Duty, Responsibility, Freedom, Right #12
Description
On what definition of freedom do you intend to base your proposed constitution?
There are several definitions of liberty. The most famous and important distinction is between negative and positive freedom. According to the proponents of negative freedom, people are free to the extent that their choices are not impeded: impediment can be defined in different ways, but all these conceptions have in common the insight that to be free is more or less to be left alone to do what one chooses. According to positive freedom, on the other hand, being free means being able to exercise self-control: the most common example is that of the gambler, who is free in the negative sense if no one prevents him from gambling, but not free in the positive sense if he does not act on his second-order desire to stop gambling.
Then there is republican freedom, which has been revived in recent decades. The supreme republican value is political freedom, understood as non-domination or independence from arbitrary power: in this sense, freedom is defined as a kind of structural independence, as the condition of not being subject to the arbitrary or uncontrolled power of a master. In his time, Cicero said that "freedom does not consist in having a just master, but in having none" ("Libertas, quae non in eo est ut iusto utamur domino, sed ut nullo"). This idea inspired the communes of medieval Italy, the English Revolution and the American Revolution.
Imagine, for example, a group of slaves with a generally well-meaning master. Although the master has an institutionally protected right to treat his slaves more or less as he pleases (for example, he might start whipping them), we can assume that this particular master leaves his slaves alone most of the time. To the extent that he does not actually interfere with his slaves on a daily basis, we would be inclined to say, on the basis of the non-interference view of freedom, that they enjoy some degree of freedom, but this conclusion would be deeply counterintuitive.
In the republican conception, freedom is generally described as a kind of structural independence, a condition of not being subject to the arbitrary or uncontrolled power of a master. In this view, laws do not merely protect some freedoms at the expense of others (as in the non-interventionist view), but actually introduce or enable them. Only when relations between citizens are mutually regulated by a system of public and stable rules is it possible for fellow citizens to enjoy a degree of independence from arbitrary government.
In this sense, laws do not merely protect some freedoms at the expense of others, but introduce or even enable them. Imagine if there were no national system of criminal and civil law. In that case, citizens would not know where they stood in relation to each other; their relations would simply be governed by force, i.e. by the arbitrary whim of the currently stronger faction.
In this view, a person or group enjoys freedom to the extent that no other person or group has the ability to arbitrarily interfere in their affairs. Political freedom, therefore, is most fully realised, according to this view, in a self-governing and well-ordered republic of equal citizens under the rule of law, where no citizen is master over any other: only when relations between citizens are mutually regulated by a system of public and stable rules is it possible for fellow citizens to enjoy a measure of independence from arbitrary government.
This may recall the controversy that arose between Hobbes and Harrington over the freedom of the citizens of Lucca and the subjects of Constantinople. Hobbes had argued that the citizens of the Republic of Lucca were subject to no less severe laws than the subjects of Constantinople, claiming that the citizens of Lucca had no more freedom with regard to their duties to the state than the subject of Constantinople. Harrington replied that it was one thing to argue that a citizen of Lucca had no more freedom or immunity from the laws of Lucca than a Turk had from those of Constantinople, and quite another to argue that a citizen of Lucca had no more freedom by virtue of the laws of Lucca than a Turk had by virtue of those of Constantinople.
In this sense, the law is not seen as coercion per se, but as an instrument to promote human self-determination.
Secondly, the law becomes a guarantee against power, not limited to interference, but extended to the very possibility of interference: for a man to be free, it is necessary not only that he should not be subjected to coercion, but also and above all that he should not be able to be subjected to coercion (and this, for the citizens of Lucca, was guaranteed by the law).
While the approach of liberal thought considers any heteronomous intervention of the law as interference, republican thought recovers the role of the law as an essential instrument to counteract the arbitrariness of power, setting limits to protect essential freedom. In this sense, republican theory focuses on the possibility attributed to one party to exercise arbitrary power over the other: this does not require that this power is actually exercised, resulting in interference, because the mere possibility of it is sufficient to compress the freedom not to be dominated.
