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10.1177/0090591704271302POLITICAL THEORY / February 2005Christman / SAVING POSITIVE FREEDOM

SAVING POSITIVE FREEDOM

JOHN CHRISTMANPennsylvania State University

In this article, I respond to Eric Nelson’s claim (in “Liberty: One Concept Too Many?”) that themost prominent versions of a positive concept of freedom all reduce to negative notions. I arguethat in his otherwise scholarly and well-argued article, Nelson confuses a conceptual disputewith a normative one based on moral or political principle. Further, I point out that the tradi-tional critique of positive conceptions of liberty, which rests on skepticism about perfectionistconceptions of political value, is lost if we see the debate in the way Nelson lays it out. When theseissues are disentangled, I suggest that there is indeed conceptual space for uniquely “positive”conceptions of freedom, and I suggest that the idea of “autonomy” can be taken for such a notionand indeed represents a value worth taking seriously in current discussions of justice.

Keywords: freedom; Isaiah Berlin; Quentin Skinner; autonomy

The supposed conceptual distinction between negative and positive free-dom was a great preoccupation of philosophers and political theorists for sev-eral decades after Isaiah Berlin directed renewed attention to it.1 That preoc-cupation seemed to reach an apex as writers remarked on the obviousplasticity of the notion of freedom (or liberty) and the numerous ways inwhich elements of that notion could be conceptualized. Also noted was theclear fact that freedom was an “essentially contested concept” which couldnot be neutrally unpacked in order to decide other questions of value or jus-tice. Conceptions of liberty embodied answers to such questions.2

However, those who want to cling to a positive conception of freedom ofsome sort insist that liberty should be seen as not merely an absence of con-straints—whether those are considered as internal or external to the agent,the product of human action or accident, etc. Such theorists want to place thefocus of our concern for liberty on the quality of agency and not merely theopportunity to act. Admitting that such a position may not be politically ormorally neutral, defenders of such an understanding of freedom insist thatmerely establishing opportunities to act upon one’s current desires (or what-

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ever defines the motives of rational action) fails to secure for citizens the con-ditions of authentic self-government that make freedom meaningful as anideal. Seeing freedom as a quality of agency is different, conceptually, fromseeing it as an absence of something, no matter how robust one’s conceptionof that “something” turns out to be.

Now of course, one can claim that understanding freedom in this way isdangerous or leads to various difficulties of politics or policy. But that norma-tive position is different from the view that such an idea is not conceptuallydistinct from its negative counterparts at all. It is this latter idea that guides theanalysis in Eric Nelson’s thoughtful and informed essay, “Liberty: One Con-cept Too Many?”3 Prof. Nelson argues that despite attempts by Quentin Skin-ner and others to resurrect a distinctively positive conception of liberty, thatconcept can always be understood in a negative fashion, with disagreementsover its meaning amounting really to disputes over the meaning of “con-straint.” Historical figures who have famously been designated as “positivetheorists,” he argues, can all be understood as promoting a conception of neg-ative freedom, albeit one that includes “internal” constraints—constraintsthat operate to prevent the true, authentic self from emerging. Such think-ers—from ancient writers such as Plato and the Stoics, to classical and civicrepublicans such as Machiavelli and Rousseau, to Hegel and the neo-Hegeli-ans—all tout the notion that the free “man” is one who embodies a form ofself-realization, independent self-rule, or some related state of being reflec-tive of the most rational or virtuous life. But for Nelson this state turns out tobe nothing more than the absence of barriers to such realization and hence toa negative conception of freedom after all.

But I want to suggest that this reductionist conceptual argument fails on itsown terms and also serves to disguise a more straightforwardly normativeposition that freedom ought not to be construed in any manner other than anegative one. Nelson’s subtle and scholarly treatment of this controversyfails to take sufficiently seriously the way in which positive freedom can beconceptually distinguished from its negative counterpart whether or not sucha positive notion is morally or politically palatable in the end.

