Questions of Power (21): Never Settle for Liberty
Freedom is good, but it’s not good enough. Even at its best, I think freedom, or liberty, was always something of a limited concept. But once European moderns promised liberty as a universal value, from then on out, its quality only degraded through the successive brands of liberalism that took its name. Over the centuries between, we’ve gotten ideologized into believing that liberty, democracy, and the West naturally combine into “Western liberal democracies.” When it’s probably more accurate to say that we’ve been whittling down the meanings of liberty and democracy into a better fit with oligarchy and empire. Here’s what I mean. It makes perfect sense to say that a bird flying over the skies of Manhattan is free. Ask any red-blooded, American ten-year-old: nothing emblematizes freedom like a bird in flight. Now picture this bird, late one afternoon, fluttering to a rest on the ledge of a penthouse on the Upper West Side. It peers in through the window and what does it see? A white, coiffed housecat, lounging on a sectional sofa on the other side of the glass. The two animals observe one another. The bird can’t help but notice that this cat with a shitty attitude nevertheless appears safe, rested, well-fed, and adored. The bird assures itself that, for all these luxuries, that cat remains a captive. It is unfree, despite the softness of its unfreedom. Beyond this though, while the bird may have its freedom, the cat its security, and each some degree of autonomy, both of these animals are still relatively powerless with respect to the Manhattan around them. The world for them is a given. Most all of its shapes and decisions are made by us homo sapiens, with only the rarest consultation with the animals. It is, in other words, an oligarchy. And neither the bird’s flight nor the cat’s penthouse do anything to contradict this basic oligarchical relation. They may even enjoy the world they inhabit, with all the cat toys and bird feeders, but they’d be shit out of luck if they didn’t.
The moral of this story is that most of us homo sapiens are also living under some comparable form of oligarchy, even if many of us are loath to admit it. Patriotic, high-fructosed Americans such as myself are raised to believe that we lived in the greatest democracy in the world — with our prized national securities and constitutionally-promised freedoms. But democracy is foremost about a shared distribution and coordination of power in the making of the world, and as the fable of the bird and the cat goes to show, many of these most cherished freedoms and securities are perfectly compatible with the soft oligarchy in place in the United States of America. A lot of us have led the good life in the United States. Totally. That still doesn’t make it a democracy. As far as many of us are concerned, it’s not a democracy. And not because its democracy isn’t “direct” or whatever, but because its mechanisms and institutions of would-be-democratic representation and participation are undermined by the wider configurations of power. The demos has little sway in any major decisions or general structures of institutionalized power. These are determined by a small cluster of agents and organizations: the military and arms industry (and larger security apparatus), the petroleum and resource industries, the financial sector, Silicon Valley, certain dynasties, cartels, and houses of patrimonial wealth, and an assortment of conglomerates, governmental agencies, and foreign actors, national or otherwise. In other words, all the best people. Once everything’s in place, these agents and organizations are happy to let the rest of us decorate. They’re not particularly interested in dictating our lifestyles and self-expressions. They have more important things to worry about: entrenchment, expansion, domination. So we the people are then free to do whatever the hell we please, provided it doesn’t interfere with the imperatives of these dominant entities. And in fact this is precisely how freedom was redefined by 19th century liberals like Benjamin Constant and John Stuart Mill: freedom is a matter of mutual non-interference. The more we can let each other alone, the reasoning goes, the freer our society becomes. It’s been pointed out before that one interpretation of this is roundly at odds with society itself, since this kind of freedom is only maximized in isolation — in the cabin, on the frontier, on the high seas, on distant red planets, in tourism ads for Alaskan get-aways… All the go-to backdrops for the broadly libertarian imagination. The freest society by that measure would be no society at all. However, far worse, the liberal notion of freedom has also been twisted to mean that any interference with the workings of oligarchy or empire amounts to a hatred of freedom itself.
