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Editorial
The Politics of Freedom
by Rick Lewis
“The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.”
With these words, John Stuart Mill began his famous 1859 essay On Liberty. As it happens, they also apply to the magazine you are holding, for this issue’s theme is the politics of freedom. We have gathered five articles on subjects connected with civil or social liberty, and we hope you find them thought-provoking even if you do not agree with them.
We’ll start off with a brief history of freedom and state intervention since the Age of Enlightenment. Can the state force us to be free? What is the role of education in underpinning liberty? Next we have an essay on value pluralism – can society function when it contains individual and groups with differing values, without an overarching ideology? Arianna Marchetti then asks another great question for all of us living in liberal democracies. Being free of censorship, of arbitrary arrest, of the knock on your door in the night; is no small thing – ask anyone who has lived in the shadow of such fears – but if we are not able to change our world then are we truly free?
Also within our special section we’ll think about the state deliberately removing the freedom of some of its citizens. Does imprisonment still make sense as a punishment or should we find some other way to deal with lawbreakers? You’ll find two surprising and original essays on this, one from each side of that debate. I am sure they will be read with particular interest by the small number of Philosophy Now readers who are themselves serving time – as well as by their jailers. I’m thinking in particular of a penitentiary in Arizona where the zealous censor scours each newly arrived issue for anything contrary to prison policy, scissoring out the occasional discussion of drugs policy or any pictures of classical art showing anyone in a state of undress, before passing the rest of the magazine to our subscriber. (The prison then kindly emails us to tell us what they have cut out and invites us to appeal, which we sometimes do).
In that other long-running philosophical debate, about free will and determinism, it is often said that we cannot answer the question of whether we have free will unless we first decide what we mean by free will. Something similar is true when it comes to political freedom. So what is freedom? Is it “just another word for nothing left to lose”, as the song goes? Well, political philosophers often distinguish between negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is freedom from something. Positive freedom is freedom to do something. Sometimes different claims of freedom may conflict: I might feel that my desire to walk downtown without fear is threatened by your wish to carry an assault rifle. A number of political philosophers have provided philosophical underpinnings for extensive individual freedom, but the extent and nature of the freedoms we should enjoy will always be very much a matter of debate and in this issue we can’t pretend to do anything more than scratch the surface.
Freedom is always contested. For example, here in Britain laws on demonstrations were drastically tightened by the last government, and now a law passed by Parliament last year to put a legal duty on universities to protect free speech has been binned by the incoming government, without debate and with no coherent justification given. The one constant is that if you want freedoms, you’ll have to demand them and make a lot of fuss – you will rarely be simply given them by those in power, who on the whole would rather have a quiet life. Yet when that right is taken away, it is very frightening and hard to reverse. Tragically, we can all think of countries that until recently enjoyed the right to free speech and the rule of law, and yet where you can now be sent to jail for many years for critical statements or the kinds of normal opposition activism that would be legal in any democracy.
It seems appropriate that this issue contains a lot of references to France. Firstly, because the Olympics are taking place in Paris right now. Magnifique! Secondly, it is appropriate because of the central role of freedom in the political imagination of France which, after all, provided the Statue of Liberty as a gift to the American people. Our front cover illustration is based on the famous 1830 painting by Delacroix of ‘Liberty Leading the People’, a symbolic representation of the revolution of that same year. Our artist Steve Lillie has given it his own special twists: perhaps the revolutionaries themselves are being manipulated? It happens. But these ones are trying to cut their strings. You’ll also spot references to that earlier French Revolution, of 1789, and to a dazzling array of French intellectuals alive and dead, including Jean-Paul Sartre, with his existentialist notions of radical freedom. Sartre believed that we are all inescapably free, regardless of politics, and equally unable to escape the burden of responsibility that comes with that freedom. Hasn’t this more to do with what Mill called the ‘so-called liberty of the will’, rather than with political freedom? Sartre was involved in assorted political causes for much of his life, but his existentialism was mainly forged in the years of the Nazi occupation of France, a dreadful time when individuals often could not escape having to make momentous and unenviable choices. Perhaps Sartre’s picture of radical, inescapable freedom was to do both with the human condition and with our relation to political power and the state?
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