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Liberty and liberties

  
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:48 / 27.01.03
Good lord, I don't think I've ever started a topic in here before.

So anyway, I went to the first of the Ford Lectures last Friday, and it was Quentin Skinner talking about Freedom, Representation and Revolution, 1603-1651, and the specific lecture was on common-law and neo-classical challenges to the crown's prerogative (i.e. the rights of the monarchical government - this is the period leading up to the Civil War so it's a pretty hot potato): and it was: a) bloody brilliant, the man is a genius; and b) made me think it might be interesting to talk about ideas of liberty and liberties, and how governments and polities conceive of liberty these days, and how liberty and liberties are curtailed in practice...

('scuse my multiple clauses, please - thinking on my feet)

Skinner's thesis was basically as follows: that there were two main strands of opposition to the crown prerogative, the common-law opposition and the neo-classical opposition. The common-law opposition were concerned that the exercise of the crown prerogative would endanger the rights and liberties of the commons - those being 'lives, liberties and estates', i.e. personal liberties (rights of the body) and rights of propriety; and that the prerogative, if exerted outside its consitutional boundaries, was a violation of the lex terra, the common law of the land.

The neo-classical opposition, on the other hand (so called because of its origins in the Roman historians - Cicero, Sallust, Livy and Tacitus) argued that the mere existence of the prerogative, whether exercised or not, reduced subjects to slaves. This was because a free man/person was not someone who simply enjoyed their rights without interference, but was someone who held their rights and liberties independently of any discretionary powers - it was possible to remain free only if the curtailment of rights resulted from laws upon which one had agreed oneself, and therefore if there was any possibility of arbitrary interference, one was already subject to such interference and was therefore not free, a slave. The mere awareness that interference might occur would affect one's behaviour - servitude brings servility.

Phew. Hope that made sense (it was much clearer when QS said it, honest).

So what I was thinking was - that clearly this idea has affected theories of representative government (and I suspect a variant of it was fairly crucial to the foundation of the US - neo-Harringtonian ideas, wasn't it?). But what ideas of liberty are we using now? Because it seems to me that flawed models of democratic representation mean that we are in fact subject to a certain degree of arbitrary interference (though it's not absolutist, I suppose). Does this come under the heading of 'laws to which we have agreed', because of our participation (or ability to participate) in the democratic process - or are we servile?
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
12:28 / 27.01.03
First off, we have to seperate liberty from 'freedom', right now I'm 'free' to strangle somebody to death with my mouse-cord, but I am not 'at liberty' to do this. Although I'm physically free to do something I will be punished for doing so because garrotting somebody with a serial cable is not an acceptable action for somebody in this society.
Guns 'n' Roses once said 'you can't trust freedom when it's not in your hands', Axl Rose is no Tacticus but he hit the nail on the head; governments provide liberties like cereal manufacturers provide a free toy in the packet, they don't exist like gravity or thermodynamics. Also, citizens of any particular state are assumed to automatically agree to both the liberties we enjoy and the arbitrary interference we hate even if they don't participate in any democratic process (and especially if they don't live in a democratic country at all). There was a Switchboard thread on choosing not to vote which said something to this effect.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
17:51 / 27.01.03
I think you're coming from a more Utilitarian tradition than I am, phex. Sounds a bit John Stuart Millish to me (and why did I leave my copy of On Liberty in Southsea? Dratitude - can anyone else come up with anything on this?).

Anyway.

First off, we have to seperate liberty from 'freedom', right now I'm 'free' to strangle somebody to death with my mouse-cord, but I am not 'at liberty' to do this. Although I'm physically free to do something I will be punished for doing so because garrotting somebody with a serial cable is not an acceptable action for somebody in this society.

