Liberty

Aristotle conceives of liberty primarily in political terms. The free person is one who lives in a polis governed by law and who participates in ruling and being ruled in turn. The slave, who is permanently subject to the rule of another without any share in government, lacks the condition of the free man. Liberty, on this view, is not merely the absence of constraint but a specific form of political life: shared self-government among citizens who are by nature equals.

Aristotle also treats the question of liberty in its moral aspect, as the capacity for voluntary action. A person is responsible only for what he does willingly, with knowledge of the relevant circumstances. Actions performed under compulsion or through ignorance are not fully voluntary and therefore not fully the agent's own. This analysis of voluntary action, treated more fully in the chapter on WILL, lays the groundwork for what later writers develop as the distinction between free will and determinism, though Aristotle does not himself frame it in those terms.

There is, further, a connection in Aristotle between liberty and virtue. The person who is governed by appetite is, in an important sense, no freer than the person who is governed by another man. Liberty in its fullest sense requires that reason govern desire, and that rational citizens deliberate together about the common good. On this account, liberty, like virtue, is an achievement of character and political order, not simply a natural condition. The bearing of this conception on the questions treated in the chapter on SLAVERY is evident.

Aristotle thus introduces two strands that run through the subsequent discussion of liberty: political liberty as self-government among equals, and moral liberty as the rational governance of one's own actions. The relation between these two conceptions, and whether they are ultimately compatible, becomes a central question in the tradition.

Epictetus, himself a former slave, develops the Stoic conception of liberty as an entirely inward condition. Political liberty, on this view, is neither necessary nor sufficient for genuine freedom. A Roman senator tormented by ambition may be more enslaved than a slave who has achieved inner tranquility. The free person is one whose judgments, desires, and choices are entirely his own, regardless of external circumstance.

The foundation of this doctrine is a division between what is and what is not within our power. Our opinions, desires, aversions, and purposes are up to us; our bodies, possessions, reputations, and the events of the external world are not. Freedom, Epictetus holds, consists in disciplining oneself to be concerned only with what lies within one's power. To attach one's happiness to external things is to become the slave of whatever controls them. To take charge of the inner life is to become free in the only domain where the self can be sovereign.

This conception of liberty as freedom from disturbance by the passions (apatheia) is not, on the Stoic view, a form of resignation or passivity, but the active cultivation of rational self-governance. The sage remains free even in chains, because his ruling faculty, his capacity for judgment and assent, is intact. The question this raises, treated in different terms by the theologians, is whether the Stoic discipline of desire constitutes genuine liberation or merely a redirection of the will's attachment. The bearing of this question on the problems discussed in the chapter on EMOTION is evident.

The Stoic conception of inner liberty becomes an important element in the subsequent tradition, particularly in the theological transformation it undergoes at the hands of Augustine, who accepts the primacy of the will in freedom but denies that the will can achieve its own liberation without the assistance of divine grace.

Augustine's treatment of liberty is governed by the doctrines of sin and grace. Human beings possess free will (liberum arbitrium), the capacity to choose, but after the Fall this capacity is disordered. The sinner retains the power of choice, yet his will reliably inclines toward what is destructive. This condition represents, in Augustine's account, a form of freedom that is simultaneously a bondage.

A distinction of central importance in Augustine is that between free will (liberum arbitrium) and freedom (libertas). Free will is the bare power of choice, which is preserved even in fallen human nature. Freedom, in the fuller sense, is the actual ability to live well, to love rightly, to will the good, and to be oriented toward God. This higher liberty is lost through the Fall and can be restored only by grace. The unredeemed person has choices but is enslaved to his own disorder; the redeemed person, bound to Christ, is thereby raised to a higher freedom. The relation of this teaching to the questions treated in the chapter on SIN is evident.

Augustine's position represents a departure from the Stoic conception of Epictetus. Where the Stoics held that inner liberty could be achieved by rational self-discipline, Augustine maintains that the will cannot heal itself. The will is at once the seat of human freedom and of human fallenness, and its rectification requires a love that comes from outside the self. On this view, liberty in its highest sense is not self-mastery but the ordering of the will by divine grace, a conception that bears directly on the questions of WILL and GOD.

