those debates to be overcome. So methodological question: how should we proceed?
0:52
And I think the only hope is genealogy. I think that we can only hope to make any progress if we try to follow the rival understandings that have emerged and done battle over time and then perhaps we can step back, this is my high hope for this little lecture, and reflect on what we think about them and so that's what I'm going to try a very briefly and sketchily to attempt
1:19
Within the anglophone tradition on which I'm going to concentrate the earliest thesis in which the concepts of civil and political liberty are systematically analysed is also as it happens perhaps the most important work of anglophone political philosophy namely Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan first published in 1651. I think you could say that chapter 21 of Leviathan which is entitled Of the Liberty of subjects really inaugurated the modern debate.
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Moreover Hobbes's understanding of Liberty turned out to be extremely influential so that his analysis is a very familiar one as you can see here at once in the first slide.
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As you see I've called this the liberal concept and it's very straightforward: if, Hobbes argues, you have the power and the will to do something then you are free to do it if there is no interference with the exercise of your power by any external agency.
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So there it is. But obviously that doesn't get us very far because if freedom means absence of interference if you just look at what you're looking at it turns out that we're looking at the wrong concept what you really need to know about is well what do you mean interference what is no interference? But Hobbes of course has thought of that and there is a straightforward answer.
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According to Hobbes external agencies are said to interfere when they act on the body of an individual in such a way that an action within the power of the individual is either prevented or compelled due to the application of physical force by the external agent in such a way as to render any alternative impossible. So on this account what what Hobbes thinks Liberty means is and I now quote "absence of external impediments to motion".
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Notice that it's only bodily interference that is said to take away freedom of action. The implication is that if it is only your will that is coerced
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as for example if you obey the law only because of the fear of the consequences of disobeying you nevertheless act freely. Hobbes summarizes: fear and Liberty are consistent because you will to obey because you want to avoid the consequences of disobedience.
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Now that way of thinking remains widely endorsed in anglophone philosophy to this day. I mean Matt Kramer for example in his classic work on the measure of freedom is an out and out Hobbesian.
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So that genealogical line runs right down into our own time.
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However the immediate reaction to what you're looking at, Hobbes's analysis, was to say look there's something obviously wrong with that and I now want to turn to the critique. Especially as this appears first of all in the most celebrated work of anglophone political philosophy of the immediately Next Generation that's to say John Locke's Second Treatise of government first published in 1689. So I'm going to sweep the board clean at this moment and start
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again with John Locke. No slide. Now that's correct, that's right, I don't want to slide because now we're just going to think about Locke. Locke has a complex view about freedom
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and I'm not talking about all of it. I'm talking about when he turns in his Second Treatise of government to the question of freedom of action. He there agrees with Hobbes that of course you are unfree if you are bodily prevented from exercising a power. If I get up and find someone has locked this door I am not free to leave the room. No one can surely deny that. Locke certainly doesn't want to deny that. But he says surely (this is now Locke) you're also unfree if your will is
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coerced. I quote the Second Treatise: "should a robber break into my house and with a dagger at my throat make me seal documents to convey my estate to him, would that give him title?"
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The question is purely rhetorical I mean what Hobbes wants you to see that it is in that predicament you have no choice as we say. Now that coercion may not render your action impossible to perform but it can make an action so as you might say so unappealing - you really don't want him to cut your throat - that you can never be said to perform it freely. So there's Locke's view and I should say even more clearly and a century late, and I'll come to that, it's Jeremy Bentham's view
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and from Bentham this view passes into the mainstream of anglophone thinking about freedom of action and so the addition of this argument makes the picture of liberal freedom look like this.
6:44
Now we have Hobbes's analysis here on the left wing - that's not at all where he wants to be - but we have Locke's and even more clearly we have Bentham's addition to the right and the rival claim as you see is that you are unfree whenever there is either bodily interference that prevents action or coercive interference by others that has the effect, and this is Locke's own phrase, of bending your will. There I've put it up there. Acting on the
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body: Hobbes or bending the will: Locke. "Bending your will to their designs".
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Well some of the problem, as before, it turns out that if you want a clear analysis of Liberty on this account it turns out what you'll have to understand is what do you mean by coercion.