So it goes with the contemporary caricatures of the classically liberal notion of freedom. In contrast to this, we have lots of other, more “robust” notions of freedom: freedom as collective fulfillment, freedom as self-actualization, freedom as obedience to reason rather than passions, freedom as civic participation, freedom as the production of concrete possibilities, and freedom as the minimization of domination… All very fine things. Whether or not we should adorn them with the sash of “freedom” is another question. According to Gerald C. MacCallum, we most certainly should, because at the end of the day, these are all just different “values” for the same “triadic relation” at the base of all definitions of liberty.
“Whenever the freedom of some agent or agents is in question, it is always freedom from some constraint or restriction on, interference with, or barrier to doing, not doing, becoming, or not becoming something. Such freedom is thus always of something (an agent or agents), from something, to do, not do, become, or not become something; it is a triadic relation. Taking the format ‘x is (is not) free from y to do (not do, become, not become),’ x ranges over agents, y ranges over such ‘preventing conditions’ as constraints, restrictions, interferences, and barriers, and z ranges over actions or conditions of character or circumstance.”
MacCallum claims that all the different definitions of liberty just reflect the different answers or ranges for each of these variables, and that many of the hot disputes or ambiguities around liberty result from their omission, as in phrases like “free society” or “free will.” MacCallum’s onto something here, but I’d argue that these actually all represent different equations of power not liberty. He’s right that we should ditch the bad distinctions between “negative” and “positive,” or between the “freedom from” and the “freedom to,” but this is because all operations of effective power are matters of capacities overcoming resistances or of resistances thwarting capacities. What makes one negative and another positive, one present and another absent, or one capacity and another resistance, is more or less arbitrary, since each can be phrased in terms of the other. As MacCallum asks, is the prisoner “unfree because of the presence of the locked chains, or is he unfree because he lacks a key?” Am I broke because I lack money and drive or because I’m burdened and screwed by the systems in which I live? Am I a slave to vapes because of the addictiveness of nicotine or because I lack the willpower to quit? What distinguishes freedom from those other equations of power isn’t negativity or positivity, from-ness or to-ness, capacity or resistance (and trying to define liberty this way is just a holdover from the ontological partition of the world into being and non-being). Instead, I think what distinguishes liberty as a concept is how it fences off motion from arrest, process from interruption, or change from cessation. It says what must stop and what may go. Liberty is a cordon that sets the limits between stasis and kinesis, and so for this reason, is primarily a static-kinetic concept (and all the better for reifying the gurgling democratic impulses of the 17th and 18th centuries). This doesn’t mean it’s a bunk concept. It doesn’t mean that it isn’t super important or necessary. It does however mean that it can only do so much, and that it can’t serve as the “value among values” for steeply dynamic endeavors like self-actualization or the minimization of domination.
Look at it this way. One thing that we know that liberty is not, is bondage and captivity. If you’re free, that means you’re neither enslaved nor imprisoned. This is a gimme. And aside from a few Stoics, this distinction holds for nearly any culture, era, or definition of liberty. It’s as true for “liberal” as it is for “republican” definitions of freedom. It was just as true among the ancients as it is among the moderns. Now, if by some republican virtue, power and participation were also extended to all the “free men” of Athens or the Roman Republic, great, that was a nice bonus, but I see it as something added rather than inherent to the meaning of freedom. Libertas and civitas were conjoined but never identical. You can at least imagine a free Athenian with no civic power, no role in shaping the polis, but it’s much harder to imagine a free Athenian with a shackle around his neck. In this sense, the liberal conception of freedom comes from sticking tight to the physical intuition that something is free when it is unbound, uncaged, unfettered, unhindered. The seawaters flow freely down the canal. The dog is free to roam indoors and out. The slave is freed from their chains. Thomas Hobbes, who many consider the originator of this conception, defined liberty literal-mindedly as the absence of an impediment to motion — a definition that could apply as equally to gears and gases as it does to people. But even this physical intuition doesn’t imply freedom is simply an absence of interference, since it can — and often must — be expressed conversely, as the impediment itself. Why is the dog free to roam indoors and out? Because we propped the door open with a bucket, that’s why; freedom is a total relation between the bucket, the door, and the dog, not a quality of any one. How did the slaves of North America ultimately escape their shackles? Because one day, after a little bit of fratricidal bloodletting and the reconstitution of an entire country, their masters were forbidden from enslaving people. Lincoln expressed emancipation as an interdiction: “there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” In these cases, liberty discerns both what may and what may not move. In most evocations of liberty, though, it doesn’t mean literal physical movement, and despite the literal-mindedness of many freedom-definers out there, doesn’t come down to a question of coercion. Liberty draws the boundaries between all forms of stasis and kinesis — that is, around any and all kinds of process or change. Liberty, then, is a silhouette of power. It marks contours — maximums and minimums — without determining much of anything that happens in between its bounds. This is why it’s easier to express liberty nomologically, in the form of a universal law or nomos, and why it would dovetail so smoothly with an ontology of mechanism. However, this is also why liberty is no match for something like domination, which can’t be understood nomologically. It operates on a higher dimension, if you want to call it that.
