Revisiting ancient and modern liberty: On de Dijn’s Freedom: An Unruly History

Abstract

Annelien de Dijn’s Freedom: An Unruly History is a rich and thought-provoking work in intellectual history, tracing thinking and debating about political freedom in the West from ancient Greece to our own times. The ancient notion of freedom as self-government (what Quentin Skinner calls neo-roman liberty) is referred to as the ‘democratic conception’. The argument is that this conception survived through the renaissance, the early-modern period and the 18th-century Atlantic revolutions only to be deliberately scrapped in the 19th century in favour of liberal freedom – absence of state interference – thus severing the ancient links between freedom and democracy and turning democracy into a threat to freedom. The book is an impressive achievement and the use of sources staggeringly wide. However, though the liberal turn is certainly a fact of history, I am not convinced that it was such a decisive break, nor that the relations between conceptions of freedom and attitudes to democracy are as clear-cut as de Dijn needs them to be. De Dijn claims, with regret, that the liberal view remains our view and is now an essential part of Western civilization, but I find that to be empirically under-substantiated. By using the liberal turn to define an age, de Dijn lets history play out through the lens of the elite.

Introduction

In this rich and engaging book about the history of the idea of political freedom, Annelien de Dijn (2020) sets out to establish a narrative of continuity as well as rupture. A conception of political freedom created in ancient Greece and Rome and revived in the renaissance continued to dominate political thinking about freedom all the way till the early 19th century, at which time it was deliberately replaced with a conception that remains ‘our’ conception today. The ancient idea is freedom as self-government, such that a person can live a free life only by being part of a self-governing people. De Dijn refers to this as the ‘democratic conception’ and it is this, she claims, that was deliberately scrapped in the early 19th century in a counter-revolutionary, anti-democratic move. The new question pertinent to freedom was not ‘who governs’ but the extent of government interference. Freedom in society came to mean limitation of state power: to be free was no longer to take part in government, but to be left alone by it. This is the liberal turn and it severed the conceptual and political links between freedom and democracy. If freedom is the absence of government intervention, it does not matter for freedom whether that government is democratic or not. In fact, because of the risk of majority tyranny, democracy is a problem for freedom conceived in this way. Individual protection rights and the freedom to do what you want in your private sphere are as threatened under majoritarianism as under an autocratic ruler.

De Dijn insists that this new idea represented a deliberate and decisive break; the French and American revolutions in the late 18th century should therefore be regarded as the ‘curtain call’ (p. 215) of the democratic conception. Thus was the path set to our own times, in which – according to de Dijn – it is commonplace (p. 5) to hold that freedom is equated with minimal government and is used as a ‘battering ram against democracy’ (p. 343).

There is an implicit value judgement or lament running through the book. De Dijn clearly believes that something of profound political importance has been lost and that this history explains it. There are crucial things at stake, not only for historical reasons but for us today. How could it happen? How could centuries of struggles for freedom against the arbitrary and oppressive power of rulers throw up this: freedom as the name we give to each minding their own business?

Freedom: An Unruly History is in many ways a remarkable achievement; rich and buzzling it draws the reader in, regardless of whether one is new to these debates or not. It opens up new avenues for debates, both about the long history and about ourselves. A book like this can be read in different ways: as an odyssey or as an argument, as an exploration of the repository of ideas or as an explanation of what happened and why. I read it as an argument and explanation since that, it seems to me, is what the author intended. But this leaves me at a bit of a loss. I will highlight what de Dijn takes to be major steps in this long history and who took them, and in the process reflect on what needs to be true here: that freedom conceived as individual protection against politics, where democracy is a threat and state interference a violation, really is ‘our’ conception, and that the link between freedom and democracy explains the difference between then and now. But it is also a matter of focus, or choice of lens. Whose agency is the main story?

The steps and who took them

The history told in Freedom: An Unruly History is that freedom as popular self-government – the ‘democratic’ conception – was developed by ancient Greeks and Romans, revived by renaissance humanists, came to inspire the late 18th-century revolutionaries, but in the aftermath of the revolutions was challenged by a liberal conception that equated freedom with limitations of state power and saw democracy as irrelevant or even detrimental to freedom. This new conception continued to be challenged in the 19th century by various radical groups but in the 12th century freedom conceived as minimal government was absorbed even by the left and is today the commonplace view.