Conceptions of positive freedom can be motivated by various consider-ations. Among such is the view that freedom concerns not only the absence ofintrusion (by others or by natural circumstance) but also one’s effectivenessas an agent. Some have stressed for example that effective agency is mani-fested not only in one’s internal or psychological capacities to govern oneselfbut also in one’s ability to carry out one’s wishes through action in the world.A person who faces no restrictions on action that can be called an “intrusion”or “constraint” (at least as that has been typically understood) may still bepalpably unable to act in any meaningful way. She may, for example, lack

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basic resources that all other “normal” people have easy access to. Leftistcritics of liberalism, especially those influenced by Marx, have seized uponthis thought to insist that resources that enable effective action increase free-dom (and so radical inequalities of resources amount to unequal freedom).4

While this push to link freedom with material condition raises powerfulissues, it is not actually the focus here. Rather, Nelson’s discussion revolvesaround conceptions of positive liberty that focus on internal achievements ofthe self. Positive freedom in this sense was indeed the brunt of Isaiah Berlin’sfamous analysis, in that Berlin drew critical attention to those traditions thatsaw freedom as the operation of the “higher” more “rational” self, as somesort of self-realization. But it is important to note that in addition to the “his-torical” and “analytical” claims that Berlin made in his famous essay, he alsoadvanced a straightforwardly normative argument that construing freedomin a positive sense dangerously masked a contentious ideal of the good lifebehind the veneer of liberty. For a liberal like Berlin, liberty was the funda-mental requirement of a society which sees questions of fundamental value,including the ideals of the best life, as open and subject to ongoing debate andcontestation. To label as “freedom” the mastery of the “lower” desires by the“higher” capacities of morality and virtue, not to mention mastery by the sup-posedly superior wisdom of a general will, marked a treacherous tilt towardthe justification of centralized power under the guise of moral superiority.Berlin was keen to alert us to the tendency that could be found in writers suchas Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, and neo-Hegelians such as T. H. Green to construefreedom in ways that enacted this masquerade.

This is more than merely a historical or analytical claim as Nelson sug-gests; it is very much a political one. Berlin mounted what we could call apluralist, antiperfectionist argument against construing freedom in a positivemanner. For Berlin, skepticism about positive liberty was inextricably linkedto worries about the dominance of narrow and parochial horizons of value.

Nevertheless, Berlin’s ruminations sparked a sustained conceptual debateabout the subtle and variable differences among concepts of freedom. Thelocus classicus for the schematic organization of conceptual elements of theidea of freedom is Gerald MacCallum’s “Negative and Positive Freedom,”where he claimed that all conceptions of freedom were composed of the same(variable) elements: x is free/unfree from y to do/be z.5 According to Nelson,McCallum “dissolved” the distinction between negative and positivenotions. But I’d prefer to say that this schema does not actually dissolve thedistinction, it merely locates it in a different place. Rather than thinking thereare two (or more) fundamentally different concepts of freedom, McCallum’sanalysis shows that we should think about freedom as one overarching con-ceptual schema allowing for several different conceptions. Positive under-

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standings of freedom denote one set of interpretations of the variables in theschema and negative notions another.

For example, Berlin (and others) claimed that for a constraint to properlycount as a limitation on freedom it had to have a human source. We could callthis the “human source restriction.” But this is different from asking whethera constraint must be internal to the agent to count as such. A factor relevant topursuing some action can come from a human source or not (and be volun-tarily, negligently, or recklessly introduced by such a source), or it can oper-ate internally or externally. These are different questions. It is true that onemight try to finesse the issue of whether internal constraints truly limit free-dom by claiming that as long as the source of them is (voluntary, intentional)human action it counts as such. But one can also claim consistently that someconstraints count as limitations whether or not they are introduced by humanaction and leave open the question of whether such “constraints” must beexternal to the agent to be counted as such.

The focus of Nelson’s comments is Quentin Skinner’s attempt to revital-ize a positive understanding of liberty as “self-realization” and the claim foran historical imprimatur for it in the work of, among others, neo-Hegelianssuch as T. H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet. Nelson replies by looking moreclosely at the manner in which thinkers such as Green and Bosanquet articu-lated their conceptions. According to Nelson, Green did see freedom as self-realization, since it amounts to the absences of “wants and impulses whichinterfere with the fulfillment of one’s possibilities.” But Nelson adds that it isalso true that for Green, “once such encumbrances are disposed of, man willindeed ‘find his object’(what else could he do?)” (pp. 61-62). This shows thatthe key element of freedom for Green is the absence of obstacles after all andnot the establishment of some positive state.

But this last parenthetical statement by Nelson (“what else could he do?”)reveals the difficulty. For I would insist that finding oneself is freedom forGreen, and removing encumbrances is but the necessary means to that state;it is not sufficient (conceptually) for freedom itself. And it is true, as Nelsonclaims, that Green says that this “shares a ‘community of meaning’with free-dom as the absences of physical interference,” but sharing a community ofmeaning is different from meaning the same thing.

