The Pleasures of Misunderstanding Freedom
Spitz, David
Definitions, whether of liberty or of other political terms, are neither true nor false. They are useful or mischievous, and in any case they change over time. They are useful, ordinarily,...
...for if one freely chooses to enter a contract he cannot be said to have lost his freedom by being bound to its terms...
...for he then erroneously supposes that he knows better than the sovereign—whose will, let it be remembered, is an infallible will—what is good and just, not merely for the society but also for him...
...Even in the most tyrannical government there are some who support it and who consequently think themselves free, and others who are in some respects free...
...What then does the word restraint mean...
...it rather is, as Fulton Sheen said, "the right to do what you ought," to go back to a "Truth which is inseparable from the purpose of man...
...Indeed, if we are to take seriously the humanistic stress that Marx gave to individuality in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and other writings, it becomes a matter of more than ordinary importance that socialists should look first to the defense and promotion of what little individuality still resists the conformist pressures of our time...
...They are sometimes useful, at least to some men, when by failing to communicate, they enable a man or a group of men to achieve ends that otherwise might not be attained...
...Perhaps he wants only to breathe the clean air, to step outside the prison walls...
...To seek his self-realization in the face of these external pressures is to seek it, and perhaps to find it, only as a member of society...
...This is the notion that freedom is something that one either has or has not...
...Or they have erroneously supposed, with Bentham, that "every law is an evil for every law is an infraction of liberty...
...For in this conception, whether a state restrains men, or restrains a restraint on restraints on men, they are in every case free...
...And how can any law, since it embodies our "real" will—if we but knew this as our rulers know it—be anything but an act of freedom...
...The law, they say, does not "really" impose a restraint...
...These reflections are not put forward to speak against the idea of community, or the obvious fact that selfdetermination, however construed, can take place only with and through participation in a communal life...
...This is what Rousseau means when he advances the paradox that men shall be forced to be free...
...Moreover, is it always the case that the law embodies the real will or real purpose of the individual who is compelled to obey...
...And so John Winthrop instructed the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay...
...But it is surely evident that to secure this freedom, it is necessary first to surrender the liberty of doing whatever the laws do not permit...
...each is an individual, a unique person...
...That Mill, among others, perceived this truth and endeavored to build upon it, is surely of greater moment than the work of those who foolishly seek to resolve the problem by wiping out half of it...
...The quest for self-realization, then, if it is also the quest for freedom, must be sought outside the realm of positive liberty...
...The issue is never, as Walzer puts it, "man-byhimself" versus "man-with-the-others...
...The state or sovereign, despite Hegel and Rousseau, can err...
...This would seem to suggest that not all men can be free, and such would indeed be the case were it not for a saving factor—those who have such knowledge can and do make it available to others...
...To be a man, as Aristotle said, was preeminently to be a social or political animal...
...It is also the problem of determining who shall enjoy the vital freedoms, under what conditions or circumstances, and to what degree...
...And so President Eisenhower reaffirmed, discussing the conflict between America and the Soviet Union, when he said (in his first Inaugural Address): "Freedom is pitted against slavery...
...Rousseau and Hegel and their disciples, however, deny this conclusion...
...I know of nothing in Mill, or in socialist writers generally, that militates against this awareness...
...If socialism is, as I believe, a moral and not merely an economic principle, then no socialist theory worthy of the name can neglect either of these elements of man's nature...
...But to recognize that an individual man is an issue of his society in much the same way that a child is an issue of his parents is not necessarily to conclude that the interests of the man are identical in all respects to the interests of his society, any more than the interests of the child may be said to be always identical to those of his parents...
...They are useful or mischievous, and in any case they change over time...
...at the very least, it is, as Montesquieu said, "a right of doing whatever the laws permit...
...Not only is his cure worse than our disease...
...It is simply the state of being free...
...And it remains, all too unhappily, the problem that bedevils us today...
...V We come now to the question of positive versus negative freedom...
...To speak properly, we should rather have to say that the law that imposes a restraint is a just law, that the restraint is warranted, but it is still a restraint...
...Thus men are free to do only some things, not all things...
...that without this knowledge men cannot make the "right" choices and be "truly" free...
...This is indeed why I shudder at Walzer's equation of freedom with citizenship rather than with man...
...First and most immediately, that knowledge (it is said) is incorporated in the laws...
