Sunday, July 27, 2014

The freedom debate

Back in 2006 there was a debate on freedom between some British left and right liberals. Much of it is predictable and unenlightening, but there were a few points of interest.

The left liberal was Neal Lawson. He began with this observation:
Politics is about competing conceptions of liberty or freedom. What is it to live freely?

In a sense he is right. The banner of liberal politics has for a long time been the word freedom. Our current PM, Tony Abbott has said:
The dream of greater personal freedom is probably the Liberal Party’s nearest equivalent to a “light on the hill”

And:
The Liberal Party’s animating principle is freedom

There are two responses to be made to this. First, it is limiting and distorting to see politics as being only about freedom. People do want to be free, but they also want other things as well: happy marriages, the opportunity to raise children, a work and life balance, membership of a community they are proud to belong to, achievements in culture and the arts, a productive economy, an attractive environment, some level of cultural continuity, the upholding of a national identity and so on.

The proper role of a government is to hold in balance a range of goods that sometimes compete with each other, to the point that there is a framework of society that fits together. Part of this framework will be an understanding of what the proper limits of a government are.

Second, if politics is about freedom alone, then what freedom is understood to be matters a great deal. According to Neal Lawson, it is the right-liberals who have managed to define freedom in market terms (he calls right-liberals "conservatives"):
Conservatives have taken ownership of the word and therefore its meaning. Freedom from the state, from trade unions, freedom of exchange, free markets and free enterprise – the lexicon of freedom is the language of the right.

Again, he's correct that right-liberals do see a freedom to be self-made in the market as a key aspect of freedom. He contrasts this with the left-wing view of freedom here:
Neo-liberalism equates individual liberty solely with free markets. In contrast, 'social liberalism' suggests individual liberty requires some kind of collective welfare provision. Both of these visions are part of the liberal tradition but come to very different conclusions about what it means to be free.

There are a few points to be made here. First, he overstates the difference between left and right. Both have the autonomous, abstracted individual as a starting point. But when it comes to the issue of how a society of such individuals is to be regulated, right-liberals look to the market whereas left-liberals tend to look to the state.

Second, the left-liberal view of solidarity is not persuasive. The left-liberal idea is that we express our social natures by accepting a "collective welfare provision," i.e. by agreeing to pay taxes to fund the welfare state. If that's supposed to be the alternative to right-liberalism, then excuse me for not getting excited. The sense of connectedness between people should run deeper than this: there are supposed to be loyalties to family and ethny; an impulse running between men and women; a bond existing between groups of men (comradeship, brotherhood); a connection felt by those belonging to cherished institutions (e.g. school, university alumni) and so on. In the left-liberal conception, my social nature is complete after I hand in my tax return.

However, I have to say that reading the Neal Lawson piece did get me thinking about what freedom in the market might mean to people. I've never understood the appeal of the right-liberal idea about freedom in the market.

But think of it this way. If you live in a society in which the "sideways" connections between people (family, ethny, sex etc.) have been considerably dissolved, so that the individual is treated only as an individual, then the sense of agency that we have in life is considerably reduced. What can you do as a private individual? What effect can you have on anything? For most people the answer will be: very little. It will be just you as an individual, with no role except to steer your own individual course (which most people find difficult to do, as the surrounding culture exerts such an influence over us.)

So what is left to the average person to salvage some sense of agency? Well, if you get money then you have buying power - you have a freedom to distribute your financial resources as you see fit. You have freedom in the market in the sense that decisions to purchase are in your domain.

You might have to work all week to get the money, but come the weekend you have agency to please yourself or your family with purchasing decisions.

To me it's not central to what freedom should mean, but in the absence of anything else, perhaps it has its appeal to people.

10 comments:

  1. I've never understood the appeal of the right-liberal idea about freedom in the market.

    If you do not have economic freedom -- to buy, sell, and control goods and services as you please -- then your other freedoms are meaningless. You are a slave to the extent that you do not control your economic freedom. If the government gives you everything, and tells you how you can spend your money, then you are a slave to the government.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Bah, yes and no. I understand that a society in which a government had complete control over what people might buy or sell would not be a free society. However, at the same time, a society in which people are limited to the freedom to buy and sell in the market is not a very free society either. It is a society with an incomplete view of what it means to be a person.

