Freedom as non-domination
The historical influence of republicanism upon socialist thinking has been somewhat obscured, though recent works such as William Clare Roberts’ Marx’s Inferno and Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx have done much to help bring this relation back into the light. What is distinctive about the republican tradition is its conception of freedom, which differs from the one most commonly used today. Republican ideas about freedom were picked up and adapted by early socialists.
Freedom from and freedom to
Introductions to political or social freedom often start with Isaiah Berlin’s essay Two Concepts of Liberty. This article will follow the convention and begin here, not because there is anything uniquely faultless about Berlin’s essay, but because it has become the paradigmatic statement of the modern view of liberty. Berlin distinguishes between two ways of thinking about freedom, which he labels ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. In secondary texts this distinction is sometimes explained as being the difference between ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’, but this does not really capture two distinct concepts just two different ways of talking about the same thing – for example, the ‘freedom to’ enjoy a quiet space is also at the same time the ‘freedom from’ the interference of noisy neighbours.
While freedom in the negative sense can straightforwardly be understood as an absence of constraint or interference, Berlin’s positive freedom is a little harder to pin down. If we think of positive freedom as being about self-mastery of our internal life, we still have something that can be collapsed into negative freedom. The mastery of physiological compulsion can still be thought of as the overcoming of interference or constraints, and so a type of negative freedom. Instead of being about self-mastery we can think of positive freedom as being about self-realisation and self-perfection. Positive freedom can be understood as overcoming the constraints or barriers that obstruct us from the realisation of our own full potential. Only by living the most fulfilling version of ourselves do we become truly free. On this account, freedom is not an absence but an end-state or achievement. As summarised by Quentin Skinner in A Third Concept of Liberty:
‘… what underlies these theories of positive liberty is the belief that human nature has an essence, and that we are free if and only if we succeed in realising that essence in our lives. This enables us to see that there will be as many different interpretations of positive liberty as there are different views about the moral character of humankind. Suppose you accept the Christian view that the essence of our nature is religious, and thus that we attain our highest ends if and only if we consecrate our lives to God. Then you will believe that, in the words of Thomas Cranmer, the service of God “is perfect freedom”. Or suppose you accept the Aristotelian argument that man is a political animal, the argument restated as a theory of freedom by Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future (1961). Then you will believe that, as Arendt maintains, “freedom . . . and politics coincide” and that “this freedom is primarily experienced in action”.’
Berlin, who was writing during the Cold War and in opposition to Stalinism, highlights how this positive conception of freedom could be open to abuse. It leaves itself open to paternalistic and authoritarian interpretations. If freedom amounts to the achievement of our true potential or real interests, the question arises as to what these ‘real’ interests really are. If real interests do not have to be something that an agent is conscious of then the coercive interference from a higher social power could be a way of forcing people to be free. Says Berlin:
‘… George Orwell is excellent on this. People say “I express your real wishes. You may think that you know what you want, but I, the Fuhrer, we the Party Central Committee, know you better than you know yourself, and provide you with what you would ask for if you recognised your “real” needs.’
This is not to say, as is sometimes claimed, that Berlin thought that every use of the concept of positive freedom was a concealed attempt at manipulation and that we should therefore only use the negative conception. His claim was that historically the positive conception had been misused more often and with more devastating results. The negative conception of freedom was also open to misuse:
‘…Negative liberty is twisted when I am told that liberty must be equal for the tigers and for the sheep and that this cannot be avoided even if it enables the former to eat the latter if coercion by the state is not to be used. Of course unlimited liberty for capitalists destroys the liberty of the workers, unlimited liberty for factory-owners or parents will allow children to be employed in the coal-mines. Certainly the weak must be protected against the strong, and liberty to that extent be curtailed. Negative liberty must be curtailed if positive liberty is to be sufficiently realised; there must be a balance between the two, about which no clear principles can be enunciated. Positive and negative liberty are both perfectly valid concepts, but it seems to me that historically more damage has been done by pseudo-positive than by pseudo-negative liberty in the modern world.’
Ancient Rome
Having a grasp of these two common ways of thinking about freedom we can now introduce a third conception, which is commonly referred to as ‘republican’ or ‘neo-roman’ freedom. This way of thinking about freedom has been bought back into the public consciousness largely thanks to the work of historian of ideas Quentin Skinner and the political philosopher Philip Pettit. It can be thought of as ‘freedom as non-domination’ or ‘freedom as independence’. This republican concept of freedom can be directly tracked back to the Digest of Roman law. Here it is stated that ‘the fundamental division within the law of persons is that all men and women are either free or are slaves’ and that ‘Slavery is an institution of the law of nations by which someone is, contrary to nature, subjected to the dominion of someone else’. From this we can get a definition of what it means to be a free person within a society. A free person is someone who is not under the dominion of anyone else and can act on their own accord. As Livy, the Roman historian who served as an inspiration for Machiavelli and other 16th century Florentine republicans, put it – to be free was ‘to be in your own power’ and not dependent on the will of anybody else.