...to be different in some things is not to be different in all things...
...But this is also why, despite all his democratic preachments about equality and the common good, Rousseau is properly viewed—at least with respect to this portion of his teaching, accompanied as it is with a defense of censorship— as the godfather of modern totalitarianism...
...If freedom implies choice — and this Walzer concedes—it entails the right to choose rightly or wrongly, and not merely to choose what another affirms to be right...
...It is of course sometimes true, for not every man's opinion is always as good as every other man's...
...This is why, Rousseau emphasizes, he must be compelled to obey, and why such compulsion is not "really" coercion but rather freedom...
...He is still a social animal...
...But while these are convenient polar extremes—and like Walzer I shall treat them, at least initially, as such—it is important to remember that they do not displace the many variations that occupy the vast middle ground...
...If democratic socialism is to make its way, it must do so not by rejecting this reality but by accepting it...
...But the restrictions imposed by that contract do not cease to be restrictions, and even though they may provide safety and honor they do not in themselves provide freedom...
...It was this problem that Mill—quite properly, I believe—conceived to be the crucial problem for the society of his day...
...So too with President Eisenhower's dictum...
...As such, he remains concerned to satisfy both his common and his particular interests...
...This brings us to the second major group that believes in obedience as freedom...
...Such knowledge, however, is not given to all men...
...Believing, for example, that law is a restraint and that all restraints are chains, they have leaped, with Hobbes, from the correct understanding of liberty as the absence of chains to the incorrect conclusion that liberty is consequently to be found will prevent others from impairing only in the silence or interstices of the these prized liberties...
...it is necessary first to submit to the restraints of the law...
...And however difficult the drawing of such a line may be, the refusal to attempt it, the denial that it needs to be drawn, is precisely what characterizes a totalitarian, as distinct from a democratic, state...
...But no such evasion is countenanced by Rousseau...
...V11 I would add but one last comment...
...It is a totality, so that one is either a free man (or a member of a free society), or a slave...
...for this is no more than a semantic device to obscure a brutal and demeaning reality—that so to realize oneself one must in fact abandon that self and must submit to another person's will...
...law...
...Since the ultimate object sought or thus secured was deemed to be good, the deception was judged use ful and proper and the gain pleasurable...
...To make those things appear to be good, whether or not they really are good, was the almost natural consequence...
...it militates against the very self-determination that Walzer also values...
...VI But liberty, I have said, is properly to be understood neither as negative nor as positive freedom...
...Definitions change because new circumstances often require new terms and instead of inventing such terms, men attribute new meanings to old words...
...To be sure, tolerance is to be given to all religions that tolerate others, but only so long as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of citizenship...
...And those duties require, above everything else, compliance with the laws...
...From the moment he is born into the world the individual is subjected to prohibitions and commands, to rules laid down first by his parents and then by his friends, his church, his school, his state, and his several voluntary (and perhaps involuntary) associations...
...To have another make that choice for him, on the ground that that other knows better what the right choice should be than the person restrained, is to deny him his identity as a rational creature, as a man...
...Definitions, whether of liberty or of other political terms, are neither true nor false...
...And those others, by acting in accord with that knowledge, can also be free...
...What Mill tried to formulate as a matter of principle is what every democratic state tries to achieve as a matter of practice — namely, to distinguish those areas or activities in which men are properly to be left alone from those in which they are properly subject to coercion, to distinguish the community (and its cultural life) from the state (and its coercive order...
...rather, because it expresses one's "real" rather than actual will, it truly enables a man to realize himself, to attain what he "really" wants...
...Hence the classical conception of liberty did not recognize, much less focus on, the right of an individual or group to do as he or it might choose...
...For it is to admit, with Aristotle—and, may I dare add, with Mill—that the problem of freedom is always to distinguish, in one way or another, the realm that is Caesar's from that which is man's...
...It is easy to understand why this should be so...
...the laws being removed," wrote Hobbes, "our liberty is absolute...
...for it is not always the same thing to be both a good citizen and a good man...
...For what is the citizen apart from society...
...They conceived of the people—by which of course they meant only that small portion of the people who qualified as citizens—as a homogeneous unit, as a body of men who shared the same values and pursued a common way of life, and who therefore sought their fulfillment as men not in their private and diverse activities but in the life of the polis itself...
...The word freedom has an honorific glow...