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So it's rather remarkable that Locke never offers an analysis of what he means by coercion. You won't find that in the Second Treatise and indeed as I've already intimated as far as I can see the earliest anglophone philosopher who actually puts that question at the front of his mind is Bentham and that's especially in his treatise called On the Limits of the Penal Branch of Legislation which he wrote in the early 1780s. So the genealogy, this one is going to bump forward
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at high speed and now moves on from the end of the 17th century to the end of the 18th century. Now Bentham proposes that we should distinguish between two ways of bending someone's will.
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One is that you can promise that you will reward them for compliance so that if they refuse they're no worse off. The other is that you can threaten, that you will penalize them for non-compliance, in which case if they refuse they will be penalized they will be worse off.
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Now Bentham's proposal is that we can properly speak of coercion and thus of taking away Freedom only in the second case because as he puts it, and I'm now quoting Bentham, "by coercive threats with a penalty certain actions will be rendered ineligible" that is people can coerce you into deciding not to perform them although of course as Bentham nicely points out the threats themselves have got to satisfy certain criteria and those are
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the the threat should be credible, it should be immediate, it should be serious. But then Bentham says we've got a large and crucial extension to the Hobbesian analysis of freedom and here it is
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Now is this perhaps the analysis of Freedom we want? Well in anglophone political thinking it was widely agreed for some considerable time that the answer is yes. So this lecture would come to a close and many philosophers still accept the analysis that you're now looking at. For example here's a really important example. If you look at perhaps the most influential of all modern anglophone discussions of my theme namely Isaiah Berlin's essay two concepts of Liberty
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the so-called concept of negative Liberty for Berlin is exactly what you're looking at, nothing else. And for Berlin that is the concept of Liberty that you would wish to accept
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and so the genealogical line, with a vengeance here, comes right down into our own time.
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However within the anglophone tradition there arose a further complicating moment only a generation after Bentham when John Stuart Mill published his classic essay on Liberty in 1859.
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One of the moves that Mill makes is to point out that the legal tradition of liberalism so far endorses one principle that he thinks is questionable and there you can already see it at the top of our chart that the freedom you have consists in there being no interference by external agencies. No one has disagreed with that, that's to say another person or a group or indeed, Hobbes says, even natural force. You can be rendered unfree by the
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wind. It might blow you over. This force that either leaves you powerless or threatens you. Now Mill asks in chapter three of his essay, now is it true that freedom is necessarily interpersonal in that way or could the agent who takes away your freedoms somehow be yourself
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and so here is the chart with that addition included.
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So there it is. We have an individual is free when the whole liberal tradition is over on the left that's the first thing to say there you now find Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, the lot. But the addition now proposed is that the agent can impede their own actions or compel them due to the operation of what? Now here's the question: what? So here's the issue how can the self undermine its own freedom of choice? Okay now we enter some deep philosophical
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waters but let me just at least mention some possibilities that have been much discussed.
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First this can happen due to the impact of an overpowering emotion: passion.
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Passion. So there you have it: passion. Here the suggestion is that the will can ally itself either with the passions of the soul in which case the resulting action will not be an expression of Liberty but of license or else the will can ally itself with reason in which case the action will be free. So here's the claim only actions undertaken out of Reason will be freely performed. You can take away your own Freedom by submitting to passion. So there's a strong connection there
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of Freedom with reason and we would most firmly associate that not with anyone in the anglophone tradition but with Kant and the whole tradition of Kantian philosophy which makes this point very strongly. But also notice more familiar and certainly therefore Christian as well as English as well is the Christian way of thinking in which this is exactly the way that Liberty used to be
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categorically distinguished from license. However John Stuart Mill's concern is not with any of that he is far more interested in a second possibility which is the power of Civil Society to limit your freedom by demanding conformity to its conventions and norms. So that's Mill's central suggestion you can render yourself free by living inauthentically.
