Is Freedom the Most Important Political Value?

I teach political theory with the presumption that most students come to the course already steeped in some version of liberalism, even if we do not use that label to describe our views. This is why I spend a good deal of the course trying to help students see what is compelling in alternative ways of answering the fundamental questions of politics—questions such as “What is the proper purpose of government?” and “What makes political power legitimate or illegitimate?” Classical liberalism, as well as “liberalism” in the common contemporary sense of the term, answers these questions in a particular way that centers the concept of individual freedom. The purpose of government, from the liberal standpoint, is to protect individual freedom. We know that we give up some of what Rousseau calls “natural freedom” when we enter a liberal social contract. But that situation of complete “natural” freedom is actually anarchy. And anarchy (so the argument goes) is actually a situation of less freedom, because we are oppressed by one-another. We are made unfree, that is, by fear, insecurity, and harm at the hands of others. Liberal government, therefore, can be said to exist for the purpose of not just protecting freedom, but of maximizing freedom. Government is legitimate, according to liberalism, when it does this. It is illegitimate (liberals contend) when it goes beyond this mandate and enforces laws in the name of other social goals, whatever they may be (i.e. progress, decency, tradition, the general will, God’s will, “social harmony," the “mandate of heaven,” Plato’s Justice, etc.). Laws enforced in pursuit of these things are only legitimate if they can be explained convincingly in terms of preventing actions that harm others (i.e. actions limiting others’ freedoms) in some way. We have referred to this as “the harm principle.”

Through the writings of Aristotle, Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Constant, and Sandel, I try in this course to present alternatives, critiques, and counterpoints to the liberal framework. I do this to encourage students to think outside the particular cultural box that most Americans are born into. I also do this to help students understand in a deep way the politics of other countries, such as China, Sweden, Kenya, or Russia, which depart in various ways from American liberalism. But I also do this also because I think there is value in some of these alternatives, particularly the alternatives that come from the older and broader republican tradition. I consider myself a small “r” republican or an “Aristotelian republican” in this sense. I believe freedom is the most important political value, but we liberals have inherited an incomplete concept of freedom—one that has been amputated from the larger and older republican tradition. Aristotle says that a hand severed from the body is no longer really a hand. Likewise, I contend that individual freedom, when separated from more holistic republican concept of freedom, is no longer really freedom. Contemporary liberal democracy, and especially American democracy, needs to recover that broader sense of freedom.

The free and sovereign individual—which for liberalism is both a description of our true nature and a model for what we ought to be—is a myth that we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves not only that we should be free in this sense, but that we fundamentally are or can become so. We believe that we are or can be fully in charge of ourselves, that we make our own choices. This is related to the idea that we are unique individuals with authentic selves, which we can presumably discover if we go backpacking for long enough in southeast Asia after graduation. But I say we are not as free as we think. Rather we are to a large extent products of our cultural and material environments. Let me use a few examples.

1. When a gun is in the home, we are more likely to “freely choose" to commit homicide, and much more likely to freely choose to commit suicide. 
2. When cigarettes are advertised prominently, we are much more likely to choose to smoke them. 
3. Most of us today wish to wear seatbelts, and will freely choose to do so even if it we know we will not be cited for not wearing one. Were we born 50 years earlier, we would most likely freely choose not to wear them. Seatbelt laws have changed our norms, our cultural context, our habits and inclinations. To a very small but non-trivial extent they have changed who we are. 
4. Civil rights laws, such as nondiscrimination and anti-segregation laws, have changed who we are in similar ways. As a white person living in the South, I believe if segregation had not been overturned, I would have very different feelings, attitudes, and behaviors concerning race. I would be a different kind of person.
5. Consider a final example: social media, which form a part of the cultural/material/technological context in which we live today. I have noticed that if I am arguing with an old friend about politics in a comments thread on Facebook, things often get very ugly very soon. I know we used to be friends, I think to myself, but I guess we have changed. We have discovered our true selves in the intervening years, and we just don’t see eye to eye any longer. But then, I have also noticed that if I switch suddenly and continue the conversation in a private message, things cool off immediately, and we can be friends again. Well, which is it? Are we truly friends who can find common ground? Or are we people with views so different all we can do is hate one another?

It seems that who we are, what we want, and what we choose is very dependent on the material-cultural context in which we are interacting. In other words, the self is plastic; we change (or at least our behavior does) not only over time but across different contexts. 

If this is true, what are the political implications? One of the primary implication for me is that we ought to be more open to democratic control over technology, over economic activities, and over natural resources, all of which have been mostly considered the purview of private decision in American politics. So, let me give some examples of policies I would support, which I think flow from my rejection of the individual as the primary locus of freedom.

1. I favor Congress regulating social media companies and requiring certain policies regulating user behavior. 
2. I favor banning the sale of assault rifles and allowing handgun bans in cities. I don’t say that all cities should ban handguns, but that they should be able to do so through their own municipal democratic process. 
3. I am also in favor of economic polices that limit free trade or subsidize certain industries in order to protect regional economies from major economic upheavals. During the last century, the percentage of Americans who lived on farms declined from 40 percent to 1 percent. Farming communities were drastically disrupted as people moved to cities for manufacturing jobs. Then factory jobs left for cheaper labor markets overseas, and mill towns that were scarcely a generation old were decimated. The jobs remaining in the USA are increasingly either low-paying and inconsistent service and construction jobs, or jobs requiring high educational attainment. The working class suffers. What if states were able to implement policies intervening in the free market to slow such transitions, and preserve certain industries such as agriculture that have traditional cultural value. Perhaps you require grocery stores to carry a certain percentage of food produced within its state or region, or require big box retail stores to carry a percentage of USA-made goods. 
4. Kenya has banned the import of free used clothing from developed Western Countries in order to protect Kenya’s own clothing industry and to promote the dignity of Kenyans. Such a ban restricts economic freedom, but arguably for the greater Kenyan good. I favor Kenya’s policy although it restricts market freedom.