      It is not even the case that the market works in a one-sided way to promote freedom. There are times that I feel like a slave at work. I know that I am overworking and doing myself damage, but I have no choice or control over the matter. I have a family to support and a mortgage to pay. It doesn't seem like a great trade off that I then get to spend a small amount of money at a shopping mall on a Saturday - not when I am so run down mentally and physically that I am most focused on simply recuperating by Monday.

      The great fulfilments in life are not about market transactions; such transactions should not be the focus of our understanding of human freedom.

      Delete
    2. I didn't say economic freedom was sufficient for freedom, only that it was necessary.

      However, at the same time, a society in which people are limited to the freedom to buy and sell in the market is not a very free society either.

      You are begging the question. If your only freedom is market freedom then yeah that is not very free because you are starting with the assumption that "everything else" has been written off. My view is that a society that doesn't want to meddle in your economic freedom won't want to meddle with your other freedoms either - and just as importantly, if they don't take your money then they have that much less power to tyrannize you in other ways.

      There are times that I feel like a slave at work.

      You don't like working? Join the club! That does not mean you are not free. Your responsibilities - house, family, etc. - were freely chosen, and you had a measure of freedom in how to choose your job and house that is well-nigh unprecedented in human history.

      My granddad had to quit school and go to work as a manual laborer at age 14. He did not choose or control that; his dad made him do it. I think he would have traded that life for your current one in a heartbeat. I have ancestors even before that who, according to the census, were miners or farm workers. Too bad we can't summon their shades and ask them about choice, control, freedom, and personal fulfillment, but my guess would be they didn't get much of that.

      Delete
    3. Also, whenever I see any of that crap about "white privilege" I think about all those miners and farm workers stretching back to the dawn of time.

      Delete
  2. My view is that a society that doesn't want to meddle in your economic freedom won't want to meddle with your other freedoms either - and just as importantly, if they don't take your money then they have that much less power to tyrannize you in other ways.

    I can see your point, but in practice it doesn't seem to work that way. At the moment we have political parties which formally do believe in the free-market, which is in part how they justify open borders (the free movement of labour); but they don't mind taking a large percentage of people's earnings for taxes, nor in engaging in radical ideological programmes. Even when these parties talk about "small platoons" and local autonomy, they still end up using central government to impose radical social engineering measures.

    It seems to me that in practice the moral assumptions (about justice, equality, freedom etc.) that people make trump the whole idea of a laissez faire market liberty.

    What I'm trying to argue is that what really seems to count are the underlying philosophical assumptions. If a person believes that the natural condition of things is for everyone to have equal outcomes, and for our race or sex not to matter, and for people to make themselves in the market, then they will be so morally outraged when these things don't come to pass, that inevitably they will use state mechanisms to "put things right" no matter how much they believe in the free market.

    Furthermore, even when a laissez faire attitude was at its height (say mid 1800s), this was not a great thing for traditional society. It seems that people adopted the attitude that social processes should be left to work out for themselves; this led to some very unusual and contorted views in which people tried to justify both open borders and loyalty to a traditional identity. They tried to hold together two contradictory things, which wasn't sustainable in the longer run.

    ReplyDelete
  3. You don't like working? Join the club! That does not mean you are not free.

    Well, it does mean that the economic sphere is not just a sphere in which we get liberty, it's also one which takes it away. It may be a necessity of life, but the negative aspect of it remains.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you define "liberty" as "total emancipation from all requirements to work, produce, and do things for others" then no duh, you cannot get liberty from the economic sphere, and furthermore "liberty" is totally unattainable. But I do not define liberty that way. You and I have far, far more liberty than any previous generation in human history. That means we have vastly more power to choose our path than they did. It does not mean we can get something for nothing.

      Delete
    2. You and I have far, far more liberty than any previous generation in human history.


      More liberty to do certain things, less liberty to do certain other things. Civic liberty has been in a long decline for the past half century or so.

      Delete
  4. dissolving everything important it seems leaves the dissolvers with nothing but a twig ("Free Trade") to wave around and call it a tree (meaningful liberty).

    You have a nice turn of phrase (does that line come from somewhere?)

    Marx wasn't the only one to think that free trade was dissolving the older relations thereby opening up the way for the "new man". I recall John Stuart Mill suggesting something similar (don't have the quote to hand).

    Thanks for the comment.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "Free trade" is simply capital's war on labor.

    ReplyDelete