The objection that Nelson considers on p. 62 comes close to representingthis suggestion. The objection resists Nelson’s move that positive liberty ismerely disguised negative liberty because all claims that freedom is a positivestate can be reanalyzed into the idea that freedom is nothing more than theremoval of all obstacles to that state. The objector claims that this confuses“removing the obstacles to x” with “x.” Nelson replies that Green and

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Bosanquet both revert to the “language of constraint” when called upon todefend their idea that freedom is actually self-realization.

Nelson’s reply misses the point, however. Green and Bosanquet may welltry to motivate their alternative conceptualization of freedom my showingthat it shares a “community of meaning” with negative notions, in that self-realization involves (but cannot be reduced to) removal of internal obstaclesto the functioning of my true self. But this is merely to motivate our under-standing of why freedom is more than the absences of obstacles, for unlesswe see the final outcome of that absence in positive terms we have not fullyunderstood the meaning of freedom.

Similarly with Kant: freedom as self-imposition of the moral law is possi-ble only when I can act independently of pathological impulses; it is a mis-take to equate the former with the latter. Independence, the negative compo-nent of freedom, simply makes possible the positive element. As Thomas Hillputs it, for Kant “to conceive a person as having positive freedom is to thinkof the person as having (1) in addition to negative freedom, (2) a deep rationalcommitment to some principle(s) of conduct as (rationally) binding but (3)not adopted for the sake of satisfying desires, (4) not just prescribing meansto rationally contingent ends, and yet (5) in some sense necessarily imposedon oneself by oneself as a rational agent.”6 To think that this can be reduced tothe removal of barriers to the operation of the will is to misunderstand theprofound (and controversial) contribution Kant is making here to our under-standing of free agency. (I say this acknowledging, as Nelson does in note 41,that there is interesting scholarly debate about whether, or how, Kant may becommitted to equating free action with applying the moral law to oneself.)

Nelson goes on to say that the objection involves a “fundamental error” inthat it confuses debates about concepts of freedom with disputes over thespecificity with which the behavior of the free person can be described. Thisgets to the heart of the matter but not quite in the way Nelson claims. For it istrue that critics of the use of freedom in a positive sense are concerned thatequating freedom with a narrow range of life pursuits, say ones coming underthe banner of “self-realization,” is to give an overly narrow account of thepossibilities of a valuable (free) life. That point may well be right, or at leastits cautionary intent is well taken, but it is a normative claim about whetherwe or a society ought to design institutions that promote “freedom” in thisway or not. It is not a claim, not a plausible one at least, about what freedommust mean.

Nelson does point to an important insight here, though. Even so-calledvalue-neutral negative conceptions of freedom fail to escape the charge oflinking freedom to ideals of the good life. Defining a “constraint” necessarily

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involves specifying (if only implicitly) the range of human actions and pur-suits that such constraints make impossible. Fences only one foot high cannotbe counted as a constraint for normal adults, unless, that is, such adults feelobligated to participate in a religious ritual that involves shuffling along with-out lifting their feet and such fences are in the way. The very meaning of con-straint presupposes a range of normal (and perhaps morally valued) actiontypes that humans are thought to pursue. Attempts to fashion value-neutralaccounts of freedom, either negative or positive, merely aim to allow the wid-est possible range of such pursuits in the conceptual architecture of theseideas.

A parallel point can be made concerning Nelson’s discussion of CharlesTaylor’s attempt to locate the positive understanding of freedom. For Nelson,Taylor’s insistence that positive freedom is an exercise concept shows it to be“incompatible” with negative liberty. But first, this is a slight misconstrual:defenders of freedom in this positive sense do not argue that such an ideal isincompatible with negative freedom but only that it goes beyond that goal orthat securing simply negative freedom is incoherent or incomplete as a socialaim. Taylor and others argue that there is no conception of freedom as simplythe absence of constraints that does not rest on the more robust (positive) con-ception of freedom as a quality of agency, for what counts as a constraint isonly specified by presuppositions of what final state such interference makesimpossible. As Taylor argues, it is not possible to “count” constraints unlessone clearly understands what effective agency amounts to. How many “con-straints” am I laboring under right now? Who knows, unless I understandwhat authentic agency amounts to, and so which such constraints constrain.