Right, this is probably just a semantic difference. I would say that this is a bit of a red herring, because technically speaking, by participating in the democratic process you agree that your liberties in the matter of strangling people with your mouse-cord are curtailed. You may not participate in the democratic process, but so long as that is still a matter of your personal choice I think you probably have liberty which is curtailed by socially agreed boundaries - or in other words you have that liberty and freedom (which are the same thing) to act according to your own decisions, i.e. you are sui juris - self-regulating.

Think the way that operates is where the Utilitarians come in.

Guns 'n' Roses once said 'you can't trust freedom when it's not in your hands', Axl Rose is no Tacticus but he hit the nail on the head; governments provide liberties like cereal manufacturers provide a free toy in the packet, they don't exist like gravity or thermodynamics.

I think my point here (if I'm propounding the views I wrote about in my first post) would be that actually liberty (as opposed to liberties) does exist like gravity or thermodynamics, or water, or whatever. 'Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.' I suppose one might say that man, as an animal, is governed by group or social dynamics - that association creates limits on individual freedom by its very nature; but I would also say that for men, association is (in part at least) a participatory system. Therefore the question is, whether regimes which govern our liberties are participatory or not; because if they are not, and we are subject to their arbitrary decisions, we must be slaves (this is, I think, where your argument would end up, phex - we are slaves). I suppose it's a questions of representation, at bottom.

Also, citizens of any particular state are assumed to automatically agree to both the liberties we enjoy and the arbitrary interference we hate even if they don't participate in any democratic process (and especially if they don't live in a democratic country at all). There was a Switchboard thread on choosing not to vote which said something to this effect.

I really don't think that first sentence is true - I don't think anyone thinks that people who live under an arbitrary or despotic regime automatically agree to the interferences of that regime - by the lights of my neo-classicist friends, they are enslaved; and anyone who might be subject to such arbitrary interference is enslaved. If you choose not to participate in a representative system, then you are still sui juris, because that decision is yours and you will not suffer any arbitrary interference as a result.

I think one of the things I wanted to ask was whether people felt that, in the light of recent developments such as GATT, IAO/DARPA, the RIP act, our institutions are no longer sufficient to prevent us suffering arbitrary interference? Do we still have that fundamental liberty? Have we lost control of our representative institutions?
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
15:13 / 28.01.03
I think the quick answer to the questions in your final paragraph is yes.

That might be, because, unless I've completely misunderstoood your posts, in light of the examples you give, for example GAT, and I'd put the WTO in here as well, representative government is no longer (was it ever? trying to think of examples) does not create and structure the conditions of liberty you're talking about. These are in the hands of non-represenative groups like those above.

There *seems* (and I'm pretty woolly on this so do correct me) to be an implicit link in yr two examples between the makers of the laws to which we may or may not agree, and their status as *representative*.

I guess I'm veering towards some version of the neo-classical standpoint, as you've described it, whereby the curtailment of various rights and freedoms has not been agreed by us and that it doesn't matter hugely whether it is exercised or not, it puts us in a position of subservience.

Buuutttt... and am thinking aloud, actually, given that in some parts of the world we have the right to protest. Does that mean I'm actually really talking about a common-law situation wherein, it's when the freedoms are actively curtailed, when we take an action and this provokes a repressive reaction, that we lose our liberty.

More when I'm not so confused. Good topic, Kat.
 
 
No star here laces
10:38 / 29.01.03
In the spirit of the thread to date: some random related thoughts.

Strikes me that the level of the debate on liberties largely depends on the prevalent levels of restriction of liberties. When slavery, serfdom, conscription and the like are making themselves felt, liberty is seen in terms of things like the right to life, the ability of self-determination etc. Whereas in a more enlightened society the debate centres around freedom of expression, the right to privacy and all the way down to the use of language.

And I guess this is partly because the more liberty you get, the more sharply you realise where your liberty is curtailed - you realise you are free in the evenings, but not at work (leading to Marxism). You realise that you have the right to religious freedom, but not the right to incite racial hatred.