I’ll illustrate my meaning with the game of chess. The rules of chess are static-kinetic in a pretty straighforward sense: they dictate how and when each of the pieces may and may not move. They spell out the liberties of each piece or player, in both how they can move and how they’re protected by constraints on the movements of others (that is, both “positively” and “negatively”). These are hard limits: unambiguous, universal, incontestable. As essential as these rules are, however, they don’t tell you how to win the game. More to the point, there are no rules anyone can follow in order to win a game of chess. Some moves are better or cleverer than others, or bolder, dumber, or more imaginative, but nothing in chess strategy is a matter of necessity or prohibition. Every move has to be understood within the nexus of all previous and possible moves. Chess strategy is, in fewer words, dynamic. And as you probably guessed, the comparison I’m trying to draw here is that liberty is more like the rules of chess and things like the “minimization of domination” are more like its strategy. Liberty isn’t always expressed as a rule, law, or norm, but it’s at best only expressible as a moment within a larger power account. Domination is another story. It is nothing if not devious, innovative, forever a moving target — “an inherently contestable concept.” It can’t be banned but only challenged by equally clever, equally organized capacities and strategies. Trying to corner it with a concept like liberty is like watching one of those videos where panting security guards chase parkour Tik-Tokkers around a parking garage, to pitiless laughter.
The Irish political theorist Philip Pettit clearly gets this, this lag between our commonest conception of liberty and the struggle against domination. To overcome that handicap, he recommends both a stronger idea of liberty (a classically “republican” conception of liberty as non-domination, only expanded to include everyone rather than only landowners or virtuous elites) and what I consider a somewhat weaker idea of domination (which, as the antonym of liberty, he defines as being at the mercy of arbitrary interference). Harken back to the 19th century, he asks us, and imagine a kindly, adoring husband who lavishly keeps his wife and permits her every whim. He never interferes and never would interfere, this gentle gentleman, but he nevertheless could interfere, and so for Pettit, she is no freer than the slave of a “benevolent master,” whatever that may mean. Another example Pettit uses is the American colonies, which were effectively self-administering under the “salutary neglect” of English rule. The English Crown interfered relatively little in domestic American affairs. However, the colonists — working from the republican idea of liberty among 17th and 18th century commonwealthmen — bristled that England nevertheless maintained the right to do so. Its domination was implied in the most minor tax or insult: “For by the same power, by which the people of England can compel them to pay one penny, they may compel them to pay the last penny they have. There will be nothing but arbitrary imposition on the one side, and humble petition on the other,” as Pettit quotes from Joseph Priestley. But is this really all we mean by domination — “arbitrary interference?”
