Attempts at Liberty (4) - Themes - History

Image credit. Continued from Attempts at Liberty (3) - Seeking a Format - Economics

Towards a List of Chapter Themes

In the previous post in this series Attempts at Liberty (3) - Seeking a Format - Economics I have invited myself to a brainstorming on the chapters , the themes of my book Attempts at Liberty, and this streamed through my head:

First to mind come concepts like

• Economics

• Politics,

• Law

• History

• Government (the State)

• Philosophy,

and these challenges:

In the first round of brainstorming; I noted a number of fundamental issues relating to the connection between freedom and economics.

History

In this second round of brainstorming, I want to say something about freedom and history:

For the sake of vividness alone, it would be desirable to start the whole enterprise by offering an account of the history of freedom, highlighting great moments in her unfolding.

While not giving up on the hope of collating vignettes of historical episodes that exemplify the foundational elements, the growth, and the nature of freedom, my reading experience concerning catchy historiographic depictions of freedom is pretty disappointing.

All the books that explicitly advertise their subject matter as being a history of freedom are bloodless, patchy (Schmidtz), cluttered with non-essentials and unspecific (Threadgold), or dry deliberations on the history of ideas (de Ruggiero). In fact, most "historical" accounts of freedom are about the history of liberal ideas. Which turn the subject into a specialised form of abstract reasoning with virtually no room left for vivid images and stories.

Maybe I should complain less, and keep my eyes open for the thing I am looking for - I must admit, I have not read Adam Ferguson, and my memory of Lord Acton's account has faded considerably.

Often, in historical accounts, the term freedom is reserved for freedom from foreign oppression, but the freedom I refer to is the hallmark of a civilisation, our, modern civilisation, and as such freedom is far more comprehensive and ubiquitously present in the fabric of society as well as in our daily lives, in our personalities. In that sense, I do not put much store by the freedom of the ancients. It is hard to fathom just how free they were, and before I spent much time in figuring it out, I better look for the surer freedom of later epochs. See also John Gray's Liberalism (3).

So what is the point of my soliloquy: I ought to make a list of historical events that are liable to (a) demonstrate the meaning of freedom, (b) her foundational elements, and, if possible, (c) her development, or unfolding, as I like to call it.

It appears there is a pretty obtrusive trade off between the requirements of a vivid portray of freedom in the bustle of real life, and the requirements of making her meaning and working clear. The latter gets drowned in the former. The former does not throw into clear relief the latter. The better freedom works the harder it is to recognise her - an observation perhaps to be subsumed under the popular category: paradoxes of freedom.

That should be one of the messages, the would-be graphic historiographer of freedom should share with his readers. 

Maybe, I should give more thought to the simple question: why write about the history of freedom to begin with? So far, I have given a largely pedagogical answer: history is supposed to be a means to recommend freedom to those of our faculties that are partial to images and stories. 

More Reasons to Study the History of Freedom

Possibly, the historical perspective can also help us understand that freedom is sometimes stumbled upon, and sometimes actively, consciously, and successfully sought after.

Freedom - Waiting for Her to Happen or Building Her Up ?

And interestingly, as is the case with the desegregation of blacks in America, which is clearly a requirement of freedom, the wave of freedom comes to split up, with one part trying to swallow the other: freedom from oppression and discrimination, freedom as non-interference, gives birth to a new notion of freedom: the active right to step outside of the realm of disadvantage, the freedom to be endowed with the means needed to do something that one has been denied hitherto - affirmative action. No longer is freedom a matter of leaving human initiative to take its course. Now she is conceived of as fitting out those without equipment. Freedom as ability. Freedom as tooling.

Tooling and Self-Devouring Freedom

Freedom as tooling, freedom as ability, is a historical theme of particularly pronounced topicality, as we live in a period where the enabling discrimination, the preferential treatment of certain groups (blacks, women) is being promoted by dominant political forces as morally desirable - a trend clearly undermining a mainstay and venerable principle of freedom.

The history of freedom - as a fight of freedom with herself. Freedom as a history of the tug-of-war and the intertwining of unfreedom and freedom. I like this formulation that occurred to me during dinner:

Freedom devours herself. Just think of her best friend's fate: classical liberalism, the champion of freedom that diminished as she grew. Creative destruction is another name for liberty, the untiring trencher of man's cultural mother soil.

The Non-Liberal Pioneers of Liberty

I also toy with the idea of using the chapter on history to highlight movements and personalities that have advanced freedom without being self-conscious liberal agents, but often opponents of liberalism. Instances of it? Perhaps, the emergence of modern freedom-enabling law from the Church's effort to become the monopoly power in the Christian world, the popes Gregory I and Gregory VII, Bismarck, social democracy, Roosevelt ...