On the Nature of Freedom
Walzer, Michael
On the Nature of Freedom In our September—October issue we printed an article by David Spitz, entitled "Pure Tolerance: A Critique of Criticisms." Its subject was A Critique of Pure Tolerance, a...
...Social life of any sort requires that some "impediments" be raised against individual action...
...When we say citizen, we are describing a man who bows to no external force but shares with his fellows the choice of the "impediments" he is going to have to live with...
...Their self-government entails their civil liberty, though it does not entail their absolute "negative" freedom...
...Freedom, Hobbes wrote, lies in the silence, and, he ought to have added, the impotence, of the laws...
...But surely the consciousness of freedom must involve rational reflection upon alternative options, a recognition of one's own right to make choices, an acceptance of responsibility for the choices one makes...
...positive" freedom can only be taken...
...That liberal shudder may well have its reasons —we all know its reasons and it would be inexcusable to ignore them—nevertheless, these are not philosophical reasons...
...The autonomy not merely of individuals, but of individualsin-groups, thus remains central to any general theory of human freedom...
...for freedom must always be shared with the others...
...But this is not a conflict between freedom and unfreedom, which would be easy to resolve...
...It seems to me that Marcuse makes what generally has been and ought to be the democratic socialist choice...
...We have received a comment by Robert Paul Wolff which will appear in our next issue.—ED...
...Its subject was A Critique of Pure Tolerance, a new book coauthored by Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, and Herbert Marcuse...
...Freedom is the guarantee of his lonely selfhood, its protection against the others, conceived implicitly as enemies...
...Indeed, a great deal of freedom, in Hobbes's and Spitz's sense of the word, may be enjoyed by the subject of an authoritarian regime: he is free to do whatever the ruler does not prohibit (and if the ruler is prudent, most human activities will not be banned), and he is free also to evade the ruler's prohibitions whenever he can get away with it...
...Marcuse defends the Rousseauian view of freedom as citizenship, "positive" freedom, at whose center stands man-with-theothers, the others now conceived implicitly as colleagues...
...And there is no good reason for us to surrender to the mysteries of totalitarian ideology...
...social life of a democratic sort logically requires that "impediments" like censorship always be rejected...
...it is rather the individual...
...I want to argue that those distortions are in fact inconsistent with an adequately developed theory of freedom as citizenship...
...But we are saying something more than or different from this when we characterize the Athenian citizen or contrast democratic and authoritarian polities...
...We must insist, instead, that freedom has its logical limit, which is unfreedom...
...This is the meaning of the word "commitment": to commit oneself is voluntarily to raise obstacles against one's own future irresponsibility...
...And a socialist society, insofar as it rejects every sort of authoritarianism, in economic as well as in political life, is totally dependent upon the commitments of its members...
...But it is necessary and crucially important to call into question his proposed antidote: the revolutionary dictatorship of a rational elite, or, in his own words, "a democratic educational dictatorship" run by "everyone who has learned to think rationally and autonomously . . . a small number indeed...
...In this sense only—this very restricted sense—will men be forced to be free: they must be self-determining...
...Then none of the socially necessary or superfluous "impediments" that we encounter will have been freely chosen and all of them can be opposed or evaded with a good conscience...
...The list of obstacles and difficulties on the way to free citizenship is very long...
...Those commitments must be freely made, their nature freely determined...
...We are talking precisely about communal autonomy and self-determination...
...imagine censorship described as the collective choice of free men...
...The problem with the Hobbesian definition of freedom is that it makes it difficult to explicate certain of the most important uses of the word "free...
...They arise from historical experience, above all, from the disturbing spectacle of totalitarian government defended in the language of "positive" freedom...
...But the subject of this autonomy is never the contingent, private individual as that which he actually is or happens to be...
...Commitment is self-determination...
...The very existence of society makes it inevitable that selfdetermination, if it is to have any reality, must be in large part a collective act, that alternatives must be confronted and choices made in some cooperative fashion...
...Progress in freedom requires progress in the consciousness of freedom," Marcuse rightly says...
...Here the issue between them is clearly joined...
...When we say, for example, that the Athenian citizen, but not the Persian subject, was a free man, or that Frenchmen during the reign of Louis XIV were unfree, we are not talking only about the presence or absence of "chains" or, to use Hobbes's own phrase, "external impediments" to individual motion...
...It is curious that a philosopher who insists so vigorously upon an activist definition of freedom should fall so readily into the passive voice when talking about liberation...
...Spitz defends the liberal, "negative" conception of human freedom, at whose center stands a very special sort of man, man-by-himself...
...Since citizenship consists in free choice, citizens cannot consent to any laws which limit their future right or capacity to make choices...
