Liberty

Carl Friedrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138527201
• eBook ISBN: 9781351508742
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Recent writing on the nature of freedom has served to underline a crucial gap in the academic experience. First--and most obviously--the concept of freedom has been modernized by its application to contemporary institutions. Second, a new approach to the concept of liberty has been pioneered in the construction of new typologies of freedom. Finally, awareness of variety in concepts of freedom has been paralleled in variations in the practice of freedom. The tumultuous history of Western man may be conceptualized as the story of how freedom has become embodied. What is missing from the story is the relationship of concepts to actions.This relationship has been established for some specific notions of freedom. Many of the philosophical analyses--especially recent ones like pragmatism and existentialism--have been predicated on actual human behavior. On the other hand, many classic histories of freedom--those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, John Bagnell Bury, Guido de Ruggiero, and Harold Laski--have traced the actual development of a definite kind of freedom.This volume contains essays prepared to celebrate the anniversary of the publication of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, revised in the light of discussions by Henry D. Aiken, William Ebenstein, Mark DeWolfe Howe, and David Spitz, as well as other articles, many of them growing out of the discussion either in the form of commentary or independent contributions. There are also two papers written independently (Andrew Hacker and Leonard Krieger).

1 Stages in the History of Political Freedom

Leonard Krieger

I

Recent writing on the nature of freedom has served to underline a crucial gap in our academic experience. This writing testifies to progress along three lines. First—and most obvious —the concept of freedom has been modernized by its explication in terms of contemporary institutions.¹ Second, as an antidote to proliferation a new approach to the problem has been pioneered in the construction of typologies of freedom.² Finally, the awareness of the variety in the concepts of freedom has been paralleled for the practice of freedom by the consideration of the whole tumultuous history of Western man as the involved story of embodied freedom.³ What is missing is the relating of the concepts to the actions of freedom. To be sure, this relation has frequently been established for particular notions of freedom. Many of the philosophical analyses—especially recent ones like pragmatic and existentialist—have been predicated on actualities of human behavior, and, on the other hand, many of the classic histories of freedom—Hegel, Bury, Ruggiero, and Laski, to list some ill-assorted samples—have traced the real development of a definite kind of freedom. What we do not yet have, however, is the connection between the recently emphasized variety in our concepts of freedom and the variety of our historical experience. Adler’s Idea of Freedom has neither a practical nor an historical dimension, while Shotwell’s Long Way to Freedom lacks a conceptual framework.

What follows is an attempt to use history to join theory with practice and to provide genetic continuity between the varieties of freedom. Such history must be both schematic and thematic: it must organize the historical manifold into categories if this manifold is to be made fruitful for concepts, and these categories must form a connected series through the ages if the varieties of freedom are to have a developmental logic. Moreover, if the categories are to perform their synthetic function they must be formal concepts whose contents are the resultants of the total historical material organized for its bearing upon the area defined by the concepts.

The focus will be on the political field of freedom, because, in Western history, politics has been the most constant barometer of the civilization: more than any other single field of activity it has provided the central arena wherein impulses from the whole range of human interests have crystallized into perceptible and commensurable forms. The basic categories of this field are furnished by the concepts of liberty and order: the nature of the freedom characteristic for each age can be assessed through the kinds of liberty and order that are existent and esteemed and through the prevalent relationship between the two poles; the process of freedom may be reconstructed through the sequence of these assessments.

Obviously such an essay is too ambitious to be definitive. All synthetic judgments in history do violence to particulars, and given the unevenness of one man’s knowledge, the tenuous line between the approximate and the arbitrary may well be breached for any single judgment. Again, the ultimate use of the historical process of freedom for a final definition of freedom must be left to the philosophers. What will be attempted here is simply a model for the reconstruction of historical experience into forms usable for general knowledge.

