Government, the State, and Freedom (2) - John Gray's Account

Image credit. Continued from Government, the State, and Freedom (1) - John Gray's Account.

Evidently, the state is more than an abstractum - any state is instantiated by a particular form of government.

Freedom and Forms of Government

Is there a unique match between a particular form of government and freedom, or can distinct types of governing coexist with freedom?

John Gray suggests that liberty is compatible both with democracy and non-democratic forms of governance, such as monarchy - as long as there are appropriate constraints in place.

Freedom and Constitutional Government, Politics, and the Rule of Law

From this follows that a liberal state must always be based on constitutional government, a government answerable to a set of constraining rules, among which we shall always find that set of restraints referred to as the rule of law.

What this shows is that in discussing the state, our arguments inevitably branch out into new areas, notably politics, to which I devote a separate chapter, and law, to which I devote another chapter in Attempts at Liberty.

No Freedom without Democracy - My Idiosyncratic View

I recognise that I am biased in my view according to which liberty is not enduringly sustainable in a political environment that is lacking democracy. On this issue, I part with John Gray. The possibility of mass political participation, or more precisely, the possibility of any member of the citizenry to participate in the process of political competition that shapes and controls political outcomes affecting the entire society is a sine qua non for a free society. Put briefly: political freedom is one of the robust conditions of freedom - which conditions must be present for freedom to remain feasible.

I may be prepared to hone my argument by demanding THE POSSIBILITY of general political participation rather than arguing that the absence of democracy is immediately tantamount to the absence of freedom. But I would expect that the possibility of democratic engagement inevitably leads to attempts at exercising democracy and these, in turn, bring about democracy or reveal a given regime to be incapable of freedom.

The Liberal-Democratic Matrix

I may be wrong - the matter is difficult: are places like Hong Kong free? Are they latently democratic, while being free? Within democracy there is a lot of non-democratic politicking. How democratic are democracies? In what ways is freedom depended on democracy? If democracy is a requirement of freedom because it prevents the establishment of overly concentrated power in society and enables its members to monitor and reverse maldevelopments, especially those that stem from overly concentrated power, a lack of the ability to effectively limit, challenge, and non-violently terminate non-eligible power holders would seem to be incompatible with freedom - at least in the long run.

For more see Why It Is Not True That Politics Makes Us Worse - Thirteen Conjectures on Politics (1/3)

Continued in Government, the State, and Freedom (3) - John Gray's Account