Towards a Worldwide Index of Human Freedom

16 • Towards a Worldwide Index of Human Freedom
entertained a freedom of action…. Throughout the campaign refugees,
soldiers, and onlookers came and went… as they saw fit. (Hanson,
2002: 51-53)
While it would be beyond the scope of this paper to recite in detail
Hanson’s arguments and evidence for these claims, they can be quickly
alluded to: 1) he notes the well-recorded and unrestrained argument and
debate not just in the Greek city forums of the time, but even on the
battlefield between generals over tactics and strategy; 2) Hanson is right
about proto forms of democracy in the Greek world, but he weakens his
point by failing, by and large, to distinguish democracy from freedom (a
distinction that will be discussed latter in this paper); 3) he notes that the
Greeks had the security of property rights to feel confident to leave their
most valued possessions at home “trusting in the law to protect the private
capital of the free citizen” (p. 52); and 4) along with the example of
free action in the above quote, he notes that many free Athenians simply
decided not to evacuate Attica despite the assembly’s order to do so. It
is worth noting this runs directly counter to Constant’s arguments, since
Athenians were clearly ready to disobey community authority, and this
disobedience was not even strongly proscribed.
Hanson’s claims about property rights should not be extended to commerce
in general in the Greek world. Property rights may well have been
respected even when commerce was considered an unseemly profession.
Stark argues convincingly that commerce was despised by the elites in
the Greco-Roman world. Constant provides now outdated statistics to
argue that the commerce of the ancients was extremely limited compared
to the commerce of his day, but he does not much explore why this is so,
other than his claim that the culture of the ancients created a warlike (or
confiscatory) concept of commerce, limiting its emergence, while new
technology, such as the compass, encouraged it in his time.
Whatever the true data on ancient commerce, the Greeks, particularly
the Athenians, were traders. Yet, while comments praising (or deploring)
negative freedom are fairly common in ancient literature, there are few, if
any, ancient quotes that praise what today we would call economic freedom.
It is only in the debate of the last few centuries that economic freedom
was seen as crucial to other freedoms, a connection that seems lost
again in most modern freedom indexes, as will be argued later.
Although Hanson lists property rights as a central element of freedom,
both Stark and Constant claim that private commerce is not just
a freedom, but also the basis of other freedoms.8 Constant, for example,
8 Constant also claims that the size of the polity also affects freedom, with small polities exercising
more social control over the citizens. He opposes direct democracy with freedom.
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