...V The virtue of negative freedom is that it recognizes, with Kant, the obvious truth that `but of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made...
...And even where the ruled are wrong, is it not the meaning of freedom that men have a right to make mistakes, that selfrealization consists not in doing what another requires you to do but in doing what you, fallible and imperfect though you may be, want to do...
...It is rather to make him realize another's conception of his self...
...for there is a vast difference between feeling free and being tree...
...The state (Hegel) or the sovereign (Rousseau) being rational and right, the laws proclaimed by the state are also right...
...That is enough for liberty, for that at the moment is enough for him...
...This may well have been a vital liberty, but it was not the whole of liberty...
...And the problem of freedom, otherwise conveniently obscured, is the difficult determination of a standard or value that will enable us to distinguish the more from the less important freedoms...
...They agree that such freedom is not to be found in mere obedience to the law, for the law may be wrong, and in any case there is a morality above the law...
...Now clearly, if men are to avoid legal punishments, if they are to stay out of prison, it will behoove them to obey the law...
...III Walzer, like many others, supposes that the problem of freedom is by and large the problem of positive versus negative liberty...
...Hence (he tells us) there must be a single religion, a civil religion, whose articles should be fixed by the sovereign, and disobedience to which should be punished by banishment or death...
...kor law is a letter, right is treedom, and they differ like contraries...
...And being free means that one has areas of choice within an ordered system of particular liberties and concomitant restraints...
...It is unfortunately true that some men have falsified the question of negative freedom...
...He had "liberty"—certainly the liberty to enter a church of his own choosing, to utter words of defiance to his parliament and king, to do the many things that slaves and men in prison were not free to do, even to use the Negro slaves who waited outside the Virginia church to serve as stepping-blocks for their freedom-demanding white masters to mount their horses...
...The things men hold to be good have not always seemed to be good to others...
...The delineation of which freedoms for whom remains the fundamental task of any intelligible theory of liberty...
...Now the problem of liberty is focused inward, on the relationship between the individual and his government, whether that government be an "alien" power (as in Hobbes's Leviathan) or the people's own creature...
...This can only be determined, it is said, by one able to distinguish between the apparent and the real, or between that which is immediataely or momentarily desired (a particular apple) and that more ultimate end for the sake of which he desires it e.g., good health...
...Santayana likes to use the term "vacant freedom...
...Not all freedoms can be simultaneously secured, and not all men can enjoy the freedoms provided...
...To say that negative freedom so construed is the prerequisite to a human existence is to say only that without such freedom man is less than human...
...The real issue, accordingly, does not emerge from a simple (and false) dichotomy between freedom and unfreedom—whatever the latter might be—but from alternative and always complex systems of freedoms and restraints...
...yet being so chosen, he is her lord, and she is to be subject to him, yet in a way of liberty, not of bondage...
...It is that, throughout the history of freedom, men have sought to identify the meaning of the word freedom with the things they hold to be good...
...The answer is simplicity itself: by eliminating the diversities, and with them the freedoms that have created and if unimpeded would continue to create those diversities...
...With Hobbes and Locke and their successors we move to a quite different conception of liberty...
...That men are free only when they are unrestrained is true, and to the degree that Hobbes and Bentham grasped this truth they were eminently correct...
...And surely, if we survey the laws enacted by various states, even democratic states, we cannot but conclude that many of those laws are harmful and unjust...
...For no man can find himself apart from his membership in society...
...But it is possible, Rousseau admits, that the general will may on occasion be known better by a single individual than by the rest of the community...
...and if what they "think" is good is not "really" good, why then they will not choose it...
...The crucial question then is: how and by whom is that right knowledge to be revealed...
...Under such circumstances, to permit him to act contrary to the laws is to permit him to act against his own true interests, and this (in Rousseau's view) is an absurdity...
...But how does Rousseau resolve this problem...
...One who freely chooses to be a wife, or a student, or a soldier, or a citizen, does not thereby continue to be wholly free...
...For the choice before us would then have been less stark, and to the people (and perhaps himself) less clear...
...But it is surely the magic of government—political or otherwise —that men rule who are often less knowing, less wise, less just, than some of those who are ruled...
...That Hobbes and Bentham, for all their learning and insight, failed adequately to perceive that law then becomes not merely a restraint but a restraint on a restraint —for how else is the weaker to be protected from the stronger?—is not a reason for our failing fully to apprehend it...