Augustine's account raises a question that Aquinas takes up in his own treatment: if the fallen will cannot achieve freedom without grace, what remains of human moral responsibility? Aquinas will argue that grace restores and elevates nature rather than replacing it, and that the will cooperates with grace precisely because it retains its character as a will.

Aquinas brings together the Augustinian theology of grace with the Aristotelian analysis of voluntary action. Free will, he argues, follows necessarily from rationality: a being that can apprehend universal goods cannot be determined by nature to any one particular good. Human beings are free because they are rational, and their freedom consists in the power to deliberate among the alternatives that reason presents to the will.

This freedom is not, however, mere indifference or arbitrary choice. The will naturally inclines toward what reason presents as good. On Aquinas's view, the ability to choose evil is not the perfection of freedom but its defect; genuine liberty consists in the rational ordering of choice toward the good. Following Augustine, he holds that persons become more free as they become more virtuous, more united to the highest good, which alone can completely satisfy the will. The questions this raises about the nature of the will are treated more fully in the chapter on WILL.

Aquinas further situates individual freedom within the framework of natural law, as discussed in the chapter on LAW. Rational creatures are free precisely because they can participate in the eternal law through their own intellect. Human law binds them, but it binds them as rational agents; when they obey just law, they are not constrained but freely actualizing their nature. A difficulty remains, however, for if true freedom is realized by choosing rightly within the moral order, then the person who chooses badly is in some sense less free, and it may be asked whether the state that coerces virtuous behavior is increasing rather than diminishing its subjects' freedom. This question is taken up by the early modern writers in different terms.

Aquinas's account represents the most comprehensive medieval treatment of liberty, holding together the theological doctrine of grace with the philosophical analysis of rational self-direction. The tension it leaves unresolved, between liberty as right choice and liberty as the mere power of choice, becomes a principal concern of the early modern discussion.

Milton's Areopagitica, written against Parliament's licensing of the press, represents one of the earliest sustained arguments for freedom of expression in the English language. Truth and virtue, Milton contends, cannot be produced by coercion; they must be chosen freely in confrontation with error. "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary." A virtue that has never been tested, on this view, is not truly virtue at all.

Milton's argument connects religious, intellectual, and political liberty. The suppression of dissenting books, he holds, is an affront to human reason, for it assumes that ordinary persons cannot be trusted to distinguish truth from falsehood. More fundamentally, it betrays a want of confidence in truth itself. "Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?" The premise of free inquiry, as Milton understands it, is that truth is sufficiently strong to prevail without the state's protection. The question of censorship and its relation to liberty is treated from a different angle in the chapter on OPINION.

Behind Milton's argument lies a theological conception. God created human beings with the capacity for free choice precisely so that virtue might be genuine rather than merely compelled. To replace that freedom with external compulsion is, on this view, to substitute ceremony for substance and to treat adults as though they were children. The liberty to read, write, and choose is not a political concession but an expression of human dignity as creatures endowed with reason.

Milton's argument for the liberty of expression becomes an important precedent for later writers, particularly Mill. Locke, however, approaches the question of toleration in narrower institutional terms, asking not whether truth will prevail in open contest among learned readers, but what minimum guarantees of toleration are required for citizens in a pluralist society.

Hobbes defines liberty in terms that depart sharply from the Aristotelian and Stoic conceptions. "Liberty, or freedom, signifieth, properly, the absence of opposition; by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion." A free man is "he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to do." Liberty, on this account, is not self-mastery, not the cultivation of virtue, and not political participation. It is the absence of external constraint on action.

This definition has a polemical context. Hobbes is concerned to show that the rhetoric of "ancient liberties" and "the liberties of the free-born Englishman," which had been invoked in the English Civil War, rested on a confusion. Such "liberties," he argues, were merely the particular permissions granted by the sovereign then in power. Under any stable government, subjects enjoy liberty in everything the law does not specifically prohibit. The relation of this position to questions of LAW and GOVERNMENT is evident.