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And there it is this is like Tocqueville. Mill is impressed by the power of society to limit your freedom by moulding you into its shape. Now Mill also gestures towards a third, and closely related I should say, possibility that I would have to add and it's important that we would skid off the anglophone tradition here because this is really a Marxist thought very strongly. Marx's exploration
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of this third possibility which is that it is the idea of false consciousness about what makes for Liberty. And so there it is that Mill comes close to talking about false consciousness and inauthenticity is close to it already but there's a wonderful passage in Chapter 3 of On Liberty I can't resist quoting it: "the people of England think themselves free but they choose what is customary in preference to their inclinations until it does not occur to them to have any
15:00
inclinations except for what is customary". So they have false consciousness as a result
15:08
So now we're looking at an array of different conceptions of freedom but notice that they all have one basic element in common and there it is at the top of the chart they all explicate Freedom as no interference. Now we've broadened the idea of interference tremendously but towards the end of the 19th century a number of anglophone philosophers wanted to go much further, they wanted to argue that what you're looking at is still radically incomplete
15:46
and these are the numerous English followers of Hegel: T.H Green, Bradley, Bosanquet and others. And according to their view of freedom we want to be free not merely to act at will but, and here's something very hard to grasp but let me just say it, and this is quoting Green, "to act in such a way as to realize the essence of our nature". So that's the idea.
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Now we're waiting for that to appear and there it is. Freedom consists not in no interference but in self-realization, the realization of the essence of your nature. I quote Green again "freedom is the achievement of becoming what you have it in yourself to become".
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What? Well now this is difficult isn't it? What we now want to ask is well what then is the form of life that a truly free person will live? And here you come to a dichotomy in the tradition between a classical view and then the subversion of that view by Christianity. Very close to a theme of Nietzsche's genealogy of morality. So and this is the view, and we've now got it up on our chart and it's Aristotelian originally, that
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we are political animals. Aristotle: 'man is the Zoon Politikon' - the political animal. Incredibly influential thought so on this account you would realize yourself the essence of your nature most fully and thus you will be most fully free if you exercise your talents in the public sphere.
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However according to the Christian view that historically of course Nietzsche again challenged that vision of human nature we realize our nature most fully not in the service of the community but in the service of God. And there's the biblical thought as the Anglican Collect says: to serve god is perfect Freedom. So there's a second possibility: your essence is spiritual
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Now obviously that's not a political idea at all but if you turn back to it you arrive at the heart of what Isaiah Berlin calls positive Liberty. That's what he means by positive Liberty: self-realization. So you've got the whole Berlin story now on the board as it were although he doesn't at all want to endorse this. He's endorsed everything else that we've said. But who does endorse this? Well in our time the greatest philosopher who absolutely endorsed
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this view is Hannah Arendt especially in the famous essay What Is Freedom.
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And very much a follower of Hannah Arendt is Charles Taylor. Charles Taylor's mighty treatise or at least very long treatise Sources of the Self endorses exactly this view of how to think about the character of Liberty and so again there's a further strand of the genealogy that likewise runs straight down into the present. You can now see why it has to be a genealogy. You can't put these together: they're just rival conceptualizations.
19:16
Now I want to pause at this point. I've got a little time left. I hope five minutes or so because I think it would be generally agreed that what you're now looking at is as full of genealogy as can coherently be given of the concept of Liberty except that we ought to add this final thought. Can we please, Alice? Thank you very much. Philosophers ought always to put in "C".
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Now what I want to do now, and this is more ambitious, is I want to end by challenging all of this so I want to start by sweeping the board clean yet again.
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Now I can best introduce this final part of my talk by noting that when we saw Hobbes insisting that Liberty is simply absence of interference one of his aspirations was to discredit a completely different way of understanding Liberty that before Hobbes's time had been almost universally accepted. And the contention that Hobbes is trying to discredit is the one that you would find most clearly articulated in what I've come to think may be perhaps the most important
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text for the analysis of freedom in the western tradition and that is the Codex of Roman law. The part of the Codex known as the digest, read by every jurist, begins with the law persons and their Roman law introduces a fundamental distinction. the distinction between the figure of the free person the liber homo in the Latin by contrast with the figure of the servus, the slave. The contrast between the free person and the slave.
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Now according to Roman law anyone in servitude is by definition unfree
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but the question is, and then you'll understand Freedom, what makes a slave unfree? Now the answer given in the law is not that those living in servitude are necessarily impeded from pursuit of their goals. A very subtle point is made here: a slave who only ever does their master's bidding may not suffer coercive interference, they just do it. So what makes them wholly unfree nonetheless?
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The answer according to the jurists is the mere fact of living in dependence on the arbitrary will of someone else is what makes you unfree. So look, you could be not a slave and yet unfree if you are wholly dependent on the arbitrary will of someone else. The slave is just the most obvious case.