This can also apply to the economic sphere: there is a risk of deprivation of basic needs, which can place the less advantaged members of society in a position of economic vulnerability. In order to meet their basic needs, individuals may well submit to the arbitrary power of exploitative employers or become dependent on the whims of voluntary charity. A republican idea is the establishment of a universal basic income: no one would be so poor as to sell themselves to someone rich enough to buy them.
From the republican point of view, which has come back into vogue in recent decades, freedom consists in the condition of not being subject to the arbitrary or uncontrolled power of a master: a person or group enjoys freedom to the extent that no other person or group has the capacity to arbitrarily interfere in their affairs (but can and must interfere to eliminate situations of domination).
In this sense, if I am not guaranteed a basic income, there will be many areas where the richer could interfere with me without being confronted with the legal prevention of such interference. If A were financially dependent on B, B could arbitrarily control A without ever resorting to violence or other abuse: A would live under B's control, striving to stay within the limits arbitrarily imposed by B, unless there is an effective and financially sustainable alternative, such as the provision of a basic income.
One might ask why a basic income should be guaranteed to all rather than only to those who need it: one answer would be that a universal right would resist electoral pressure better than a right based on need, since it would benefit everyone in common and thus constitute a more entrenched and firmer bulwark against domination.
Moreover, a universal right symbolises the fundamental equality of all in relation to the collective provisions of the state: only some will depend on the basic income received by all, but all can see that the income is there to be relied on should they themselves fall on hard times. It is not a question of failing, but of ensuring that you will never have to rely on handouts from others if you fall on hard times.
Another danger to republican freedom arises in the context of family life and gender relations. Traditional family law subjected both wives and children to considerable arbitrariness: circumstances in the case of the latter, limited opportunities in the case of the former, ensured the almost total dependence of both on the family in which they found themselves. The contemporary republican programme is thus congenial both to the extension of children's rights and to the elimination of sexual domination.
More generally, the protection of citizens from the arbitrary or uncontrolled power of their government through good institutional design is perhaps the most distinctive classical republican concern. Many of the standard devices for achieving this goal (the rule of law, separation of powers, federalism, constitutionally enshrined fundamental rights, and so on) have been adopted by liberals and others, and contemporary republicans of course remain faithful to these institutional devices to some extent.
However, contemporary republicans also recognise that such devices can only go so far. The basic reason for this is that the functioning and operation of government, no matter how carefully designed, necessarily involves considerable discretion on the part of public authorities: this is why republicans generally advocates some form of 'contestative democracy'. The idea is that properly designed democratic institutions should provide citizens with an effective means of challenging the decisions of their representatives.
This ability to challenge will hold government officials exercising discretionary authority accountable to a public understanding of the ends or purposes they are intended to serve and the means they are authorised to use. In this way, discretionary power can be subject to popular control in the sense required for the secure enjoyment of republican liberty.
For this reason, discretionary authority is guided by the norm of deliberative public reason. This means that decision-makers must be required to give reasons for their decisions, and these reasons must be subject to open public debate. Furthermore, there must be institutionalised forums for contestation in which citizens can raise objections to laws and public policies.
In this sense, I think it is possible to imagine that Europe could equip itself with institutional instruments that would allow minorities to challenge the majority. Obviously, such instruments will not be perfect and will have to be modified over time in order to function at their best, but on the other hand, another great republican - John Milton - already stated centuries ago (in the midst of the English Civil War) that the liberty of a Commonwealth does not consist in the fact that no one needs to complain, but in the fact that such complaints, once made, are freely heard, deeply considered and quickly reformed: therein lies the ultimate limit of civil liberty. In this sense, the future European federation must (also) be a Res Publica, a Commonwealth of peoples.
Moreover, republican freedom is closely linked to the idea of virtue. Indeed, domination implies awareness of control on the part of the powerful, awareness of vulnerability on the part of the powerless, and mutual awareness - that is, a shared awareness of this awareness on both sides.
