capitalism

Freedom 181
Further Readings
Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. The
Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures
by and an Interview with Michel Foucault. London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1991.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Alan Sheridan, trans. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
———. The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. Robert
Hurley, trans. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
———. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age
of Reason. Richard Howard, trans. New York: Vintage Books,
1988.
Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993.
FREEDOM
There is little disagreement surrounding the claim that freedom
is the central value of the liberal political order.
However, there is little agreement regarding the proper
understanding of this value and, more precisely, the kinds
of constraints on individual freedom that the state would be
justified in imposing. On this issue, proponents of freedom
can be roughly divided into two basic camps: those who
articulate the value of freedom negatively as “freedom
from” interference, and those who understand it in a more
positive fashion as “freedom to” live under certain conditions,
participate in particular activities, or develop in a
specified way. Simply put, advocates of negative freedom
limit their focus to constraints that originate in the wills of
other individuals or in state intervention. Freedom, in this
sense, focuses on external human control over the decisions
and actions of individuals, and it calls for respect for fundamental
civil liberties. Accordingly, the function of the state
is to maintain and enforce laws that protect this domain for
individuals. In contrast, advocates of positive freedom
point out that individuals also are constrained in other ways
(e.g., by lack of opportunity or lack of resources). Some of
the constraints may be material in origin, yet others political.
Proponents of positive freedom appeal to certain desirable
states of affairs for which negative freedom will not be
a sufficient means.
Benjamin Constant drew the relevant distinction as
one between the civil liberties exalted by modern theorists
and the participation in public life that the ancients
regarded as the essential component of being free. John
Stuart Mill makes the classic argument for a modern
notion of freedom in his book On Liberty. Mill defends
freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of
expression, freedom of association, and freedom to pursue
“our own good in our own way, so long as we do not
attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts
to obtain it.” As opposed to Mill’s conception of freedom,
that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau more closely approaches
that of the ancients, at least as Constant characterizes it.
In The Social Contract, Rousseau famously identifies the
most important kind of freedom as a constitutive element
of democratic government. For Rousseau, freedom is not
solely acting as we want without hindrance from other
human agents. As Rousseau understands it, a person is
free only to the extent that he participates in the political
decisions that determine what he may or may not do. In
this way, the state plays an active role in enhancing not
only political freedom, but also moral freedom, “which
alone makes [a man] truly master of himself.” Political
man trades the freedom of the state of nature for the freedom
to be something much greater than he might otherwise
have been.
It is clear that these differing conceptions of freedom
arise from competing views of moral agency. Some conceptions
of freedom give substantial weight to an individual’s
understanding of his own well-being. For example,
Mill holds that, “with respect to his own feelings and circumstances
the most ordinary man or woman has means of
knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed
by anyone else.” In marked contrast, as Isaiah Berlin
points out in his seminal essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty,”
other accounts draw on notions of a
dominant self...variously identified with reason, with my
“higher nature,” with the self which calculates and aims at
what will satisfy it in the long run, with my “real,” or
“ideal,” or “autonomous” self, or with myself “at its best”;
which is then contrasted with irrational impulse, uncontrolled
desires, my “lower” nature, the pursuit of immediate
pleasures, my “empirical” or “heteronomous” self, swept
by every gust of desire and passion, needing to be rigidly
disciplined if it is ever to rise to the full height of its “real”
nature.
Berlin’s analysis can thus be read as a pointed warning
against political orders committed to this view of human
agency. In Berlin’s words, “Enough manipulation with the
definition of man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever
the manipulator wishes. Recent history has made it
only too clear that the issue is not merely academic.”
In response to just this kind of argument, Charles Taylor
claims that those who would have us reject positive freedom
for “fear of the Totalitarian Menace” make us “incapable of
defending liberalism in the form we in fact value it.” Taylor’s
thesis is that freedom is not “just the absence of external
obstacles tout court, but the absence of external obstacle to
significant action, to what is important to man.” We protect
certain kinds of freedom (e.g., religious freedom) by appeal
to their significance, not by appeal to the overall amount of
freedom their exercise would allow. According to Taylor, no
society would be considered more free simply because its
members were permitted to carry out more acts all told, but