The initial problem is posed by the necessity of finding a working definition of essential terms that will function as a criterion of relevance without stacking the cards a priori. With all due recognition that no definition of freedom can be entirely neutral, we can probably strike a satisfactory balance between the exclusiveness required of any theme and the inclusiveness required of any historical treatment if we consider freedom to be simply the participation in the control over the conditions of one’s own living. Such a definition posits the individual person as the locus, activity as the mode, and autonomy as the status, but it is flexible enough to permit of degrees, to admit of either intellectual or practical control, and to avoid the thorny problem of freedom as means or end. Political freedom in its generic sense, accordingly, will mean participation in the control over the common external conditions of one’s living. In this sense it includes both civil liberty, which refers to individual control over such conditions, and political liberty (i.e., political freedom in the narrow sense), which refers to participation in the common control over such conditions. Juxtaposed with generic political freedom are personal freedom, which refers to the individual control over conditions that are both internal and particular, and social freedom, which refers to participation in a common control over conditions that are either internal or particular. The distinction between “common” and “particular” is obvious, but the distinction between “external” and “internal” conditions is not. External conditions are those situations which relate the area of freedom to the areas of nonfreedom; internal conditions are those situations that relate different loci or aspects of freedom to one another.

Finally, we must specify conventional definitions for a pair of concepts which have had a constant relationship with political freedom throughout its history. Authority is participation in the control over the conditions of another’s living. Order lies between authority and freedom and refers to the organization of the conditions of living into some kind of system or unity, whether rational or existential.

When freedom is considered as an historical theme, such definitions can be multiplied indefinitely. What has been selected for discussion here should be viewed as representative types of freedom, and they will be treated for the two facets of meaning toward which history can make a contribution: the process through which the interaction of different kinds of particular activities generates a representative concept of freedom, and the temporal logic involved in the succession of such concepts.

II

Let us take our initial stand on a familiar promontory —the period around the beginning of the sixteenth century which is usually adjudged to introduce the modern era. This is not to say that Western man was unconcerned with the assertion of his freedom in the classical and medieval periods: in one form or another, the value of freedom was a constituent of the Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, and the law of the Empire; and later it entered into the tribal structure, the feudal arrangements, and the municipal constitutions that traversed the medieval period. Yet, the context of freedom which has characterized the modern era is so different in kind from what went before that only it seems directly relevant to our own concern. Free general conditions distinguish the modern experience and provide analytic support for the instinctive tendency to begin the story with the Renaissance and the Reformation. First, it is only from this point in time that freedom became a continuing rather than an occasional issue in Western history. Second, it was only then that freedom became a dynamic rather than a stabilizing force—i.e., that it was directed toward the extension rather than the preservation of control. Third, it was then that the institutional framework of freedom moved from the local to the regional level of organization. This shift implied more than a mere change of setting, for it worked a mutation in the existential status of freedom. The visual and personal connections which had made freedom, authority, and security natural adjuncts of a controllable local order were sprung, and gave way to the distant and abstract relations within which areas of control must be established. Fourth, then, the Renaissance and the Reformation mark the beginning of the process in which freedom develops into a distinct value and institutions which embody it into autonomous bodies. Fifth, they mark the beginning of the process of multiplying the agents of temporal freedom. Freedom in the abstract had certainly been recognized for all humanity long previously, but the exercise of freedom had been recognized only for identifiable representative or authoritative individuals. By questioning the former loci of freedom, the protagonists of Renaissance and Reformation initiated the expansion of the figurative “people” to an ever greater inclusion of the anonymous individuals constituting the literal people.

If, then, we take our stand at the Renaissance and Reformation as the starting points of the continuous process of freedom in these senses, the prior development of freedom in the West takes the form of assorted discrete traditions among which men picked and chose until around the middle of the seventeenth century. For the characteristic feature of the century and a half, the primary movements of which can be subsumed under these two general labels, was a dissolution of the system or the general order of institutions and traditions which yet left these institutions and traditions themselves still vital. From this vantage point, the familiar debate about the new and the old in the Renaissance and the Reformation, with its conflicting implications for the liberal or authoritarian nature of these movements, can be resolved into the interpretation that men sought a new ordering of the old ingredients and that their freedom was extended to the limited extent that they could choose among the alternative authorities to whom they would owe their primary obedience.

The traditions which continued to supply the materials for public life during this period were myriad, but two from classical antiquity and three from the middle ages may be singled out as particularly relevant to the history of human freedom.

From classical antiquity:

1. The city-state tradition. The main emphasis here was on the association of the freedom of the citizen with the independence and power of the local community in which he was participant. Primacy redounded to political freedom in the narrow sense, but this took two variant forms: democracy on the Athenian model, in which individuals were identified as equal members of the community, and mixed government on the Roman model, in which independent authority became the function of mutual freedom and political rights served to commit the citizens to loyalty vis-à-vis a community conceived as more than the sum of its parts. In either form, the individual was integrated into collective freedom.

