Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month.

You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

The Politics of Freedom

The Unfreedom of Liberty

Arianna Marchetti reflects on the limits of political freedom.

Freedom “is my right to have my own opinion, my own conscience. Many can perfectly live without freedom, as the freedom of having responsibilities can be scary at times. Freedom is the first of our values, and yet, not everyone needs it.”
Liudmila Ulitskaya, Interview in Svoboda, 2023

I do not feel free. I had never confessed this to anyone before, for fear of being perceived as dramatic or spoiled. After all, I come from the EU: do I even have the right to complain about a lack of freedom? But when my Russian teacher asked me whether I felt free, I could not lie. We had just read a poignant passage by the Russian novelist Liudmila Ulitskaya, where she describes freedom as “the right to hold one’s own conscience.” I could not bring myself to lie about this, this time around. So here I was, after years of careful hiding, now expressing to a Russian that I do not feel free.

As expected, my pronouncement was met with a mix of surprise and subtle contempt. Her expression seemed to say: “What do you mean you don’t feel free? Here you can literally do whatever you want!”

From her perspective, I can see why my statement could be seen as the whining of an ungrateful and out-of-touch Westerner. After all, in my own country (Italy), I have much more freedom than people in many countries have, where citizens face imprisonment or death for expressing their opinions, or for simply living in a way deemed immoral by the ruling government. I can participate in protests; I can dress the way I like; I can marry whomever I want; and I can do so many other things that I’m not even noticing from my privileged perspective. And yet, I do not feel free.

For a long time I felt I had no right to assert that. This time though, a sudden thought made me rethink my attitude: ‘Why is it ever wrong to seek more freedom? Why should we put limits on our ambition to be free? Who has the right to impose those limits?’

From Freedom to Liberty

“The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decisions as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed, and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance to the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses.”
Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, vol.10, 1964

Today the word ‘freedom’ is pronounced with confidence, even nonchalance, as something that requires no definition or characterization. The times where philosophers were inquiring about the true meaning of freedom and trying to seize its elusive nature are long forgotten. Modern Western man has few certainties in his life; yet one of them is that he knows what it means to be a free man. Yet when the average modern man talks about freedom, he’s actually usually talking about liberty.

The first philosopher to prominently point out the importance of the conceptual distinction between freedom and liberty was Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). She considered the differentiation crucial in order to make sense of political life in modern times. More recently, political theorist Hannah F. Piktin talked about the unique opportunity that speakers of English have to decide between two words, freedom and liberty, granting them the ability to label two quite different concepts (Politics, Justice, Action, 2016). As Piktin observes, liberty implies a system of rules within which the individual has the ability to make choices. Freedom, on the other hand, is a much broader, deeper, and riskier condition, which presupposes being exempt from systems of rules altogether. But perhaps freedom is better understood as the possibility to transcend what already exists to create something new – or as Arendt would say, unexpected.

So, while talking about ‘liberty’ makes sense in a political framework such as that of the state, where individuals are provided with a scheme to orient their actions, talking about freedom is often misleading, if not entirely nonsensical in such a context. Freedom, understood as the possibility to create something new and unexpected – something that truly reflects the unique conscience of the individual – is frowned upon in most political systems as potentially deviating from the structure, and so is heavily limited, if not suppressed.

Arguably, any kind of social organization requires us to sacrifice a certain degree of our individual freedom to facilitate the smooth flow of social life. But if such a requirement for ‘voluntary self-limitation’ is to acquire legitimacy within a society that values individual freedom and autonomy, then the results of the compromise should be recognised as worthy of the sacrifice, since, ultimately, the purpose of rules is to facilitate the lives of individuals, not to dictate the rhythms and goals of life. However, distinguishing between liberty and freedom becomes crucial in societies with a centralized power structure. In such societies it can be downright dangerous to think only in terms of those liberties that we can benefit from within the allowed framework. We should never forget that the political framework has legitimacy only insofar as it can provide benefits great enough to justify the lessening of individual freedoms that invariably comes with centralised power. Ultimately, looking at freedom as one of the highest values of human life should inspire us to build social and economic systems that allow people to play an active and central role in determining their lives, instead of reducing them to resources to be managed and administered, or units to be provided for.