On the ancient view, being free is to have no master and this freedom can be enjoyed only in a republic where the people controls who governs them and how (18f). Under a king you are arbitrarily ruled, because even a good king can turn bad and if he does there is nothing you can do. This conception was wiped out with the reassertion of kingly rule but was revived under renaissance enthusiasm for the ancient political world. With Rome as their model and Cicero the hero, humanists like Petrarch and Machiavelli brought back into the political imagination the free way of life in a republic, also emphasizing that differences in wealth are a problem for freedom since they create strife and make people turn to authoritarian rulers (pp. 135–142). In 17th-century England, the early modern take on this ‘ancient cult of freedom’ (p. 160) turned opposition to the restoration of the monarchy into an argument for liberty. Locke insisted that freedom in political society is to have a standing rule to live by, common to everyone (p. 176). Hobbes – arguing in Leviathan that freedom is the absence of law and that the form of government has nothing to do with it – was the exception and, in de Dijn’s history, not a game-changer. Freedom remained the Roman notion of not living under someone else’s will.

This was the freedom that fuelled the late 18th-century revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. The revolutionaries were not only fighting for bread and lower taxes (p. 186); they were fighting for the Roman freedom of self-government, turned into a philosophy for the age by thinkers like Richard Price. Needless to say, throughout this long history, democratic freedom was somehow seen as easily compatible with excluding women, servants, people of colour and various minorities from politics.

Crucially, representation and constitutional bills of rights were regarded as protection against potentially irrational majorities and so a part, not a limitation, of democratic self-government.

But the democratic conception of freedom had soon run its course. Because here comes the big turn and, according to de Dijn, a profound break with the past. De Dijn’s major argument is that the Atlantic revolutions were the ‘curtain call’ of the Roman and Renaissance conception of democratic freedom (p. 215). In the next generation – exemplified by Benjamin Constant – the fear of revolution turned into a backlash against democracy and the development of ‘a wholly new way of thinking about freedom’ (p. 227), which had nothing to do with popular self-government. Freedom from now on was the individual right for a person to ‘peacefully enjoy their lives and goods’, free from government interference. This is liberal freedom, and it was invoked against democracy. The rest of Freedom: An Unruly History is devoted to making good on the claim that this is the modern conception, the new normal that replaced the old and has become ‘our’ view. The rest of this review will be devoted to critically engaging with some interrelated aspects of this argument. One is the claim about freedom in our own times and what that claim does to what is deemed historically significant and not. Another is the role of ‘democracy’ in this history, both before and after the alleged curtain call.

Freedom in our time

I appreciate de Dijn’s ambition to anchor the long history of freedom in ourselves and to demystify it, as it were, by showing that we are part of it. The claim she makes about ‘our’ conception is, however, a stark one and I am not sure what to make of it. The book opens and ends with this. The first sentence reads: ‘Today most people tend to equate freedom with the possession of inalienable individual rights, rights that demarcate a private sphere no government may infringe on’ (p. 1). This way of thinking about freedom – the ‘modern’ view – comes here with an analysis of society such that democracy becomes ‘primarily a threat to liberty’ (p. 344). The book needs this to be a convincing analysis of liberty and democracy in our own time, since choices and interpretations of historical sources depend on it. It is because of this that the 19th century is the century of liberal laissez-faire politics while social movements struggling for democratic inclusion are the backdrop and not the story.

Now, a conception of freedom as minimal government is undoubtedly around in our time, serving the interests of a privileged class who think they can do without the democratic state. It is the freedom of neo-liberalism, cloaking economic self-interest in the drapery of a political value. But the fact that an ideological view is peddled with rhetorical success by free-market intellectuals and others with a vested interest in it does not make it ‘our’ conception, surely. For that it would have to be the view actually held by ‘most people’ or the view that explains and legitimates the design of our political institutions. Is it either of those things?

De Dijn’s account ends in the mid-20th century at which time, she believes, the trajectory is set – but is it? Two major developments after the Second World War that she does not discuss are the modern welfare state projects and the international system of human rights law, both of which are predicated on an interventionist state guaranteeing the conditions for a free life. The UN Charter makes social progress a prerequisite of freedom; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) declares that ‘All peoples have the right to self-determination’ and the individual right to live in a democracy follows from its 25th article as well as from article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948. That ‘freedom from want’ includes state-guaranteed social protection is international development policy. The consolidation of the human rights system in a Cold War climate was a ‘strange triumph’ (Mazower, 2004), but is it not significant for exactly that reason? Why are these institutional principles not ‘our’ conception of freedom?