The powerless will not be able to look the powerful in the eye, but each will be aware of this asymmetry - and each will be aware of the awareness of the other. Both will share the awareness that the powerless can do nothing except with the permission of the powerful: that the powerless are at the mercy of the powerful, not on an equal footing.
The master-slave scenario will materialise and the asymmetry between the two parties will become a communicative and objective reality.
Aware of this problem, Milton deplored the perpetual prostration of a servile people, which he considered inevitable in (absolute) monarchies.
A little later, Algernon Sydney, an English martyr for liberty, observed that slavery naturally produced meanness of spirit, the worst effect of which was flattery. A century later, Mary Wollstonecraft gave the subject a particularly interesting twist when she deplored the pettiness, the cunning and the wiles to which women were driven by their dependence on their husbands: by their slavery, as she called it.
It is vain to expect virtue from women until they are somewhat independent of men; it is vain, indeed, to expect the strength of natural affection which would make them good wives and mothers. So long as they are absolutely dependent on their husbands, they will be cunning, petty and selfish. Furthermore, in discussing Marie Antoinette, Wollstonecraft pointed out that most queens, unless they were reigning queens, were queen consorts, which meant that a woman had to exert influence through her husband or son, which encouraged her to become increasingly manipulative. In a sense, the slave who is prevented from being virtuous and free becomes, in turn, a tyrant.
In a sense, there is a close connection between tyranny and licence. The tyrant and the slave are free in an irresponsible and childish way, whereas true freedom consists in obedience to the law, virtue and responsibility: freedom does not consist in having no limits or in withdrawing from the public or religious scene, but in adhering to a way of life, to the discipline of freedom.
To give a simple example: to be free is not simply to have access to the pleasures of life, but to be able to resist them and not become a slave to them; I am not free if, deprived of the prohibitions imposed by others, I gorge myself on chocolate, knowing that the next day I will be ill. Self-government is a necessary condition for being a truly free citizen (otherwise corruption would grow).
So it turns out that good institutions are a necessary condition for there to be virtuous citizens and human beings: to reverse a famous feminist slogan, one might believe that the political is personal. Good order, once established, makes good men. Algernon Sydney (whom Rousseau counted among his intellectual ancestors) wrote years ago that when virtue and its glorious effects begin with liberty, they breathe with it.
This was the case with Rome when it fell under imperial tyranny: Rome's strength, virtue, glory, wealth, power and happiness, which came from freedom, arose, grew and perished with it.
Precisely because it is intertwined with freedom, tyrants fear virtue and condemn the virtuous to death or exile, and therefore virtue must be encouraged in some way. In short, during the liberty of Rome, they prospered better; that good men suffered no humiliation except from some fraud imposed on the well-meaning people; and that as soon as liberty was subverted, the worst men prospered better.
The best men were exposed to so many calamities and pitfalls, that it was considered a great miracle to see a virtuous man die in his bed. But virtue is also the sister of strength: once corrupted, the people of Rome became weak, miserable, vile, servile and trampled underfoot by anyone who would invade them.
Sadly, Sydney observes that mankind is prone to vice, and the path to virtue is so hard that it lacks encouragement; but when all honours, advantages and favours are given to vice, and virtue is despised and finds no reward but hatred, persecution and death, there are few who will follow it.
In a sense, Rousseau continues the thought of Sydney, who had said that freedom can be conquered but never regained, although sometimes, just as certain diseases confuse people's minds and make them lose the memory of the past, so we do not sometimes find, in the course of the existence of states, periods of violence in which revolutions have the same effect on peoples as certain crises have on individuals.
The horror of the past acts as an amnesia, and the state, inflamed by civil wars, rises, as it were, from its ashes and regains the vigour of youth by escaping from the arms of death.
These words were echoed by Robespierre, who believed that virtue coincided with the soul of the Republic and the pious altruism that confused all private interests with the general interest. Republican virtue," Robespierre declared, "is necessary both in relation to the people and to the government: if the government lacks it, there remains a safety valve in that of the people; but if the people themselves are corrupt, liberty is lost, and a single Brutus will not be enough to restore it if the other Romans are vicious.