On Hobbes's view, a powerful sovereign and extensive liberty are not incompatible. What subjects cannot possess is liberty from the sovereign, the liberty to decide for themselves what is just or to resist the sovereign's commands. But within the framework established by law, free action is abundant. Liberty and sovereignty, far from being opposed, are complementary: the security that sovereign power provides is the condition under which subjects can exercise their freedom in safety.

Hobbes's conception of liberty as the absence of external impediment becomes the starting point for the modern discussion. Locke accepts much of this definition but insists that liberty requires the protection of law, not merely the absence of interference; and subsequent writers continue to debate whether liberty is adequately understood in Hobbes's purely negative terms.

Locke modifies the Hobbesian conception of liberty by connecting it to law. Liberty, for Locke, is not the absence of all constraint; that would be license, which is self-destructive. Liberty is the absence of arbitrary constraint. Where standing laws, made by common consent, govern a community, liberty is preserved. Where rulers govern by caprice, there is a form of slavery regardless of what may happen to be permitted.

The connection between law and liberty is central to Locke's account. "Where there is no law, there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others; which cannot be, where there is no law." Laws, on this view, do not diminish liberty but constitute it by establishing a stable sphere of protected action. A person's property, person, and conscience are secure only when law protects them from both private violence and sovereign caprice. The relation of this doctrine to the questions treated in the chapter on LAW is evident.

Locke's conception of liberty is also inseparable from natural rights. Because each person has a property in his own body and labor, each is rightfully free to act within the bounds of the law of nature. Political society does not create these rights but recognizes and protects them. When government systematically violates the liberty it was instituted to preserve, it forfeits its authority, and the people recover their natural right to establish a new government. This doctrine of resistance is treated more fully in the chapter on REVOLUTION.

Locke's account of liberty under law becomes the foundation of the liberal constitutional tradition. The question it leaves open, whether the propertyless laborer who is formally free but materially dependent on those who own the land and tools he requires can be said to possess genuine liberty, is taken up by Rousseau and, in more radical terms, by Marx.

Rousseau's conception of liberty departs from both the negative liberty of Hobbes and the property-grounded liberty of Locke. On his view, liberty is neither the mere absence of external constraint nor the protection of private interest, but autonomy: the condition of giving oneself the law. "The impulse of appetite alone is slavery," he writes, "while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty."

His famous opening, "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," poses the question of how legitimate government is possible. The answer, as developed in the Social Contract and discussed in the chapter on LAW, is that a society is free when its laws express the general will of its citizens, and each citizen is free when, as a member of the sovereign body, he has participated in willing the laws that bind him. In obeying such laws, he obeys only himself.

From this principle Rousseau draws a further consequence: a person who refuses to obey the general will may legitimately be "forced to be free." This is not, on his account, arbitrary compulsion, but the correction of a person whose private interest has overridden his rational participation in the common good. Liberty, as Rousseau conceives it, requires active citizenship, civic virtue, and a willingness to subordinate private caprice to the general interest. The bearing of this demanding conception on the questions treated in the chapter on DEMOCRACY is considerable.

Rousseau's identification of liberty with collective self-legislation becomes influential in the political thought of the French Revolution and in the subsequent development of democratic theory. The difficulty it raises, whether the community's determination of the general will can override the individual's own judgment without destroying the very autonomy it claims to preserve, is taken up by Kant in more strictly philosophical terms.

Kant develops the conception of liberty as autonomy with a rigor that goes beyond Rousseau's formulation. Freedom, on Kant's account, is the capacity of the rational will to legislate for itself. A being is free not when it does as it pleases, but when its willing is governed by principles that it recognizes as universally valid, by the moral law that it gives to itself.

This conception must be distinguished from mere spontaneity. Animals act on inclinations and desires, which are themselves determined by natural causes. Such action is not free but heteronomous, governed by forces outside the rational self. A rational agent is free when it can determine its will independently of any inclination, guided solely by the form of universal law. This capacity, Kant holds, is what makes morality possible: an unfree will could be neither obligated nor responsible. The bearing of this position on the questions treated in the chapter on WILL is direct.