There is indeed a parallel here with the Sandelian analysis of Rawls’sOriginal Position but not quite in the way Nelson has it. The contrast betweenvoluntarist and cognitivist models of justification is parallel to the contrastbetween negative and positive freedom in the following way: a voluntaristclaims that what justifies an outcome is simply that it was chosen, while acognitivist insists that what justifies it is that it was the right choice. Similarly,a positive theorist denies that an action is free simply because it occurred (andso was not prevented by obstacles). It must be the right sort of action (expres-sive of the person’s true self for example). But this shows that defending posi-tive freedom as a value promotes a conceptually distinct state of affairs con-cerning human action and development, one which engages differentmachinery in the justification of that action.

An example may make this clearer. A person who faces no internal orexternal constraints to action may well simply fail to act or she may act ran-domly or inauthentically. Imagine a person who acts on every impulse thatoccurs to her, willy-nilly, and without any coherent plan. A defender of a pos-

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itive conception of freedom would say that she lacked something that is overand above the absence of constraints to her thought and action, namely somequality of her action (and here fill in the blank with any particular theorist’smodel of positive freedom).

Nelson unpacks the identity statement expressing the controversial posi-tive conception of freedom into the two biconditionals that form it. But thesyntax he utilizes in so doing is problematic. For we might say that “freedom”means “being or doing X” (where X can stand for some quality of agencysuch as being self-realized), and therefore this should be uncoupled as “ifpeople are free they are X and if people are X they are free.” But this is nothow Nelson explicates that claim. He disaggregates the biconditional as “ifpeople are free they will do or be X” and “if people do or are X, they will befree.” The use of the future tense here shifts the question to the contingent oneof what will allow a person to be free. This plays into the hand of areductionist-negative theorist such as Nelson since it focuses on what willlead to or allow the touted state of being (or doing). But this is to alter the con-ceptual thrust of the positive view, which is not to fix the meaning of freedomin terms of what will lead to it or allow it to flourish. Using the present tenseretains the logical connection meant here, that freedom is X (and not theconditions that allow it).

Nelson claims, however, that using the copulative “is” begs the question,since it assumes an identity that negative theorists deny. That’s right, but whatis labeled an analytical claim here is really a normative one. For it is not thatthere is no separable concept of freedom (as self-realization), rather it is thatthere is not (according to Nelson) an acceptable value (self-realization) thatwe should pursue in the way we pursue or protect freedom. When Nelsonclaims, then, that the argument is really over what counts as a constraint andnot over what freedom means, he mistakenly construes a moral and politicaldispute as a conceptual one. Those such as Skinner, Taylor, and, I wouldargue, their historical predecessors such as Kant, Hegel, and Rousseau claimthat a just society must protect or promote freedom construed in this positiveway and see as an ideal the ability of citizens to act as authentic, self-govern-ing agents (that is, be self-realized). This is different from saying that obsta-cles should be removed (internal or external) for it is specifying forthrightlythe goal to be achieved independently of removing the obstacles a personmight face in reaching that or any other goal.

When Nelson considers, for example, the Protestant ideal that being in theservice of God is “perfect freedom” or Hannah Arendt’s claim that participa-tion in politics constitutes (in part) freedom, he again twists the claim into aninstrumental one about the contingent relation between certain ways of lifeand the presence of constraints on action. But such theorists are not focusing

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on what constrains these ideals—that would be a conceptually (and forArendt a politically) separate matter. They are focusing on what way of life istruly a free one.

One could go on with virtually every claim about major thinkers in the“positive” tradition Nelson discusses: Hegel is paraphrased (accuratelyenough) as claiming that we “can only be liberated from our passions andsense impressions once we have been made to realize that we ourselves willthe ‘universal’ . . . through the practice of citizenship in a Hegelian state”(p. 70). And Rousseau is glossed as purporting that “people are governed bytheir ‘higher,’‘rational’selves (and, hence, free from internal constraint) onlywhen they are guided by a General Will” (p. 70). But this is followed by asummary statement that misses the point altogether: “For both theorists, con-straints are stripped away through the actual experience of citizenship rightlypracticed” (p. 70). Yes, but it is not the stripping away of constraints thatmakes for freedom for either of these writers, it is the achievement of a certainmode of political life, one manifesting agency of a certain idealized sort. Oneis hard-pressed, for example, to find in Rousseau’s Social Contract any atten-tion to the barriers to action and self-development that makes for the free citi-zen. What he focuses on are the social relations and internal self-governmentthat manifests civic freedom (and ideally moral freedom) itself.

