What Price Liberty

Columnist based in HamburgJokes, poems and social media posts that trigger outrage among certain sections of society dominate the news and have fuelled debate about the freedom of speech and its limits. Rarely, however, do we reflect on what freedom actually implies. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if our main concern is to secure the freedom of endless consumer choice.As far as civil liberty is concerned, we usually think in terms of an absence of restraint. We are free to act in any way we like so long as a state or govt does not interfere in our activity. A view of liberty defined purely as an absence of restrictions is far too narrow in scope, as Quentin Skinner, the most important living scholar of intellectual history, argues. Even in autocratic regimes, individual freedoms might well flourish. What is decisive is not whether we are free to act, but whether we are subject to the arbitrary will of any person or institution that might grant or impede our action as they see fit. Liberty is a status, not merely a matter of restrictions on how we act or what we say.It might be worth recalling that the concept of individual liberty is not a modern invention. It is not only in the writings of Emperor Ashoka that freedom plays an important role. Amartya Sen points out that even in as unlikely a source as the Arthashastra, the manual of pragmatic statecraft attributed to Chanakya (or Kautilya), counsellor of Chandragupta Maurya, personal liberties are meticulously set out. Sen concedes these are reserved only for the privileged classes. This is, however, no different in the case of Greek or Roman ideas of liberty, which attributed liberty exclusively to freemen, not women or slaves.In his brilliant new book, Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal, Skinner focuses on the classical Roman conception of liberty and traces its influence to the present. For Roman thinkers like Cicero, the difference between servitude and liberty is not the actions we carry out, but whether our freedom is merely enjoyed at the discretion of a sovereign power. Slaves might well be treated with benevolence, free to live their life as they desired. But as long as even the possibility existed that these freedoms could be curtailed at the whim of their master, they were not in the possession of freedom. The crucial issue is who has control over one’s life. (Or to cite another eminent thinker, Humpty Dumpty: the question is who is to be master.) In an understanding of liberty as independence, two key conditions apply. The first is the rule of law. All individual freedoms are subject to legal constraints. The second condition is that these laws should not be the product of arbitrary rule, but should reflect the will of the people. For liberty to take hold, all members of society, including those in a minority, must have a voice in the making of the laws that govern our freedoms, ideally in a political body in which their views are represented. This notion of liberty was enormously influential and shaped the English political tradition, which throughout its early history was marked by a conflict between the will of the sovereign and the will of Parliament. It found its most famous articulation in the writings of the 17th-century philosopher John Locke. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke laid the theoretical foundation for the shift of power to Parliament. But the impact of his ideas was far more wide-reaching. Locke was the main inspiration behind the Declaration of Independence by the American rebels against what they considered the arbitrary power of the British monarch. Little wonder that when a handful of Bengali gentlemen, led by Rajah Rammohun Roy, founded the first modern university in India, Hindu College in Calcutta, they were particularly keen to have Locke on the curriculum. The unease this caused among the East India Company administrators was well-founded. A view of liberty as independence from arbitrary power, not simply freedom from restraint, provided an ideal tool for the Indian independence movement to wield against its own masters. As history shows, liberty is never secure, and never less so than when a stridently self-congratulatory mood takes hold. After the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in 1688, Britain saw a flood of writings boasting of its status as the bulwark of liberty. Increasingly, these claims were exposed as hypocritical and self-deluded. If Britain was the land of the free, critics asked, how did this accord with the subservient position of women and slaves? Or, one might add, of the colonised, as British rule consolidated first in Bengal and then throughout the subcontinent. In response to revolutionary movements in America and France, Skinner identifies a rearguard action among British political theorists, as a rival notion of liberty as solely a question of restraint gradually gained predominance.One of the effects the theorists of liberty as independence warn against is that if liberty is not regarded as a status but as permission, it breeds servility to authority. It also has radical implications for our relations with one another. A climate of fear and anxiety in which citizens are set against each other erodes the bonds of trust within a society and hollows out a sense of community. Returning to the original meaning of liberty is a salutary reminder of the broader perspective to debates about freedom.The writer is former professor, English Literature, University of Fribourg, Switzerland