Autonomy, on Kant's account, connects his metaphysics, his ethics, and his political philosophy. The free will is one that legislates universally. The moral person treats humanity as an end in itself because autonomy requires it. The just state provides each citizen with the rights necessary to exercise external freedom in coexistence with all others, as discussed in the chapter on LAW. Freedom, so understood, is not license, not self-expression, and not merely the Lockean security of person and property, but the capacity of rational beings to govern themselves by universal law.

Kant's doctrine of autonomy becomes one of the most influential conceptions of freedom in modern philosophy. The objection, developed most fully by Hegel, is that a will which legislates universal law in the abstract has no determinate content and cannot by itself specify which particular institutions, laws, or forms of common life a free people should adopt. The movement from abstract freedom to concrete liberty requires, on Hegel's view, an account of the ethical institutions in which freedom is actually realized.

Hegel accepts Kant's identification of freedom with self-determination but argues that Kantian autonomy, taken by itself, remains abstract and without content. A will that merely legislates universal form cannot determine what concrete institutions, laws, or practices a free people should adopt. To be actually free, the rational will must find itself realized in particular ethical institutions. Freedom, on Hegel's view, is not an inner condition or a formal principle but a social and historical achievement.

History, for Hegel, is the progressive realization of this freedom. "The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom." In the ancient Oriental world, only one person (the despot) was known to be free; in Greek and Roman civilization, some were known to be free; in the Christian-Germanic world, culminating in the modern constitutional state, all persons are recognized as free. Each stage, as discussed in the chapter on HISTORY, overcomes the limitations of the previous through the development of Spirit.

In the modern state, Hegel holds, Kantian autonomy takes concrete form. The individual is free not in isolation but as a member of the family (where freedom takes the form of love), civil society (where it takes the form of economic self-determination), and the state (where rational universality is actualized in law and institutions). Freedom apart from these institutions is, on this account, mere abstraction; freedom realized within them is what Hegel calls Spirit at home with itself. The bearing of this conception on the questions treated in the chapters on STATE and GOVERNMENT is direct.

Hegel's historicization of freedom opens the way for Marx's critique. If freedom is actualized in the institutions of the modern state, and those institutions rest on an economic order in which many persons are unfree in practice, it may be asked whether the Hegelian state truly realizes freedom or merely provides a rational form for its absence.

Mill's On Liberty offers the most systematic modern treatment of the limits of social control over the individual. His central principle, the harm principle, holds that "the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection... the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

This principle establishes a sphere of personal sovereignty. Over actions that concern only the agent himself, society has no legitimate jurisdiction. This sphere encompasses not only overt action but also what Mill calls "the inward domain of consciousness": liberty of thought, speech, feeling, and the pursuit of individual tastes. Mill's argument for this sphere is both principled, resting on the conviction that each person's life is properly his own to direct, and consequentialist, holding that a society which permits experiments in living will discover better forms of life than one which enforces conformity. The bearing of this argument on the questions treated in the chapter on OPINION is considerable.

Mill is concerned not only with the tyranny of government but with what he calls the "tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling," the social pressure that imposes conformity through shame, ostracism, and the weight of collective sentiment. Modern democracies, he argues, are especially susceptible to this form of tyranny. The remedy lies in a vigorous culture of individuality, protected by both institutional safeguards and cultural respect for the liberty of each person. "In proportion to the development of his individuality," Mill writes, "each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others."

Mill's harm principle becomes the most widely cited formulation in the modern defense of individual liberty. The difficulty it leaves unresolved is the indeterminacy of "harm to others," which may be construed narrowly to include only direct injury, or broadly to encompass economic disadvantage, moral offense, or cultural erosion. Where the line is drawn determines much of the practical content of the principle.