I've been catching up on my anarchist reading while on holiday, and this is obviously of interest here, as anarchism is the pursuit of liberties pursued to its logical conclusion. So to come back on topic - does the possibility of interference with our liberties make us less free by it's existence, does it make us less free because it causes us to be servile or does it not matter a jot?

Classical anarchist thought would say that the existence of any rules or governance of any type cannot be anything other than oppressive by its very nature. Government only exists to reinforce the interests of the ruling class, even if that ruling class happens to be simply the majority of voters. Anarchists being absolutists by definition would probably argue that one cannot be less free - one is either free or a slave and we are therefore all slaves no matter how perfect our democracy.

The existence of the 'cascading liberties' effect above would seem to support this - so long as restrictions of any type exist we can never feel completely free.

So I'd be interested in opinions as to whether freedom is boolean or quantitative. Can you ever be 'more free' or can you only ever be 'free' or 'not free'?

As for the 'servility' question - this is very interesting. Jonathan Freedland addresses this issue directly in "Bringing home the revolution" - a call for US-style democracy to be installed in Britain. His main thesis was that the philosophy behind government in the UK was fundamentally patrician as opposed to the fundamentally democratic priniciples at work in the US. He argues very persuasively that engagement with government cannot be meaningful unless the populace feel that the government is 'of the people, by the people and for the people' and that this is a matter not just of systems and process but of symbolism. The very existence of the Crown, by this argument, mitigates against liberty because it is a symbol that we the people are not the sovereign power in our nation.

I have a problem with the servility argument, however, because it strikes me that we always have a choice, and that peer pressure is never an excuse. Just because elements in our environment suggest to us that we be servile is not a reason to actually be servile. And in any case can one possibly lose a liberty simply by choosing not to exercise it? Surely possession of liberty is independent of its use - I am still a free human being even if I, for example, enjoy being dominated for sexual pleasure...

Which would lead me to, what I perceive as, modern anarchist currents. These would suggest that liberty lies in its own assertion. If we act freely then we become free. This is as much a prescription for the means of revolution as anything else, but seems relevant here. It would suggest that the Crown is only relevant to our freedom where it physically prevents free action. In fact even if a law exists and the mechanism for enforcing it exists, but in practice it is not enforced, this philosophy would suggest that it is not an impediment to freedom.

Rambling, inconsistent and incomplete, but hey, gotta go...
 
 
Lurid Archive
12:34 / 29.01.03
Just a couple of simple thoughts.

First, liberty which is situated in a community is necessarily a negotiation of the socially agreed boundaries that KKC talks about. There are laws that define the freedoms that I can expect to be protected, in some sense. BB's anarchist might see this as enslavement, but I think this is misleading. In a society with no laws, then a mafia that extorts me (of their own free will) restricts my freedom and any systematic attempt to curtail them becomes a de facto law.

So, in a sense, I think there is a level of compromise central to the idea of liberty which is nevertheless acceptable within a democracy where the boundaries may be renegotiated. The problems of liberty for those of living in representative democracies are not, in my view, directly to do with the specific instances of our laws, which may in theory be changed. Rather, one needs to look to see whether the mechanisms of power, by which our liberties are negotiated, are actually democratic.

From that point of view, I think that lots of us would argue that it is fairly clear that wealth and power are often not democratically accountable. Personally, I don't see it as a failure of representative democracy per se, but rather as a failure of our realisations of it. One might, however, argue that it is an inevitablility of capitalism to create disparities in wealth which lead to disparities in power unless tightly regulated.
 
 
alas
01:12 / 01.02.03
one not very clearly formed thought comes to mind in response to this statement:
As for the 'servility' question - this is very interesting. Jonathan Freedland addresses this issue directly in "Bringing home the revolution" - a call for US-style democracy to be installed in Britain. His main thesis was that the philosophy behind government in the UK was fundamentally patrician as opposed to the fundamentally democratic priniciples at work in the US. He argues very persuasively that engagement with government cannot be meaningful unless the populace feel that the government is 'of the people, by the people and for the people' and that this is a matter not just of systems and process but of symbolism. The very existence of the Crown, by this argument, mitigates against liberty because it is a symbol that we the people are not the sovereign power in our nation.

