The Meanings of Political Freedom
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Despite their unanimity, I find this pattern of argument importantly mistaken for two distinct reasons. Here, as elsewhere, Pettit shows himself to be the most systematic thinker in the group, and I shall explain my dissatisfaction by reference to his account. First, it is not right to suppose that the liberal tradition displays a monolithic allegiance to the notion of freedom as non-interference. The evidence that Pettit adduces to defend this interpretive thesis is partial and misleading. But in addition, the exposition he goes on to give of his own republican theory does not really make of non-domination the supreme political value, and the source of this failure is significant. For he finds himself obliged to appeal to recognizably liberal principles in order to define the precise content of his republican conception of freedom. In the end, Pettit belongs to the very liberal tradition that he imagines he has transcended. I shall begin with the first point, reserving the second to the next section. It is indisputable that some liberal thinkers fit the picture that Pettit draws of the liberal point of view. Isaiah Berlin is a perfect example. Distinguishing two grand conceptions of freedom, the absence of interference and autonomy, Berlin held that democratic self-government is a good only so far as it remains subordinate to a respect for individual rights. For this reason, liberalism tended to signify for him a political vision whose fundamental commitment is to the negative conception of freedom as non-interference. Nonetheless, the fact that this conception found its first detailed exposition in Hobbes’ writings ought to give us pause. The Hobbesian theory of the state scarcely looks like a liberal philosophy. Of course, one might reply that Hobbes, though no liberal himself, furnished some tools – among them an idea of freedom – that later thinkers were able to exploit in constructing a model of the open society that can properly be called “liberal.” Freedom understood as the absence of interference was in fact later taken up by Bentham, who stands at the source of an important current of liberal thought. In the nineteenth century, its most eminent representative was John Stuart Mill, who argued that “the only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way” and who therefore conceived of law, which like “all restraint, qua restraint, is an evil,” as a necessary limit on individual freedom so that “we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs.”42 For the classical utilitarians, all law as such represents a reduction in one’s freedom, even if it serves to prevent the even greater degree of interference that would occur in its absence. This idea of freedom has obviously had its followers among liberal thinkers in the twentieth century as well. But the question is whether liberalism as a whole coincides with this line of thought. One signal difficulty is that John Locke, incontestably a founding father of the liberal tradition, took great pains in his political 42
Mill, On Liberty, Chapter 1, paragraph 13, and Chapter 5, paragraph 4.