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Markets and other manifestations of liberty (like the rule of law) are not self-generating (unless you look at the matter in the most extensive time dimensions); they are dependent on conditions exogenous to the processes of liberty.
This is why I am interested in politics and the state; it is not sufficient to look at politics and the state from a purely normative point of view, you have to capture them in a positive theory to understand how they are related to the emergence, the contemporary stage and shape of freedom and its future prospects.
Liberty is a lot more messy than many people think – or to put it, I hope, more felicitously: I think of liberty as a gravel walk.
In between the gravel are beautiful blue globules. The globules are manifestations of liberty; the gravel is all sorts of other stuff, relevant and irrelevant, but also lots of stuff adverse to liberty. Historically, today and in the future liberty will always be fragmentary, dispersed, discontinuous, displaced, flattened, stretched, disrupted, superimposed upon by other stuff – in a word: liberty will always be a shimmering scheme in a gravel walk with different densities and distributional patterns of blue globules.
So, we ought to develop a keen eye for liberty in its real dispersion, in its actual coexistence with phenomena and structures many of which - such as state structures - being ambivalent vis-à-vis liberty or even antithetical to her.
To be able to defend and further liberty in the real world, I must be prepared to recognise it in its granular spread amongst the gravel. Liberty is often contaminated with non-liberty and the transition between liberty and nonliberty is continuous, and this within a multidimensional grid – there are blue globules underneath the top gravel.
The same agents and institutions may both enforce and destroy liberty, consider for an example disparate practices of the legal system. I agree with most of the things expressed in this blog in favour of free markets and liberty, which is why I am interested in what we have not yet said about liberty, especially that it is happening amongst us, right next to goings-on hardly compatible with liberty. I want to be able to name some of the 2 567 876 acts that every minute are committed in the USA to make liberty happen (including acts attributable to the Aunt Sallys of libertarian critique, like state institutions) – and not only the 3 453 876 acts perpetrated against liberty.
I want to understand the imperfection of liberty, to appreciate her the better, to grasp her more realistically and to be able to act more effectively in her favour in the messy political arena, where she is born and reborn, savaged and yet reborn anew.
Written in March 2013
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