2. The tradition of the higher law. The chief vehicles of this tradition were Roman Stoicism for the theory and the Roman Law for the practice of legislation. The emphasis here was on personal and civil rather than political freedom. In its origins this tradition can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle who, writing during the decline of the Greek city-state, questioned the natural coherence of individual and collective freedom and imposed a higher moral and metaphysical goal upon individual and collectivity alike. The Romans ultimately dissociated the goal from the city-state and gave it the form of law; in this form it was mediated to the sixteenth century. It prescribed private rights but subordinated them to social and political responsibilities. Recognizably, this is the origin of the “older” natural law whose main functions were to separate the private sphere from the public, to define private freedom as voluntary endorsement of the moral law and public freedom as the right to be governed well, to prescribe policies rather than institutions, and to guarantee private freedom by the autolimitation of the public powers.

What early modern man received from classical civilization, then, were two separate traditions: a tradition of political freedom with a local base and with no guarantee of private freedom, and a tradition of private freedom with a universal base and with no guarantee of political freedom. Both traditions were perpetuated as such through the middle ages, In the shape of the commune and Christian theology; but medieval men sought also to bridge the local and the universal, and in the process they created practices and ideas which were to remain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as an additional set of traditions.

3. ..The tradition of chartered freedom. The function of this tradition may be called the universalization of localism. Its origins lay in the necessity of recognizing local rights along both horizontal and vertical axes relative to the classical urban locus —that is, both in the fragmented units of a ruralized society and on the supralocal levels of political organization which the dispersion of the older local centers of population and power made essential. The complex of chartered freedoms, then, was the response to the paradoxical situation in which the diffusion of local power, through a variety of rural and urban authorities, called for the construction of territorial, national, and even universal arrangements of order which would yet acknowledge the local bases of authority. The essence of chartered freedom was its special, or bilateral, character. This particularity had two functions: it preserved the local conditions of freedom through a series of parallel and ascending arrangements, and it broke down the distinction between freedom and authority by defining freedom in terms of authority. Bred by circumstances which confirmed local variety, corporate endeavor, and the demand for tangible order, freedom became the function either of the social authority of the group or of a political immunity which grounded the liberty from superior authority in the authority assumed over inferiors. The institutions of chartered freedom, then, bequeathed a tradition of myriad rights, infinitely variable in degree and in kind, extending indiscriminately across the religious, social, economic, and political interests of men, with the one common denominator that the variety of liberties made sense only as a hierarchy of authorities.

4. The tradition of the divine order. If the medieval experience built out and up from the local tradition of the city- state, it also built out and down from the universal tradition of the higher law. Not only did the Christian dispensation add substance and sanction to the classical tenet of a rational telos, but it institutionalized universalism. The Holy Roman Empire, to be sure, was never a reality as an institutional authority, but the Church was, and its power spread in conjunction with the attenuation of the Empire. The diffusion of clerical offices and prescriptions established the fundamental coherence among the variety of local institutions and, since men find meaning in unity, the manifestations of a single divine order supplied a basic mold for the medieval tendency to conceive of their liberties as claims to place in the hierarchy of authority. The role of the Church in this respect was to endow particular authorities with the validity of a general system.

5. The tradition of spiritual individualism. Contrapuntal to its authoritarian function, the Church developed a set of attitudes and practices which stemmed from the faith in the integrity of the individual soul before God. This tradition not only postulated, for the pure realm of spirit, the ultimate independence of the individual from all authority, secular and clerical alike, but also influenced the temporal realm, albeit in a highly diffracted form, by sponsoring the division of that realm among the various autonomous institutions which embodied the integrity of the various interests of man. The most obvious expression of this tradition was the assertion of independence by the Church as the prime guardian of man’s spiritual sovereignty vis-à-vis political authority, but for the full extent of the tradition it should be realized that every social and economic institution made a similar claim for activities authorized by God for the soul’s own progress toward salvation. The tradition, in this general form, had two effects: it lent validity to the actual conflict of authorities with one another, and particularly with those who sought to direct the supreme system of authorities; and it established a pattern of freedom which consisted in the choice among authorities.