Talking of decisive breaks, there certainly was one in the 1980s with the neo-liberal generalization of the market logic, but how these things tie in with ideas about freedom is an open matter. Thatcher famously held Hayek’s free market economics to be ‘what we believe’, but what Hayek feared as the road to serfdom was not the old concept of freedom but what he saw as a loss of spontaneity through planning (as an aside, the belief in the power of spontaneity makes a curious connection between Hayek and the revolutionary communist Rosa Luxemburg; nothing is straightforward here). It has recently been argued in this journal that Hayek’s liberalism rests on the neo-roman view of freedom (Irving, 2020; see also Richard, 2020).

So, what about the claim that freedom as limited government and opposition to democracy is the view held by ‘most people’ in our own time? An analysis of attitudes to freedom and democracy based on data from the World Values Survey throws doubt on this (Welzel, 2013). It shows that ‘freedom’ is not one thing but a composite of pro-attitudes to autonomy or independence; to non-discrimination and equality of opportunity; to choice, and voice (that is, freedom of speech and having a say in government decisions and local communities). These values are individualistic yet pro-social – they generate solidarity and joint action – and importantly strengthen people’s desire for democracy while also making them more critical of the democratic quality of their own societies.

Anti-democratic attitudes are on the rise, but there is no empirical evidence that they translate into widely held views about what freedom means. The very real threats to democracy that we see in Europe today are not explained by liberal ideas of freedom but by protectionism and racist nationalism. A question is what this does to our reading of Freedom: An Unruly History, given that the emergence of the anti-democratic conception of freedom as our conception is what de Dijn sets out to explain. We can take a couple of things away from this complication. It unsettles de Dijn’s narrative of what is going on after the curtain call, after the liberal turn. Put in a different way: it questions the choice of lens, of what is in focus and given explanatory powers and what is not. The second thing is that it questions de Dijn’s conceptual link between attitudes to democracy and a particular view of freedom, prompting us to think again what democracy means to its defenders and detractors.

What kind of break was it?

There is a dynamic at play regarding action for and valuations of freedom, which is worth bearing in mind when analysing historical developments. In authoritarian conditions with little space for people to act, they will value freedom less because it has no relevance to their lives (Welzel, 2013: 52f). This is an empirically observable coping mechanism, which in philosophy is expressed as ‘the subversion of rationality’ (Elster, 1983) or ‘adaptive preferences’ (Nussbaum, 2001). Oppression is self-sustaining. But if the cycle of disempowerment is broken, for instance through destabilization of state control, values of emancipation are strengthened and asserted in concerted action. That is the logic of revolution and resistance movements. This is what Lynn Hunt has in mind when she says that rights have a tendency to ‘cascade’ (Hunt, 2007). Contrary to what de Dijn implies (p. 226), Hunt does not mean that rights extend automatically to previously excluded groups by the sheer power of their inner logic, but that the idea of them provides ground for concerted action when politically excluded groups start to see themselves as exactly that: excluded for reasons that are unjust.

Such pro-democratic pressure will always be asserted against elite resistance, since those who benefit from the status quo – whoever they are – cling to their powers and privileges. If the elites manage to counter the pressures, say through violent suppression, the valuation of freedom might recede again but it is difficult in the long run for powers to hold the fort against claims to emancipation put forward by people acting in concert (Welzel, 2013: 309). This is the cycle of how movements struggling to assert claims to freedom will, if successful, create a new normal, like women’s equal right to vote.

In de Dijn’s narrative, the 19th century is characterized by the break with the democratic conception of freedom. In a deliberate move, a new liberal anti-democratic conception is ushered in: the right to be free from politics, to live one’s private life in a sphere protected from intervention. The minimal role of the state is to safeguard these private freedoms, particularly property, and whether it is democratic or not is neither here nor there as long as it does this job well. The problem with democracies, on this conception, is that the majority will is no stable guarantor of individual rights to property and peace of mind. We recognize this as the problem of the ‘tyranny of the majority’. Is this new? Surely this was Cicero’s concern too.

De Dijn’s ancient conception of freedom is largely in harmony with what Quentin Skinner calls neo-roman liberty. In his now classic Liberty Before Liberalism, Skinner (1998) set out to reinstall a lost intellectual world of thinking about civil liberty: a theory of Roman legal origin, taken up by the renaissance humanists, consolidated in early-modern political thought (repudiated by Hobbes) and then lost in the fog with the triumph of liberalism and freedom as non-intervention. Through the work of Skinner, Philip Pettit (1997) and by now a host of others, this intellectual world is rehabilitated and ‘republican freedom’ (as it is mostly known in political theory) has shattered the binary of negative and positive liberty that we have lived with since Berlin (1969 [1958]).