...I mention these elementary considerations only because they are often overlooked or disregarded in contemporary discussions of liberty, and this failing—from which Michael Walzer is not, I fear, altogether exempt— leads both to serious misunderstandings and untoward consequences...
...By the standard of communal autonomy, all these systems are free, for all govern themselves free from external control...
...some resolution, some adjustment, must consequently be made...
...They argue in stead that men must obey what is "right," that freedom consists in obedience to the truth, to the good, to the right morality, to the will of God...
...Other liberties still remained...
...The individual, not the state, may be right...
...and a true wife accounts her subjection her honor and freedom, and would not think her condition safe and free, but in her subjection to her husband's authority...
...They may satisfy the interests of some men, but not of all men...
...Thus it is that the term freedom today carries a variety of meanings, some visibly at odds with the ordinary understanding of the term...
...From all this it follows that knowledge—of what is good and right and just—is indispensable to "true" liberty...
...Some laws restrain restraints—or, as T. H. Green liked to say, hinder hindrances—and thereby free men from the restrictions to which they would otherwise be subjected...
...This is why Greek thinkers could identify the community with the state—the social and the cultural with the political—and liberty with a particular way of life...
...To plead, then, as Walzer does, for the communal autonomy that he associates with Athenian citizenship and with the doctrine of Rousseau is to argue for a freedom indistinguishable from conformity...
...But if men are to communicate with each other, if men are to be honest with each other, it is surely time to use the word properly...
...This function of law—to block or prevent interferences with freedom —derives from the necessary fact that men who are unrestrained inevitably collide with one another...
...a free man shares in the making of the laws which he subsequently obeys or evades...
...Nor does it remove him from the fellowship or society of others...
...This is why Socrates could properly be charged with a crime for teaching disrespect for the gods, corrupting the youth, and why in turn Socrates in the Republic could urge that all those who did not conform to the established ways and teach the "right" things should be sent into exile...
...Now there is doubtless a sense in which this argument may be made to appear a plausible one...
...other philosophers have indulged in more derogatory language...
...In any case, the general will— however determined — remains sovereign, inalienable, and above all infallible...
...In time the pleasures of misunderstanding freedom proved so rewarding that men ceased to think of it as a misunderstanding and identified that misunderstanding with the very meaning of the word...
...And what Walzer mistakes is precisely what Mill perceived: that men who share in the making of the laws do not necessarily get the laws they want, that government even by the people is not miraculously transformed into a government of each by himself but remains in all essentials a government by some over others...
...As man corresponds in his thinking and in his actions with that purpose, he is free because he is true...
...Whatever the respects in which men are equal, whatever their common interests or common stakes, they remain in some measure different men...
...They apply to all men in the same way...
...They affirm, to the contrary, that even submission to the law is freedom...
...From all of which it follows, according to Rousseau, that the citizen in obeying the laws is doing precisely what he ought to do, what he himself "really" wants to do, for he is then doing what is "right...
...Consequently a wife, or a citizen, can be free though bound...
...They change also because new or derived languages, like the English (or the American), borrow multiple terms that describe the same phenomenon, e.g., freedom from Freiheit and liberty from liberte...
...Hence freedom consists in obedience to the laws...
...In this limited sense, freedom does indeed entail obedience to the law...
...for what is thought to be a man's interest (eating the particular apple) may actually be harmful (if the apple is unripe or poisoned) and contrary to his real or true interest...
...But men like to play with words, and the word "wants" was quickly redefined to become the term "really wants...
...The answers are multiple, but I shall consider only two here...
...This is why Mill is still the seminal figure, and provides the indispensable key, to the understanding of the problem of liberty in our time...
...It serves no useful purpose to close one's eyes to this reality...
...In a sense, this is a false or misleading question, for liberty is neither the one nor the other but simply the state of being free...
...The problem of freedom, then, is only at the outset a question of the liberty of a nation to live its life without interference from external powers...
...For to be free is still no more than to be left alone, and what a man does when he is left alone is for him alone to decide...
...And no one who has yearned for that fresh air of freedom can doubt that such negative freedom, while not assuredly the end of life, is one of the essential and really meaningful ends of life...
...Now, when Rousseau talks of the sovereign he means not the will of all but the general will, which is the will for the general good...