The key difference between republican and negative freedom can be illustrated in this way: On the negative conception of freedom a slave who is not interfered with, and left to do as they please, is free. While on the republican conception what makes someone free is not the absence of interference but the absence of domination. Even though a slave may be left to go about as they please, at any point they could be interfered with according to the arbitrary whims of their master. The knowledge that arbitrary interference can be applied at any point is enough to be a restriction to liberty, behaviour and comment must continually be self-monitored so as to avoid the sanction of the master. On the republican account, freedom is a status relation within a society that makes it impossible to be the helpless victim of arbitrary interference. As Sidney wrote in his 1698 Discourses Concerning Government, ‘he is a slave who serves the best and gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands, and depends upon his will.’
In the English Civil War, disputes between Crown and Parliament drew upon this language of dependency and dominion, drawing upon common-law texts which had their basis in the Roman Digest. The effect of Royal prerogative was that those living under the king were reduced to a state of servitude. This was not because of any actual or threatened interference, but because the continuation of rights and freedoms was dependent on the goodwill of the King, and this could be withdrawn at any point. It was this state of dependency, of being under the dominion of the King, that was the threat to freedom. When King Charles was executed, the charge was that he had ruled arbitrarily and so tyrannically. The Act that abolished the monarchy declared that the effect of prerogative had been ‘to oppress and impoverish and enslave the subject’.
As well as being central to the English revolution, these ideas would surface again a century later in the French and American revolutions. The central idea was that it was only possible to have individual freedom through being a citizen of a self-ruling republic. To live under the dependence of a monarch, or in the American case under a colonial power, is to be reduced to the status of a slave. This understanding of freedom as being a state of independence left some controversy as to the normative status of industrial production and wage labour in the early years of the American republic. Wage labour was seen as being a state of dependency and so a form of unfreedom which was degrading to the moral health of the nation. ‘Free labour’, either in the form of small-scale production where the producers also owned their means of production or that of independent homesteaders was seen as being more conducive to building a strong and resilient nation.
Freedom as emancipation
Reaction against revolutionary and democratic movements in France and America saw the development and spread of the idea of freedom as non-interference. This, together with the irresistible rise of international commerce with its permanent dependence on wage labour, saw a decline in republican ways of thinking about freedom by the late 18th century. The concept of negative freedom, in the form of voluntarist ideas about freedom of contract, was one that was more suitable for the needs of the capitalist class. Though republican ideas about freedom would continue to persist in the labour and nascent socialist movements.
‘Something of slavery still remains… something of freedom is yet to come’ wrote the labour republican Ira Steward in 1873. Early socialists would continue to use the language of ‘wage-slavery’, ‘self-emancipation’ and other tropes drawn from radical republican heritage.
But they did not just adopt republican ideas wholesale; they responded to and critiqued them. Republican language focussed on an undifferentiated ‘people’ as the basis for a self-governing republic, socialist language on the proletariat as the group-agent capable of changing society. The first English translation of Communist Manifesto was in a newspaper entitled The Red Republican, and here the difference between radical republican and socialist ideas can be seen in contrast side by side. Labour republicans, such as the Knights of Labor, sought to lessen the dependence of the working class through the development of workers co-ops, etc. Marx’s Capital can be understood as an intervention within the labour movement against the prominence of such ideas. Socialist critique argued that it was not enough for individual groups of workers to separately own their own enterprises, market competition would still present itself as a form of impersonal domination.
Understanding freedom as non-domination provides a rich foundation for criticising capitalist society. The formally ‘free’ contract that the wage labourer enters into turns out to be a one-way ticket into a relation of dependency. Employers impose the same kind of arbitrary interference upon workers as kings on their subjects. The importance of non-domination in the foundations of socialism is why it has to be a movement for collective self-emancipation and why authoritarian attempts to impose it on an unwilling or passive population would be doomed to failure. Rather than being the ‘real interests’ of the proletariat imposed by an authoritarian state, freedom as non-domination is a collective good. The extent to which it is achieved depends on the extent to which it has been secured for others.
DJP