I've been involved with social welfare institutions and courts of law in both Britain and the US, and I would argue that in theory this idea sounds good, but in practice what happens is that the "patrician" roots of british legal/social welfare system seems to give more authority to individuals within the system, as opposed to the US system where individual discretion is increasingly hostage to rules that inevitably seek to equate a huge variety of cases and treat them as the same under rigidly structured rubrics like mandatory minimum sentencing. Although individual discretion clearly contributes to whimsical decision making, at least one knows who has acted and there's a chance one can speak to the person who made the decision. The bureaucratic machine is so "de-individuated" as another thread puts it that whenever I have to deal with US social welfare/legal systems I feel like Buttle/Tuttle in the film Brazil.

so I don't know, but it feels to me that bureaucracies have the potential for a kind of mass alienation/depersonalization that is perhaps not as overt in its restriction of liberty but is unprecedented in its ability to control massive numbers of people.

does that make sense?
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
16:58 / 24.03.03
My apologies for not addressing people's points directly in this post (hopefully I'll manage it later, though this thread makes my brain hurt a bit) - but I have been meaning to post some of my notes from the last Ford Lecture for this age and I'm going to mkae myself do it now.

It does, I think, address Byron's Jonathan Freedland point, actually:

The very existence of the Crown, by this argument, mitigates against liberty because it is a symbol that we the people are not the sovereign power in our nation

- the last lecture in the series was the one in which Skinner showed how the failure of the argument of the democratical gentlemen (the one I outlined in my first post) meant that the Hobbesian view of government and representation took hold, and has remained the dominant view ever since (though this has, I think, perhaps been hidden by layers of succeeding political theories). Skinner's pesentation of Hobbes' argument (in Leviathan, principally) was as follows, more-or-less:

Hobbes views absolute monarchy as the best form of representative government, and that the sovereign represents each individual subject in his person. Now, by the lights of the democratical gentlemen, subjection to the arbitrary will of an absolute sovereign is slavery, as I said above. Hobbes get around their objections in the following ways:
1) Security, not freedom, is our fundamental value: the state of nature is one of liberty, but no security, and what is life in that state? You have it - nasty, brutish and short. Therefore the fundamental purpose of the state is to limit liberty in the name of security.
2)The proper meaning of what it is to be a 'free-man' is having the ability to exercise one's powers without interference; that is, corporal liberty; and therefore the condition of being a subject and that of being a free-man are compatible.

This stems from Hobbes' fundamental ontological commitment: that nothign is real except bodies in motion; and therefore the only possible impediment to freedom is physical restriction, and the case of being a free-man can only mean the unimpedimented motion of limbs etc.

This was the vision used by the Utilitarians, and which became the foundation of our ideas of political liberty. Skinner wanted to suggest that the neo-classical argument represented a 'road not taken' in political history, and that the failure of that argument and of the Commonwealth is the foundation upon which the present representative system is laid; and I think he wanted us (the audience) to consider alternative ideas of representation and how trhe neo-classical argument might be applied to thinking about our representative institutions. I do think representation is a vital issue, and I think we're all very conscious of some of the failings in that respect of our system at the moment. Be interested to hear what people have to say about it (I am still at sea on this one myself...).

Incidentally, Quentin Skinner's outlines and booklists are online here.
 
 
Linus Dunce
11:26 / 25.03.03
It's been a while since I read anything to do with this subject so it's all gone a bit fuzzy. But I seem to remember that, as long as we have corporal freedom, we retain the right to return ourselves to the state of nature, ie revolt? Therefore, we're nearly always free or whatever you want to call it?
 
  
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