...But no elite, however "progressive," can make free men, for the means of such making contradict the end of freedom...
...Just as a free man cannot legitimately sell himself into slavery (as Rousseau argued), so a body of citizens cannot legitimately enact laws which undermine or annul the very character of citizenship...
...But this is not the freedom of a free man, for a 727 free man shares in the making of the laws which he subsequently obeys or evades...
...it is absurd to suggest that it can ever be surrendered or taken away in the name of citizenship...
...If this is sometimes done in their name, it is never done rightly...
...they have to govern themselves...
...Freedom," replies David Spitz, "is not .. . 'self-determination, autonomy' ...It is rather, as Hobbes properly said, the absence of chains...
...Freedom, in Marcuse's sense, can never be the gift of a minority...
...It is with such prospects in mind that theorists like Spitz shudder at the equation of freedom with citizenship and at the definition of the citizen as a man who "gives the law to himself...
...But he then goes on to accept just those characteristic distortions of "positive" freedom which have driven writers like 726 Spitz to make the opposite choice...
...A revolutionary elite can, perhaps, set men free, or rather, set them loose...
...But there is a certain tension between them, and a writer probably must choose to emphasize one or the other...
...But suppose citizens freely enact repressive laws...
...only "negative" freedom can be given and received...
...But it is necessary first to suggest the inadequacy, from the point of view of both democracy and socialism, of Spitz's choice...
...Now there is no other...
...it is also to say 728 that they must be determined and made...
...think of individual artists or writers, their works expurgated of suppressed, being "forced to be free" —surely all this would involve a kind of double-think, destructive of freedom, however it is defined, and of rational discourse as well...
...the struggle for freedom is an activity in which those who are to be free must be involved...
...Collective choices can and of course do become obstacles to individual action, especially to spontaneous or impulsive action...
...This dictatorship would "enable [the others] to become autonomous...
...But this is not only to say that they must be free...
...For it is difficult to be a socialist if one does not believe that men are capable of determining and accepting their social responsibilities in some genuinely free fashion, and that they ought to do so...
...There are the years of oppression and the inertia and fearfulness they have bred, the established complexes of political and economic power, the force of the mass media, the vast size of modern polities, the existence of centralized bureaucratic systems, and so on...
...Now it is certainly useful at times to talk about freedom as a matter of more or less, and to say that a man is free in this sphere of activity but not in that one (as Spitz does when he writes of "the particular freedoms granted in a specific society...
...Now we must add, there is the dangerous elitism of those who see all these obstacles, who think that only they see them, that only they can see them, and who would make their fellowmen free without their agreement or participation...
...None of this can possibly be advanced by indoctrination or "precensorship" which necessarily limits the options and undermines individual responsibility...
...Marcuse is right, then, to argue that "the only authentic...
...It is a conflict within the world of freedom, between citizenship and individuality, and therefore very difficult to resolve...
...Below Michael Walzer discusses the article, and David Spitz replies in turn...
...The two theories are not logically and need not be practically contradictory (all of us have some colleagues and some enemies...
...And we should have to say that no men have ever been or could ever be unfree —this side of the grave—for there is no environment, not even that of a concentration camp, totally resistant to all human motion...
...Such conflicts are the price of democracy...
...The most powerful tendencies in modern government, industry, communications, and education militate against human freedom, and there is little reason to quarrel with Marcuse's description of these tendencies...
...It is certainly — and one would have thought obviously—central to any socialist theory of freedom...
...No, freedom is self-liberation...
...one can only avoid them by surrendering the rights and duties of citizenship and by accepting one or another sort of authoritarian rule...
...that is a purely negative act, the breaking down of prison walls, the shattering of a repressive regime...
...But this defense establishes no logical, but only ideological, connections...
...they cannot rely upon some authoritative other...
...who is capable of being free with the others...
...And it is the inalienable right of every citizen...
...They [that is, the others] would have to be freed from the prevailing indoctrination...
...When we say democracy, we are describing a political system within which such choices are freely made (and not merely, as Spitz suggests, a society which accords to its members the "particular freedom" of political opposition...
...negation of dictatorship would be a society in which 'the people' have become autonomous individuals...
...Choice is the inalienable right of the citizen...
...human beings choosing their government and determining their life...
...Liberty," Herbert Marcuse writes, "is self-determination, autonomy...
...If we insisted on using Hobbes's definition, we should have to say that no men have ever been free or could ever be, since it is impossible to imagine a social system which does not offer some significant resistance to voluntary motion...
...And he is right also in insisting that the United States today, despite its democratic institutions, is not to any sufficient degree a society in which such choices and determinations are made...
...Freedom," he writes, "is liberation...
Vol. 13 • November 1966 • No. 6