His formulation is at least dynamic in my terms, I’ll give it that much, in that it combines a modal dimension (“arbitrary”) with a causal one (“interference”), but this describes just one tentacle among very many. Is arbitrary interference really how we should understand economic domination, for example, or is it merely a sign or test of it in certain circumstances? When our would-be-democratic mechanisms and institutions are undermined and made available as instruments of oligarchy, is it really a problem of them potentially interfering? Isn’t it more that they aren’t doing the various things they’re supposed to be doing? Maybe I don’t appreciate the true breadth of this word, “interference,” but the problem with domination isn’t going to be that something conditions us, but specifically how it conditions us. And “liberty” doesn’t denote for me what is needed to overcome it, since domination is not something that can simply be banished, by a boundary or a bubble, inside of which we can all act on our reasons and wishes like busy little sovereigns. The forms of power that dominate us will be, when differently configured, the very same powers that we use to act on those reasons or wishes. As Pettit himself seems to get closer to saying in other chapters of Republicanism, the true antonym of domination is really something much closer to the concept of “empowerment.” Emancipation is obviously frequently empowering, we see that. A brutally subjugated colony overthrowing the yoke of an imperial power, or a prisoner or populace finally freed from incarceration, is empowered by their release (putting aside the question of how that emancipation is achieved, maintained, or internally institutionalized). But here’s the catch: empowerment usually also involves a considerable constriction of liberties. That’s the price you pay: that which empowers in other ways constrains. The nature of these constraints will depend on the context and modes of power, but if you got your heart set on the World Cup, the White House, Carnegie Hall, or the Nobel Prize for Literature, your calendar is probably going to fill up pretty fast. Imagine a head-of-state assuming office and thinking to themselves “finally, some peace of mind.” And when it comes to highly institutionalized forms, we want these greater powers to be accompanied with greater constraints, because if not, that empowerment will itself soon distend into domination. Pettit is just using the wrong tools for the right job. If you want to overcome domination, the last thing you need is to be exiled from power by too much liberty. And if you stretch and squint, and insist on giving the name of “liberty” to this overcoming, all you’ll get is a confused concept, one that is in many places equivalent to its own opposites.
My thought is that this is bound to happen whenever dynamism gets encased in the static-kinetic terms of liberty, as it does in concepts like “free speech” (which I’ll get into later) and “free will” (which I’ll talk about now). A lot of theorists tend to dismiss free will as a metaphysical concept rather than a properly political one, but I of course think that’s a cheap dodge since metaphysics and politics are profoundly related. For me, free will is a mutilation of the dynamic concept of autonomy, which we’ll define for the time being as the relative power something has over itself. Remember how I italicized above that liberty is a silhouette of power? When theologians and philosophers came up with the idea of free will, this silhouette again took on a recognizably human form. The picture they offered was that our human form was but a mortal shell, protecting the soul inside from influences without, so that it could act on its own reasons and wishes like a busy little sovereign. Only then, sealed off like a bell jar or a porcelain bust, was it truly free. Here again, when trying to make sense of our will or autonomy, we see freedom only doing what freedom can only do: defining a contour or boundary between kinesis and stasis, between what may proceed (the soul or will) and what must be held at bay (the rest of the world). This partition is why free will had to be unconvincingly defended by way of a metaphysical dualism. Dualism was built into the very concept. Because we insisted on understanding autonomy in the static-kinetic terms of liberty, the only way we could make sense of it was by closing our eyes and imagining the human will severed off from the surrounding nexus of powers: “there you go, now you’re free.” These days, “free will” has fallen out of philosophical fashion, or been futilely updated by making its boundaries more permeable. Nevertheless, it has still left us with a confused and sadly hermetic conception of autonomy, which has gone on to influence our idea of autonomy in everything from aesthetics to geopolitics. In contrast to this, we can move on to more dynamic conceptions of autonomy as something gained rather than given; relative rather than axiomatic. Autonomy is not in any way isolation. Autonomy is created through an unsettling entanglement and struggle with the surrounding nexus of powers — with all those forces, events, structures, and institutions that the hermetic conceptions promised to keep away from us. Autonomy cannot be granted, by a god, law or rampart, as kind of a free space. This will always fail the dynamic, especially in our social thought and action. Liberty is for so many things only a beginning. The real demand is always for power.