...With the authors of The Federalist we move a step further, for now it is seen that "the people" constitute not a homogeneous and monolithic force but a heterogeneous and divided society, and that a majority within that society may well utilize the powers of government to tyrannize over the minority (or minorities...
...He remains always a social animal even as he pursues and affirms his individuality...
...And how can he be that man if he is not permitted to exercise his reason...
...Opposition to the laws, then, is never warranted, for the laws call upon the citizen to do only what he would himself choose to do if he were more enlightened than he is...
...What the President undoubtedly meant but did not say was that the freedoms secured in the American democracy are in his judgment more significant than the freedoms provided by the Soviet dictatorship...
...For (in this ploy), what a man thinks he wants, and even says he wants, is not necessarily what he "really wants...
...And if to this we add the recognition that freedom is not a totality but a complex of many particular freedoms, the enjoyment of which may (and generally does) require the imposition of corresponding restraints, then we can appreciate the true problem and multiple dimensions of freedom —which is the ordering and selection from among the many (and some equally ultimate) liberties those that are most highly prized, and the imposition of concomitant restraints that So to arrange and protect liberties is to assure men certain areas in which they will be left alone—perhaps only in some measure or for a limited time, perhaps only under certain conditions...
...Hence the problem of freedom, for him, reduces itself to the broad question: How much will he be left alone...
...This will can be known, and in practice is generally to be determined, by the will of the majority...
...Nor can it be said that the Soviet system is simply one of slavery, without even such elemental liberties as the freedom to choose one's spouse, or one's food and drink, or one's clothes...
...But however qualified those areas of liberty may be, it is within and only within those areas that men find their freedom...
...of organizing the society so as to enable diverse individ uals and groups with different and often conflicting creeds to live together without constant recourse to force and the authoritarian imposition of one group's creed upon others...
...And if the citizen is too blind to see or too weak to do what is "right," if he is so foolish or wicked to wish to disobey the laws, or a particular law, he is clearly wrong...
...The pleasures of misunderstanding freedom are trivial when compared to the pleasures of pursuing truth...
...This is why, when all is said and done, one who believes in the autonomy of the individual, who pleads for the principle of self-realization, must opt for negative as distinct from positive freedom...
...Society enacts rules, in the form of laws and social sanctions, that are universal in character...
...For Rousseau, it is impossible to live at peace with those we believe to be damned, i.e., those who hold different creeds from our own...
...At the very least, it is the prerequisite to a human existence...
...Hence, even though many of the decisive cultural and political liberties are present in the American system, but not in the Soviet system, it remains true that in both systems there are some freedoms, and in both systems those freedoms are secured by the imposition of restraints on those persons or groups who might otherwise interfere with them...
...In particular, they called attention to the deprivations of liberty imposed by non-governmental powers—by majorities in the realm of custom and opinion, and by social and economic power blocs...
...That the value of individuality does not, and indeed cannot, displace the value of community, goes almost without saying...
...But whatever the emotive pleasures produced by these words, they are literally absurd...
...By the standard of self-determination, none is completely free (or unfree), for in all of these systems men enjoy some liberties and suffer some restraints —restraints which are in some measure not of their own making or desire...
...Walzer says...
...Since no man seeks to do evil, but every man seeks to do what is good, freedom (in their view) is not the right to choose wrongly, to do whatever one might please...
...Thus, to share in the process of law-making is only to share—and in practice always unequally, for all democratic states are disfigured by inequities in their systems of representation and political structure—in the choice of a government...
...and to choose freely means that he may choose rightly or wrongly...
...Man and society are always, to use the commonplace phrase, inextricably inter 732 twined...
...Explaining that true liberty is always maintained and exercised through subjection to authority, Winthrop employed the analogy of a woman choosing her husband...
...Consequently each has a somewhat different road to follow, a different "nature" to fulfill, a different "self" to realize...
...But this is to remove all semblance of meaning from our ordinary language...
...We can now see more clearly the essential misunderstanding, and consequent fallacy, in Walzer's appeal to Athenian as distinct from Persian freedom, or to the freedom of democratic as distinct from authoritarian polities...
...They are useful, ordinarily, when they enable people to communicate, i.e., to understand each other, or when they open concepts to further (and mutual) exploration...
...But the individual, if he is to realize himself as a unique person, needs room for his own development, his own differentiation...
...It is to re 738 fuse him the right to self-realization...