However different their inspirations and their forms of expression, the Renaissance and the Reformation may be considered jointly as breaking points of the tensions embodied in these traditions, and the history of the century and a half which these labels cover may be regarded, consequently, as essentially a series of struggles among particular authorities for domination over the general order of authorities. Liberal impulses entered powerfully into the process, to be sure, but what is more important is the role of the traditions in channeling these impulses into the support of one or other authority. For when the five traditions are taken together it becomes apparent that their chief function was to make authority represent freedom and that their chief means was to validate a plurality of representative authorities. The breaking point came when the demands for a supralocal scope for freedom and an infrauniversal center for authority met and destroyed the consensus which was grounded precisely in the conjunction of the local and the universal.

Superficial impressions notwithstanding, the Renaissance is less important than the Reformation for the history of political freedom. Its chief contribution may be summed up as the revitalization of the classical traditions—city-state and Roman law —only to the point at which they could be juxtaposed with the still vital medieval traditions. The Italian city-states ran through the cycle familiar to the local republics of antiquity, with the medieval guilds replacing the ancient clans as the primary organization of a citizenry which continued to form a small minority of the total population. The use of the labels “Guelf” and “Ghibelline” long past the period in which they had substantive political meaning testified to the role which Christian universal- ism continued to play as the repository of ultimate political values. In the north, the chief political effect of the Renaissance was transmitted by jurists who utilized the reinterpretation of the Roman law in “the French mode” to establish the ecclesiastical independence and secular superiority of territorial rulers vis-à-vis church and feudality without rejecting the legitimate functions of either. For both the southern and the northern cases, the result was rather to rearrange the hierarchy of authorities, hallowed by tradition, within an accepted framework of order, than to essay new functions for political freedom. The political relations of the Renaissance are perhaps most clearly articulated in its theories, which exhibit a common pattern through all the differences of substance. The pattern reveals an uneasy combination of traditions brought to tension by the pressure of reality and resolved or evaded through the appeal to regional authority. Classic republicanism and mirror-o£-princes lay unresolved in the Italian humanists and in Erasmus. The Platonically modelled local Utopia remains isolated in the thought and activity of that pious royal chancellor Sir Thomas More. Civic republican virtue and the perception of princely power could not be reconciled by a Guicciardini. Pioneers like Machiavelli and Bodin could fight their way out of this complex of traditions only by an appeal to a princely savior, whereas Rabelais and Montaigne resolved their simultaneous addiction to humanistic libertinism and Christian piety through their voluntary subjection to the territorial political order.

During the Renaissance, men did indeed break through to new expressions of human freedom, but not in the realm of politics. We may say only that the conflicts of authorities which reflected the equalization of the older traditions of subordinate freedom in the new arena of a regionally organized society provided the tensile political and social context out of which the new cultural freedom sprang.

The Reformation was spawned by the same constellation of traditions and real pressures, and it exhibited the same fundamental tendency to channel men’s demands into the relations of plural authorities, but where the Renaissance men juxtaposed authorities and could only appeal for a de facto resolution of their incompatible claims, the religious movements of the Reformation developed their claims into conflicting systems of authority and ultimately broke through the whole over-arching framework of order which had encompassed them. The validity of the respective claims to religious liberty by the various confessions is irrelevant to the theme of political freedom in this period, for the main effort of each major cult went into the construction of its own solitary religio-political system of authority. The role of temporal freedom within each system remained unchanged. What was new in temporal freedom was the possibility of choosing the true religio-political order from a plurality of such orders, and this affected political freedom only in the pragmatic context of conferring a right of opposition against a political authority aligned in an opposing system of order—not to t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Stages in the History of Political Freedom
• 2 I. Fetscher
• 3 Freedom, Authority, Conscience, and Development: Mill, Acton, And Some Contemporary Catholic Thinkers
• 4 John Stuart Mill: Political And Economic Liberty
• 5 Some Notes on Political Freedom and on a Famous Essay
• 6 Mill and the Justification of Social Freedom
• 7 Mill and Some Present Concerns About Ethical Judgments
• 8 Mill on Paternalism in Its Place
• 9 Freedom and Individuality: Mill’S Liberty in Retrospect
• 10 Freedom And Opportunity As Competing Social Values: Mill’S Liberty and Ours
• 11 Liberty and Truth: The Responsibility of Science
• 12 Problems of Religious Liberty
• 13 Freedom-An Empirical Interpretation
• 14 Toward A Consistent Definition Of Freedom And Its Relation To Value
• 15 Strategies Of Freedom: The Widening Of Choices And The Change Of Goals
• 16 Freedom And Power: Common Men And Uncommon Men