The Place of Liberty among Other Values (3) - Seminal Values of Freedom

Image credit. Continued from The Place of Liberty among Other Values (2) - Between Total Unfreedom and Total Freedom

Freedom - A Composite of Values

In my first post in this series on The Place of Liberty among Other Values, I have presented the conjecture that:

Even if it were possible to define a timelessly unique and incontestable notion of freedom, which I doubt is feasible, it would always depend for its structural reliability on the inclusion of values other than that of freedom. In other words, freedom is not self-defining, no less than markets are self-creating. 

In other words, freedom encourages people to contribute to the community their personal interpretations of the values they consider momentous. More specifically, the values that affect the meaning of freedom are arrived at by an open-ended process of political competition involving the entire population. We will see (in later posts) that freedom cannot assume any arbitrary meaning, but she is amenable to different interpretations which constitute a range of Wittgensteinian family resemblance.

I have also suggested, in my second post in this series,  that:

... freedom is likely to have to fit into some sort of order with attributes that exist prior or next to the attributes of sociogenic freedom ...

In other words, freedom is not only liable to being defined by the values and their interpretations that her constituents bring to the table, but she may also have to be thought of in terms of absorbing and adapting to values that precede or exist next to her. Freedom is a composite of values.

Order, Values, and Freedom

Any social order is characterised by certain regularities, some of which may be expressed as "values."

Josepf Spengler has tried to reconstruct the history of economic thought looking for the ways in which various economic schools have tried to account for the "problem of order." That is: how did the respective scholars think we could ensure an economic order? And how do we arrive at the best economic order?

I am quoting Spengler from Warren Samuel's "The Legal-Economic Nexus," p. 93.

Three somewhat incompatible conditions have combined, at all times and in all economies, to create the problem of economic order: the autonomy of many consuming and factor-organizing and supplying agents; the necessity that these autonomous agents behave in an appropriately cooperative and coordinate fashion; and the generally felt need that economic activity be continuous and uninterrupted. The problem has been aggravated, moreover,  by the force of secular and random change. ... In general, it may be said that the problem of economic order is solved in proportion as the three objectives, autonomy, cooperation, and continuity, are achieved and reconciled both with one another and with the force of secular and random change.

Spengler's is a dynamic conception of order. He depicts order as the result of balancing a number of factors that are variable in their turn. There are tensions between the factors: autonomy (freedom) may conflict with coordination (control), continuity may block the balancing process, and change might disrupt the dynamic equilibrium attained from balancing the factors. In a later article, Spengler adds another pair of factors - hierarchy and equality.

While anthropocentric freedom (A-Freedom) fits into any kind of social order, sociogenic freedom (S-Freedom) makes stringent demands on the kind of social order that is supposed to sustain her. Freedom is not unconditional. She requires that certain conditions prevail; conditions that may be interpreted in terms of values.

Values That Freedom Depends Upon - Peace, Equality, Democracy

Let us see if we are credible in construing freedom to be a composite of at least the three following values: peace, equality, and democracy.

Peace

Freedom seeks to maintain order not by violence and oppression but by peaceful means. Freedom's objective is a social order in which peace reigns. In order to attain that goal freedom proceeds peacefully.

Equality

The peace sought by freedom is meant to encompass the entire population. Every citizen is equally entitled to the presence and benefits of peace sought by a regime of freedom. The peace requirement of freedom makes people equal in a specific sense.

I cannot go into the issue of different meanings of equality in any detail here, but let me mention that equality should always be specified, to make evident what the term is supposed to mean. After all, countless specifications of equality are possible, each single one of which not necessarily implying other specifications of equality.

Democracy

To pre-empt violence and oppression from being employed as part of the means by which admissible human relationships are determined, I feel, I need to allow participation of all members of society in the processes that establish justice in their community. Concerning justice, remember, I had conjectured here:

Justice may indeed be regarded as the most fundamental issue in political philosophy because - or: if it is felt that - politics is about ordering the relationships among human beings.

If by justice we understand the admissible ordering of relationships among human beings. then the concept does serve a fundamental purpose in thinking about politics.

Note, I have not specified any concrete forms of democracy. Rather, I define democracy tentatively as the publicly accountable restraints that ensure peace to all constituents of freedom.

My terms - peace, equality, and democracy - correspond to the Spenglerian pillars of order: continuity, equality, and coordination. They form a composite that is held to be capable of bringing about personal freedom (Spenglerian autonomy).

If one thinks of freedom, as many who consider themselves partisans of liberty do, as personal liberty, then it would appear that liberty cannot stand alone as the supreme value, as her possibility critically depends on the presence of conditions related to at least three more values: peace, equality, and democracy.

The finding seems to lend support to my initial conjecture, expressed here:

... some of the building blocks of freedom, like a certain set of different applications of the term equality (e.g. characteristics of equality in the political or the legal processes of debate and negotiation), are just as fundamental as the demand for liberty relative to a certain desired ordering of human relationships. If, in your mind, you conjure away or, in practice, remove these building blocks of equality, the tower of freedom collapses.

Anticipating later posts, let me extract from the idea of order the thesis that freedom - an order in its own right - is a process of balancing a range of variable components so as to form a dynamic equilibrium.

Liberty is not a self-evident category. It is not possible to characterise her sufficiently without specifying the processes by which her constituents develop her meanings and her admissible practices.