On the neo-roman conception, to be a free person is to live by one’s own will. To be unfree is to live under the power of someone else, subject to their will. Crucially this freedom is only possible in a free state, a republic, where the citizens participate – directly or through representatives – in making the laws that bind them. But we need to exercise some care before calling this conception ‘democratic’, as de Dijn’s does. ‘Democracy’ is a moving target.

De Dijn points to the conflict in the Roman republic between Optimates and Populares over the relative power relationship between the aristocratic Senate and the council of the commoners (pp. 80–85). Now, if democracy is majoritarianism, this was a clash between democrats and non-democrats, but if democracy is representative government, then it was a clash between different brands of democrats. In neither case was it a conflict over the meaning of freedom.

Historically notable thinkers defending the freedom that de Dijn calls democratic and that Skinner calls neo-roman have either not been democrats at all or have been a kind of republican democrat where civic rights are protected through representation under a mixed constitution; that is what the 18th-century revolutionaries – inspired as they were by ancient ideals – wanted. This kind of constitutional solution is a slightly awkward co-existence between majoritarian and aristocratic principles. The aristocratic part of the equation explains why the Federalists thought that a true representative is distinguished by excellence, by their capacity to discern what is best for the nation, and has always been justified with a fear of the masses. When Tocqueville and JS Mill called it ‘the tyranny of the majority’ they did not express a new thought. This suspicion of majoritarianism has been part of the story all along. If personal freedom is to live by your own will, then freedom is threatened as much by the potential irrationality of a majority as by the autocratic power of a king.

There certainly was a shift in thinking about political freedom with the advent of liberalism in the early 19th century, but it did not come with a rejection of democracy as democracy was already understood: as representative government. Not even Constant thought so. In de Dijn’s interpretation, the twin commitment to a new kind of freedom and rejection of democracy turns on a distinction between political liberty (to actively engage in politics) and civil liberty (to enjoy one’s individual rights in peace), where the new liberals insisted on civil liberty while rejecting political liberty as too bothersome. Constant is made the harbinger of this view, but that does not seem fair. Constant worried that the modern man would give up his political liberty too easily: ‘It is not political liberty which I wish to remove; it is civil liberty which I wish to claim’. The function of the representative system is to give space for private interests, but unless citizens exercise ‘active and constant surveillance over their representatives’, they are, as he memorably put it, ‘idiots’ (Constant, 1988: 326).

There is something revealing in Constant’s attitude here. Citizens electing representatives are likened to rich men hiring stewards; they keep an eye on them because that is what you do with staff. This reminds me of what EH Carr said about the 19th-century liberal view of the world, that it was ‘serene and self-confident’ (Carr, 2018 [1961]: 7). It also prompts another thought from Carr, which is that ‘facts speak only when the historian calls on them’. Which facts are given the floor is inevitably a decision, not a discovery. De Dijn gives the floor to a serene and self-confident liberal elite. I will end with some reflections on the consequences of that.

The choice of lens

Remember that dynamic I talked about earlier: the pressure for inclusion coming from groups acting in concert, fuelled by a new realization that their exclusion is unjust, will be resisted by elites with no taste for ceding their privileges. Such elite resistance includes legitimation of the status quo as rational or as morally motivated by the common good. The fact that comfortably affluent liberals in the 19th century peddled a principle that made freedom protect exactly what they already had and wanted to keep does look very much like an example of that dynamic. But de Dijn seems to be in two minds about this. She acknowledges that liberal politicians and thinkers through the 19th and early 20th centuries were an elite group but denies that they were motivated by self-interest. Their motivation, she claims, was neither to protect business interests nor a preference for laissez-faire economics; their motivation was ‘to protect freedom’ (p. 306). But this looks like a distinction without a difference. Freedom, as they saw it, did protect their business interests and laissez-faire economics; that was the appeal. Freedom conceived in that way is not threatened by democracy per se, at least not more than any other conception would be. It was threatened by the contrary interests of a working class gaining political momentum. The revolutions had unleashed a cycle of empowerment and elites reacted as they have always done: with coercion backed up by the construction of themselves as the competent custodians of the common good.