These policies do require us to democratically decide questions about the public good. What sorts of economic activities or industries have value for us beyond just the goods and services they provide to consumers? What sort of social media bring out the best and the worst in us? What sorts of technologies or weapons should be regulated and in what ways? 

One seemingly democratic way to decide such questions is to use the market. If Kenyans value their clothing traditions so much, why don’t they buy them instead of buying cheap hand-me-downs from North Atlantic countries? If Americans don’t like the policies of facebook, let them use another platform. National parks provide a good counter-example to this way of thinking. People like national parks and we like to say we value nature. But if people value nature so much, then we would have privately owned nature reserves all over the country where people would pay the market rate to enjoy protected nature. The economics of such private parks do not work out. Why don’t they? Because not all values can be properly expressed through "willingness to pay" or through market decisions. 

Communitarians, Aristotelians, or classical republicans argue that we should understand the market is only one particular way that we express our preferences and values. When we go shopping and do our daily rounds, we generally act as consumers. We are making private decisions, and we are guided mostly by the idea of getting the most for our money. But when we are called to make a political judgement (such as whether Pinnacle Peak should be preserved in its natural state), we tend to take off our consumer hat and put on our citizen hat. We bring different considerations to our decision making. We think about the broader community. We consider the long term. We think about what sort of world we want to live in and what sort of country we want to leave to the coming generations. If we leave all questions of the public good up to private choice and market decisions, then an important aspect of our existence as social creatures is constrained or even stamped out. Democratic republican government, therefore, ought to go beyond just preventing us from harming one another. Republican self government should also be a tool through which we bring about a greater public good. 

The problem is opening that door seems dangerous. Many people will say, and not without good reason, that dispensing with the limitations of the harm principle starts our politics down a slippery slope toward fascist or theocratic oppression. What if the majority in our democracy decides that limiting personal freedom for the greater good means outlawing same sex marriage? Or inter-racial marriage? Or limiting girls’ education, prohibiting birth control and abortion, et cetera, et cetera? Even if we have on our citizen hat rather than our more selfish consumer hat, that doesn’t mean our choices are always good. We can still be oppressive, xenophobic, and bigoted. We can disregard others in a “we” way instead of a “me” way, and that may be even worse. Here are a few possible classical republican responses to these lines of thinking.

1. Be brave! Trust that you have political efficacy, you can fight for what is right, you can prevail upon the consciences of your fellow citizens, and that good values can prevail in a democratic republic. 
2. The slippery slope you are worried about is actually the status quo. Our supposedly liberal governments have actually been doing Aristotelian politics all along. The United States was founded on liberal principles of individual rights, but we have nonetheless spent our short history answering Aristotelian questions such as who deserves the vote, what lifestyles are permissible, what marriage means, what drugs we can use, and perhaps most importantly who beyond white men do these much vaunted liberal freedoms apply to? We are really already living on the Aristotelian slippery slope and have been for some time. It’s scary, but hey, that’s politics.
3. Aristotelianism can accommodate and incorporate some of what I would consider liberal or libertarian values. And indeed, one could argue that American politics does precisely this. The U.S. pretends to be liberal, but perhaps we simply cleave to a general vision of the public good that includes specific liberal values such as self-reliance and personal responsibility. Aristotelian republicanism can even be compatible with the idea of small government. Aristotelian citizens may reasonably come to the conclusion that government regulation and legislation always comes with costs and inefficiencies, and sometimes unintended consequences, and therefore while government should be a tool for articulating and pursuing the public good it should be very sparingly used in that regard. 

It is in the spirit of this third Aristotelian response that I claim, at the risk of contradiction, to be a liberal Aristotelian republican. This may sound like an attempt to avoid taking a position at all, since liberalism and Aristotelianism seem to have contradictory basic premises. However, I hold that my position is neither contradictory nor evasive because it is fundamentally an Aristotelian or classical republican position. My position incorporates the values of self-reliance and personal responsibility, not as the automatic outgrowths of an inviolable bedrock principle of self-ownership, but rather as values coexisting with other values. I do not reject the maxim that we own ourselves, if rejecting it means that someone else owns us. But if ownership means absolute dominion, then I am suspicious of the very idea of ownership. I would venture to reject absolute dominion in all of its forms, whether over people, creatures, or things. Or even over ourselves.

To answer the prompt then, in spite of my rejection of doctrinaire liberalism I do think freedom is the most important political value. However, my concept of freedom blends some individualistic and liberal values into what I claim is nonetheless a fundamentally classical republican understanding of political freedom, where freedom is an attribute of the whole society. Without individuals who have a good deal of freedom, including positive freedoms of voting and getting an education, a society will not be free. An Aristotelian republic must maintain itself by upholding things like freedom of thought and freedom of political speech; otherwise it becomes a non-republic. But we must uphold these things without the guardrails of a strict version of the harm principle, because a free society is not only one that protects individuals from direct harm but also one that enables some democratic control over economic activity in the name of collective values. And finally, a free society is one that upholds the value of equality of status in the public sphere, by guaranteeing things like access to education, free and fair elections, equality of political status, and equality in the public sphere. Republican freedom is not attained by adhering to timeless basic principles. It is something that must be continually sought and constantly accomplished anew.

-Jake Greear