Finally, I should add that I wholly agree with what Nelson says aboutPhilip Pettit’s recent attempt to fashion a unique conception of freedom asnondomination which he (Pettit) has claimed captures much of the civicrepublican tradition of political writing on the subject.7 I have argued else-where8 that Pettit’s notion is, in the end, a negative conception but one whichadds a robust normative component that requires that procedural justice beoperative for the constraints that an agent faces not to amount to limitationson his or her freedom. That is, domination occurs when the processes bywhich a certain de facto constraint comes into being have not met the require-ment of respect and citizen input (or representation of that input) demandedby justice. This implies that justice is fundamental in consideration of theacceptability of citizens’ conditions and that freedom is only derivatively so(in that one is free to the extent that one lives under just conditions).

THE NEED FOR A POSITIVE CONCEPT

My intentions in this commentary are more than to make a narrowly con-ceptual, critical point. The suggestion that positive conceptions of liberty canall be reduced to negative notions threatens to seriously misunderstandefforts to include idealized models of agency in our broadest understandings

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of social freedom. Seeing freedom as more than a set of opportunities createdby removing constraints from the path of thought and action—even “con-straints” defined in a robust and nuanced manner—is to set out a view ofhuman agency as a set of powers and abilities, ones regarding the develop-ment and expression of authentic and effective self-government. Certainpolitical institutions and policies may well remove or minimize constraintsfaced by an agent but do nothing to establish or protect those powers. Theinjustice that many claim this involves fails to get a foothold in a conceptualterrain that disallows (or misunderstands) the core concepts of that injustice.

Although positive freedom has garnered renewed attention lately fromwriters such as Skinner, Taylor, and Pettit, it is the concept of “autonomy”that has more prominently played the role recently of representing this morerobust ideal of human agency. Autonomy is defined in various ways,9 butmost conceptions stress the capacity for critical self-reflection in the devel-opment of value systems and plans of action. Such capacities do not merelyemerge naturally, but must be developed through various processes involvingeducational, social, and personal resources.

To see freedom as nothing more than the removal of certain interferencesblinds us to the need for such resources, as well as their precise character, andso blinds us to the demands of just institutions. Therefore, including centralreference to positive freedom (or autonomy) is far from using “too many”concepts, rather it is a crucial component of the articulation of principles ofjustice and the resistance to certain forms of oppression. And while a defenseof this last claim must be mounted elsewhere—all I have attempted here is toclear conceptual space for it—it is, I think, a claim worth debating fully on itsmerits.

NOTES

1. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1969), 118-72; for discussion, see, for example, the essays in David Miller, ed.,Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); for my own attempt to explicate the concept,see John Christman, The Myth of Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), chap. 4.

2. For general discussion, see, e.g., Richard Flathman, The Philosophy and Politics of Free-dom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and George Brenkert, Political Freedom(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1991), chap. 1.

3. Eric Nelson, “Liberty: One Concept Too Many?” Political Theory 33 (2005): 58-78.4. For an example of this sort of view, see Lawrence Croker, Positive Liberty (The Hague, the

Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980); see also Andrew Levine, Arguing for Socialism (London:Verso, 1988).

5. Gerald MacCallum, “Negative and Positive Freedom,” Philosophical Review 76 (1967):3112-34.

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6. Thomas Hill, “The Kantian Conception of Autonomy,” in The Inner Citadel: Essays onIndividual Autonomy, ed. John Christman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 91-105,at 99.

7. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1997).

8. John Christman, “Review of Republicanism,” Ethics 109, no. 2 (1998): 202-6, reprinted inThe Good Society 9, no. 3 (2000): 47-49.

9. For an overview, see my entry on “Autonomy in Moral and Political Theory,” in StanfordEncyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html; and Sarah Buss’s entry,“Personal Autonomy,” in the same volume.

John Christman is an associate professor of philosophy and political science atPennsylvania State University and is the author of The Myth of Property: Toward anEgalitarian Theory of Ownership (Oxford University Press) and Social and Political Phi-losophy: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge) and the coeditor (with Joel Ander-son) of Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays (Cambridge UniversityPress, forthcoming).

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