The Limits of Liberty in Liberal Democracies

“Open no matter what book of sociology, what book of jurisprudence, and you will always find that the government, its organization, its acts, occupy such a great place therein, that we accustom ourselves to believe that there is nothing else but government and statesmen… And yet, as soon as you pass from printed matter to life itself, as soon as you cast a glance at society, you are struck by the infinitely minute part that the government plays in it.”
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 1892

What makes me feel unfree even in a liberal democracy is the fact that I lack the ability to express my conscience in a truly satisfying way. I do not have the ability to see my ideals significantly materially reflected in the world around me. I can express them in the most superficial ways. I can write about my views, I can share them with other people, and even publish my thoughts in journals… However, I am prevented from taking initiative on making my values a political reality.

Yes, I can always vote for a political representative; but how does that ensure that my views will be represented (let alone implemented) correctly? Even in the unlikely event there is a candidate I truly believe in who makes it into government, there is no assurance he will end up doing what I voted for him to do. Everyone knows this, and it’s why more and more people are tired of politics. Furthermore, voting for politicians has little impact on the lives of people who are mainly preoccupied with finding a job, making ends meet, and living in a healthy environment. Politics is so far away from the concrete experience of most people that it fails to inspire any trust or hope for change in most people. But even if we do presuppose the best intentions from our representatives, how can a few politicians have the knowledge and experience to make decisions over matters they know little to nothing about? How can a Minister of Agriculture who has never farmed an hectare of land in his life make the right decisions for farmers across an entire country with different climates and terrains? Why should it not be the people who have direct experiences of the challenges they’re facing who make the political as well as the immediate decisions?

This disenfranchisement of people is sometimes justified with the claim that unless they’re controlled and directed by a higher authority, people will only care about themselves. However, since a government is made up of people, how can we therefore trust that the interests of a community that the politicians often don’t know and sometimes have never even heard of will be taken to heart? Someone who has a stake in a certain issue and is part of a community has higher incentives to take a decision that will allow him to preserve his social capital, since if he takes a decision that results in the degeneration of the very community he’s part of, he would be forced to leave. But when a representative of the people makes a wrong decision, who is to blame? How is he held accountable? Only when the media have an agenda!

If people were better enabled to directly implement changes in the interests of their communities. The world in which we live is so highly regulated that the excuse of ‘maintaining order’ kills any spontaneous collective action that would naturally arise between people sharing the same environment and challenges. But who then would allow some multinational to come into their home territory and pollute their water – as has happened in Formosa, Texas, and many other places too? The answer surely is, no one in their right mind. And yet, some argue that non-political people would not be able to come to agreement when their interests were at risk!

In fact, we do see people naturally coming together to solve issues they care about. We see it in the people of Cheran, organizing themselves against violence, or the people of Ka'apor, taking matters into their own hands to prevent deforestation. These are not exceptional cases; self-organization occurs naturally when people care about something and are allowed to act to defend their own interests. Our natural tendency for cooperation and free association was well documented by Peter Kropotkin, as well as by David Graeber and David Wengrow in more recent times. (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, 2021)

Humans naturally tend towards free association rather than purely individualistic behavior. But in a society like ours, where thousands of laws regulate every aspect of our lives, and governmental bodies take care of everything, how can our freedom of conscience be practically expressed? What does it concretely mean to be free in a world where the way society is organized politically for the fundamental areas that shape our lives are basically out of our control?

These were the thoughts that, in a much less eloquent way, I expressed to my patient Russian teacher. To this she replied: “Well, but indeed, what do we even need huge organizations for? I trust my neighbor more than I could ever trust any president.”

Arianna Marchetti is a thoughtful explorer navigating the labyrinth of postmodernism. With a background in philosophy and social sciences, she tackles the challenges of skepticism and existentialism.