...Rather is it the question how man can be himself at the same time that he is a man among others: how he can be both an individual and a social animal...
...namely union with his final end, who is God...
...Of these other meanings, one is so widely held and frequently repeated—even by Walzer himself—that it is necessary to touch upon it here, if only briefly...
...He is a bad doctor, because he neither knows what it means to be healthy nor how to approach the problem so as to make the patient well...
...But it does not follow that all laws are merely restraints...
...This does not make him an enemy of others...
...Moreover, to argue that some one other than himself—be that Some One a person or a church or a state—knows better than he does what is "right," is to argue a great deal...
...But why Walzer who professes a commitment to democratic socialism should also look to Rousseau passes my comprehension...
...The task then is to determine which elements in that complex reality hinder or obstruct one's quest for individuality—what shortcomings exist in educational and economic opportunities, what deficiencies characterize the social and political structure, and what changes, radical or otherwise, are consequently required if individuality is to be secured meaningfully...
...So we and generations of schoolchildren were taught when we were told of Patrick Henry's celebrated plea: "Give me liberty or give me death...
...only a primitive mind can say: who is not like me is against me...
...Now Michael Walzer would have us look not to Mill but to Rousseau for this key...
...Henry was not a slave...
...It is, not less importantly— but perhaps more importantly —also the problem of controlling in ternal powers, both governmental and non-governmental...
...light against dark...
...II Consider first the striking difference between what may be called, broadly, the classical and modern definitions (or contexts) of freedom...
...But it remained for Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill to point out that the problem of liberty has still deeper and greater dimensions, that it goes beyond the mere relationship between the individual (or group) and the government to embrace all other relations which may affect the freedom of the individual...
...Had he said this, he would have been literally correct but rhetorically less impressive...
...Moreover, to recognize, as Walzer does, that there is a necessary conflict between citizenship and individuality, is to admit the one point that sufficiently destroys his argument...
...Indeed, it is not freedom at all, for while freedom implies the right to choose, rational men choose (or mean to choose) only what is good...
...In that case, the law by forbidding a man to do what he wants to do, or by compelling him to do what he does not want to do, is invading his freedom...
...but a government so chosen may reflect not the will of all, not even the general will, but the will of a majority that may be selfish, iniquitous, perhaps tyrannical, and certainly sometimes wrong...
...And this is to keep him forever as a child, as a less than complete human being...
...To exercise one's reason means that he must be free to choose...
...Mere or negative freedom, then, is in this view not only an empty freedom but a dangerous freedom...
...Hence obedience to the laws may assure freedom for some men but not for others...
...The choice before Patrick Henry was never that of liberty or death...
...We can now see why Marcuse finds Rousseau rather than Mill companionable...
...Even it such a person felt free, it does not follow that he is free...
...it built instead on the right of the people as a whole to follow its own ways...
...nor do they account for a wide range of meanings outside the spectrum embraced by the positivenegative dichotomy...
...Hence there is no such thing as a completely free and autonomous man...
...Surely it cannot be maintained that ours is a system of total freedom, a political and social order devoid of restraints—without laws and police and prisons...
...To act, therefore, according to the truth, or to the good, or to the right morality, or to the will of God, may afford great comfort and pleasure, but only if the person committing the required action does so as a result of a choice freely made can he be said also to be free...
...they are not completely free...
...Men have separate and dividing as well as common interests, and a wise political philosophy will seek not only to assure the bonds of community but to provide for the cultivation of differences as well...
...To the Greeks, liberty meant not the freedom of the individual from encroachments by the state, but rather the freedom of a whole people, of the polis, from the rule of a tyrant or foreign oppressor...
...What disturbed Patrick Henry was the denial of a particular liberty, the liberty to choose representatives to his governing body...
...Hence, where the Germans and the French have but a single term the Americans have two or more, and this may lead to confusion, especially where some men use the two terms interchangeably while others give a special meaning to each of them, as in the distinction between "liberty to" and "freedom from...
...But this is to say a good deal...
...Not only is Marcuse's antidote, then, no antidote at all...
...he is not a man...
...and being free means that a man is left alone to do what he wants to do...
...for it only forces him to be free, that is, to be himself, to realize his own true interests...
...For what is a man if, as Aristotle insisted, he is not distinguished from the other animals by his reason, or by his potential for intellectual growth...
Vol. 13 • November 1966 • No. 6
