Reading Meetings on Freedom

Recently, I have started to participate in informal reading meetings regularly held among PhD students who study political theory. So far I have read two well-known papers (shown below) both related to the concept of freedom. They illuminate the complexity of the term as well as its theoretical development having been presented in the study of political theory ever since Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty appeared.

1. Freedom as Antipower by Philip Pettit, Ethics, Vol. 106, No. 3, 1996, pp.576-604

An ambitious attepmt to revitalize the civic republicanist notion of freedom. Instead of Berlin's negative liberty (= freedom from actual interference), Pettit proposes to see freedom as the absence of DOMINATION (=the capacity to interfere with impunity and at will in the choices of others). Pettit insists that this notion of freedom enables us to consider various cases of power relationships which do not necessarily include actual interference as a deprivation of freedom: between benevolent masters and slaves, patriarchial husbands and obedient wives, wealthy employers and poor employees, and so on. Such a structural perspective unsurprisingly leads to the justification of the egalitarian reform which ameliorates the institutional discrimination derived from various sociological categorizations (class, gender, ethnicity and so on). As the cost of such a viewpoint, however, Pettit keeps silent on the relationship between freedom and individuals' internal (moral and psychological) conditions, which Charles Taylor mainly investigates.

2. What's Wrong with Negative Libertyby Charles Taylor in Idea of Freedom (1979), Alan Ryan (ed.)

While Pettit criticizes the insufficiency of contrasting freedom with actual interefence, Taylor finds it problematic to identify freedom with the absence of external obstacles (physical and legal, endorsed mainly by Hobbes and Bentham), for such a negative notion ends up in so-called ‘throwing out the baby with bath-water' by neglecting the internal capacity of individuals:

it [=Hobbesian negative notion of freedom as the absence of external obstacles] rules out of court one of the most powerful motives behind the modern defence of freedom as individual independence, viz., the post Romantic idea that each person's form of self-realization is original to him/her, and can therefore only be worked out independently. This is one of the reasons for the defence of individual liberty by among others J.S. MIll... But if we think of freedom as including something like the freedom of self-fulfilment, or self-realization according to our own pattern, then we plainly have something which can fail for inner reasons as well as because of external obstacles. We can fail to achieve our own self-realization through inner fears, or false consciousness, as well as because of external coercion. (212)

Taylor's criticism of negative freedom seems persuasive here. However, he then goes on as far as to saying that since individuals are fallible, we should not ‘rule out second-guessing [about the content of self-realization by external authority]’ in order to avoid ‘an aspiration...shaped by confusion, illusion and distorted perspective’(228). To me this seems a bit too much. If we follow Taylor and admit that external authority can decide the content of self-realization of individuals, it will not be freedom anymore, and very likely to lead to the justification of the totalitarian oppression, something Berlin rightly apprehended as contained in the positive notion of freedom.

While identifying the value of Taylor's criticism against the crude version of negative freedom, I personally feel more sympathy with Hobhouse's Millian standpoint that self-realization or the development of personality can never be possible by the compulsion of external authority:

Personality is not built up from without but grows from within, and the function of the outer order is not to create it, but to provide for it the most suitable conditions of growth.
(L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism and Other Writing (1994), p.69)

Hobhouse: Liberalism & Othr Writngs (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)