At this stage in the book’s narrative, there has been a slippage in the meaning of democracy. Liberal freedom is said to be a threat to democracy, but democracy understood in what way? We are told that the liberals supported parliaments and representative governments, but that this ‘by no means’ was a support for democracy, since the electorate would be limited to those deemed capable (p. 251). But for most of the 2000 years of history up to this point this is what democracy has largely meant: representative rule with a citizenry consisting of the capable: those (men) with enough independence of mind (or property) to live as their own will directs. That is the ancient ‘democratic’ conception, but now that same position is a rejection of democracy.

One thing that had changed at this stage in time was that the majority threat to elite interests had taken on a new practical urgency. The others – the ‘radicals’ – were forming movements. The labour movement, the women’s movement, the abolitionist movement were acting with determination: they would get in. The stakes were high because the threat was real. This prompts the question of where the agency that explains how this period is played out is to be found.

Given that elite resistance is a reaction to initiatives taken elsewhere, one would expect the focus to shift onto those initiatives. For women, socialists, abolitionists and other ‘progressives’, the liberal conception of freedom was false, a cover for economic self-interest. What happened throughout the 19th century cannot be explained without their agency and relentless campaigning but given de Dijn’s choice of lens, they remain in the margins of our field of vision, and that is curious. When Hobhouse admitted that the state could enhance freedom by levelling the playing field (p. 316) and Gladstone ‘had grown convinced’ (p. 294) that working men were fit to have the vote, these were not things that just happened in the heads of liberals. They are testimony to the ‘progressives’ winning ground.

De Dijn relies on the conceptual break with the past being a clean cut. But if the liberals were so committed to the view that freedom is absence of interference and has nothing to do with sovereignty, then it is puzzling to see Spencer arguing that socialist schemes of progressive taxation are slavery, since they amount to labouring under the coercion of someone else’s desires (p. 297). By saying that freedom is to have no master, be it ‘a single person or a society’, he is invoking the ancient neo-roman liberty, now against the claims of the working poor. This has remained popular with some liberals, who claim – like Robert Nozick – that redistributive taxation is forced labour, a form of slavery. It seems everything old is new again, even when the allegiances change.

After 1945, de Dijns ays, freedom as absence of state interference had become the ‘essence of Western civilization’ (p. 340), but that is hard to square with other developments. Given the emergence of the welfare state, national health services and the UN system of human rights, it is not obvious why Hayek’s rejection of state planning is more significant to the Western self-understanding at that juncture than, say, Marshall’s social citizenship or Maritain’s personalism.

In our own time, political theory about freedom has been caught in the Berlinian binary of positive and negative liberty. It is tempting to liken it to Constant’s ancient and modern, but that does not quite work. By rejecting positive liberty, Berlin makes a clean sweep of various things – including a Stoic kind of inner self-mastery which he associated with rationalism – but not, as de Dijn claims, with the democratic conception, because that lingers on in Berlin’s famous essay. He ends up admitting that what oppressed people seek is neither unhampered freedom of action nor a rationalist state, but recognition: as autonomous and independent agents. Their freedom question is ‘Who is to govern us?’ and their answer is ‘ourselves’, or our representatives elected by us (Berlin, 1969 [1958]: 160). Berlin reluctantly calls this a hybrid form of freedom, ‘more prominent than any other in the world today’, and is painfully aware that his own analysis cannot classify it as freedom, leaving his account without an explanation of why people desire liberty. What they desire is exactly this: recognition, escape from inferiority. Even Mill said so.

It has always been a problem for freedom as non-interference that it does not make liberty credible as a value, unless you already have everything and just want to keep the others out. If we agree with de Dijn that the liberals were motivated not by a desire to protect their own interests but by a desire to protect freedom, we fail to note how that was essentially the same thing.

Writing history is a matter of constant decision making – which history am I telling, whose history? – and what is significant will be dependent upon the answers to such questions. I come away immensely enriched after reading de Dijn’s book. One of my concerns, however, has been that she set out to write a kind of genealogy of a ‘modern’ conception which is defined from the beginning, and that this skews the evidence towards that story. Another concern is that this history of the liberal turn lets elite voices self-define their own age.

It is part of the condition of the oppressed that imagining freedom is to dream, to think beyond what is. ‘Away with your man-visions’, as Susan B Anthony declared in 1871. We need other dreams! In the 19th century, socialists, feminists, abolitionists and other advocates for the excluded saw freedom as requiring the means to act, including participation in political power. And they won. That was the struggle, and they won. Surely their conception deserves to be ‘modern’ liberty.