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So we are being told that freedom consists not in no interference, not in any of what we've been talking about there, but in no dependence. And so there we have it no dependence, and absence of subjection, you should also, you could say. So there you have a third concept. An individual is free if: no interference or no self-realization, or no dependence. You're not going to be able to bring those three together. They are rival concepts.
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So there is my third concept of Liberty and here the claim being made is this
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Thank you very much Alice. You will not be a Liber homo or a free man not a slave if there could be interference in consequence of the fact that you leave your living in dependence, in subjection you might say, to the arbitrary will of others. Now why is that? Because if you are living in subjection to the will of someone else then all your actions have the form of permissions from someone who could cancel that permission with impunity at any time. So notice
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if you're not a free man you never act freely because your actions are never the product of your own will they're always in part the product of someone else's will that's to say in the form of an allowance or a permission for the action to be performed when that allowance or permission could always be withdrawn. So there you have it the idea the Roman law idea. Very influential. That's of course what Hobbes is attacking is the idea of the free person who is not dependent
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and as we used to say in an old now outdated vocabulary someone who is their own master.
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Okay now we need to ask who then on this account may be said to be condemned to living like slaves?
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Who lived as slaves? Thank you Alice. Okay let me first note the answer given in direct response to Hobbes. There's an immediate response to Hobbes celebrated James Harrington, Oceana 1656.
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And he says all subjects of monarchs live like slaves.
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He's a real republican. All monarchs, Harrington notes, have prerogative powers. Prerogative powers are discretionary executive powers but that means that you are dependent on somebody else's will. So insofar as a monarch has prerogatives and of course under the current monarchy in this country the prerogatives are extremely extensive you are to that degree not a free person because it can simply be done doesn't have to go through Parliament
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it is the prerogative power and until Gordon Brown removed it that included War and Peace by the way.
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So there is one way in which you can live as a slave if you do not live in a republic.
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Next we find a claim that became crucial with the rise of the European Empires in the same period. And there it is: the colonized lived like slaves. Notice that is exactly the argument that's exactly the entrance into my chart of the colonists in America in 1776. When there's the revolution in the British American colonies in that year and they make a declaration it is called of course as
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we all know the Declaration of Independence. But you might say independence from what? Well, from dependence of course. On what they claimed, and I quote Dickinson, to be "the enslaving power of the British Parliament which is taxing us without our being represented and so without our consent and so confronting us as a purely arbitrary will and so leaving us in the condition of slaves".
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Let me next note an answer that came powerfully to the fore in the Revolutionary decades after the 1789 revolution in France in this in the 1790s: women. In this analysis all women who lack independent means live like slaves and that is the celebrated contention of Mary Wollstonecraft's pioneering work A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792. I should say "woman". I'm so sorry that's a misprint it is the Rights of Woman. All women. Women at the moment,
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Wollstonecraft assures you rightly, need to know how to commend themselves to men upon whom they usually depend economically which renders them so hard in their attitudes and forces them and now quoting Wollstonecraft "to live no other than as bond slave". And nor, I would want to add, are we without contemporary instances of people who live in dependence on arbitrary power. So we have contemporary examples. Consider first the dominating power of bosses
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that's to say especially of non-unionized Labour forces or still worse illegal immigrants there you have people living in such dependence on their bosses that the notion of protesting against working conditions for example would become a virtual impossibility. So to that extent they live in servitude. Or consider the powers of surveillance that so many states and social media companies turn out to be practicing. The assembling by the state
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of masses of data for undisclosed purposes on this account leaves not just your privacy but your Liberty infringed because of what could be done with the information they are harvesting and in communities which as we now know are under full scale and continual surveillance as in major cities in China especially under Covid this is what is happening. They are wholly dependent upon an arbitrary power. Finally and most depressingly, I'm not claiming that this list is exhaustive
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So my time is definitely up. I've gone one minute over in fact. So let me just end by saying I promised three titles in title of my talk, I promised three concepts of Liberty in the title of my talk. Now there they are: no dependence or no interference or self-realization and maybe in discussion we can start to think about the question which really matters.
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Which of these should we prefer? You've got to choose. Thank you very much.
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