Marx's treatment of liberty proceeds from a critique of the liberal tradition. Bourgeois liberty, comprising the rights of person, conscience, property, and contract, is, in his account, a genuine historical achievement in comparison with the privileges of feudal society. But it is also limited in a fundamental way: it emancipates the individual politically while leaving him in material dependence. The worker is formally free to sell his labor to any employer; he is not free to refuse to sell it if the alternative is destitution. The bearing of this critique on the questions treated in the chapter on LABOR is evident.

In On the Jewish Question, Marx draws a distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation. Political emancipation removes birth, estate, and confession as grounds for exclusion from the state and creates formally equal citizens in the political sphere. But it leaves intact, and indeed presupposes, the economic conditions that produce real inequality. Liberal rights, Marx argues, protect the "egoistic man" of civil society, "separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest."

Genuine human emancipation, on Marx's view, requires the transformation of the economic foundation. Only when labor is no longer alienated, when production is cooperative rather than exploitative, and when class distinctions have been abolished, will the full development of the human person become possible. In such a society, "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." Liberty, so conceived, ceases to be the isolated individual's protection from interference and becomes the collective condition of human self-realization. The relation of this conception to the questions treated in the chapter on WEALTH is direct.

Marx's distinction between formal and substantive freedom becomes the foundation of subsequent socialist and radical critiques of liberal liberty. The question whether genuine freedom is compatible with private ownership of the means of production, or requires its abolition, remains among the most contested issues in political philosophy.

Dostoyevsky works out his treatment of liberty at length in the chapter of The Brothers Karamazov called "The Grand Inquisitor," which Ivan recites to Alyosha as a poem of his own composition. The Inquisitor, in sixteenth-century Seville, has arrested Christ upon his silent return to earth and comes to his cell to explain why Christ will be burned in the morning. His argument turns on the three temptations in the wilderness: bread, miracle, and kingdom, each of which Christ rejected. In rejecting them, the Inquisitor says, Christ left man with a freedom too heavy for him to bear. Men would have given up their freedom for bread, and would have accepted mystery and authority in the place of the struggle of conscience Christ had required. The Church, the Inquisitor argues, has corrected Christ's error: it has taken the three temptations upon itself, and it has given men the happiness they wanted in the place of the freedom they could not bear.

This is not a doctrine Dostoyevsky intends the reader to accept, but it is a doctrine the novel does not permit the reader to dismiss lightly. The Inquisitor's case against freedom is the strongest case any of the Dostoyevskian characters make, and the answer to it is not argumentative. Christ, at the end of the chapter, rises and kisses the old man on his bloodless lips, and the Inquisitor lets him go. The wordless answer does not refute the speech; it stands alongside it as a different kind of response to the same condition. The freedom Christ has brought, and which man finds so hard to bear, is the same freedom that Zosima, in the sixth book, will describe as the capacity to love without obligation and to be responsible before God for the sins of every other. The alternative to the Inquisitor is not another argument but a different way of carrying the burden he had refused.

Notes from Underground presents the same issue in an earlier and less developed form. The underground man rages against the calculations of the utilitarians, who would give a man everything he could rationally want in exchange for his surrender of the capacity to choose. Man, the underground man insists, would rather break his own happiness than accept a happiness forced on him by the laws of nature or of reason. The passage is violent and partial, but it gives in small what the Inquisitor will give in great: a refusal to trade the burden of freedom for the consolation of a determined order.

The questions raised belong to the treatments of Will, of Good and Evil, and of God, and are discussed under those heads. Under the idea of Liberty, what Dostoyevsky contributes is the recognition that the freedom the tradition has prized may be experienced by those who possess it as an intolerable weight, and that the desire to surrender it is not the exception but the rule. Whether the freedom is worth the cost at which it is had, and whether any society which relieves men of it can be called free in the relevant sense, are questions the twentieth century will find itself asking in circumstances Dostoyevsky had in large part anticipated. Nietzsche will take the Inquisitor's side of the account as evidence for his claim that most men are unfit for the freedom which belongs only to the few. Against him, and in the name of a freedom at once more ordinary and more serious, the novel itself stands as a different answer.