In the following century, Giuseppe Mazzini would return to this theme. Nothing, in Mazzini's thought, exists for the sole purpose of turning in on itself, but on the contrary, the purpose of every individual, every nation and everything else that exists (Mazzini will indeed criticise as atheistic the formula of art for art's sake, stating that the special mission of art is to stimulate people to put thought into action) is to be able to transcend oneself and to orient oneself beyond oneself.
Everyone must live, says Mazzini, not for himself but for others, and the purpose of human life is not to be more or less happy, but to make oneself and others better.
This is not to forget the importance of rights and welfare. Mazzini was aware that the improvement of living conditions is indispensable for man to be aware of his own dignity and moral development, achievements that cannot be made in a constant duel with misery.
Rights, then, must be sought by man because they are the indispensable means of his moral improvement and not merely of his material happiness: if happiness were sought alone, the result would be rather sad, as was the fate of those Romans who, by asking only for bread and entertainment, suffered the tyranny of the emperors.
The only way to become permanently less unhappy is to improve oneself, otherwise tyrants would arise by the thousands, fighting only for material interests. Mazzini was well aware that obtaining and defending one's rights requires efforts and sacrifices that no man who believes that the purpose of life is happiness would be willing to make: rights and happiness will not really find their place in a people that does not fulfil its duty to improve itself and others.
That is why he believed that, in order to recover from centuries of slavery, selfishness and corruption (instilled by a Catholicism without a sense of mission), the nascent Italy would have to acquire a consciousness of its own duties, of its own strength, of a virtue shaken by sacrifice. Had she remained sluggish, indecisive and self-doubting, Italy would soon have fallen under the yoke of a tyrant, foreign or domestic.
The same is true of nations. In the second half of 1867 the Congress of Peace was convened in Geneva, organised by the League of Peace and Freedom and attended by such leading figures of the time as Mikhail Bakunin, John Stuart Mill, Victor Hugo, Louis Blanc and Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Mazzini refused to participate, arguing that peace could only be the consequence of freedom and justice (for example, in the United States of America there had been gigantic struggles to obtain the liberation of the slaves) and that the Congress had substituted the end for the consequence: Mazzini stated that it would not be possible to achieve peace until justice had been substituted for arbitrariness, truth for lies, duty for selfish interests, and the republic for the monarchy.
Mazzini returned to this theme in an essay written in 1871, in which he argued that nations are the individuals of humanity and that all of them, each working in accordance with its geographical position, its particular talents and the means naturally available to it, should work for the conquest of the common goal of humanity.
Just as individuals are called upon to combat the evil and corruption that prevails around them, so nations are called upon, in solidarity and according to their means, to combat evil wherever it is found and to promote good wherever it can be achieved: the peoples who remain inactive spectators of unjust wars inspired by dynastic or national selfishness will find themselves spectators - and not allies - when they themselves are attacked.
In a sense, just as individuals must fulfil their duties within their nations in order to achieve their rights and material well-being, so nations - individuals of humanity - must fulfil their duties towards humanity in order to achieve peace and security.
Aware of the consequences of individual egoism, Mazzini warned Europeans not to repeat the same mistake in the national sphere (already in 1836 Mazzini had used the term nationalist in a pejorative sense to describe those who wanted to usurp the rights of other peoples).
The anti-fascist (and pro-European) martyr Carlo Rosselli also noted that the lack of virtue breeds tyranny. This can be clearly seen in Socialismo liberale (1928), where he writes that in Italy the education of man, the formation of the basic moral cell - the individual - is still largely incomplete, since the majority of the population lacks the concept of life as a struggle and a mission, the concept of freedom as a moral duty, the awareness of one's own and others' limits.
Centuries of Catholic upbringing, moreover, had accustomed Italians to thinking through the great problems of conscience through intermediaries, leading them to resign themselves to outsourcing even the great problems of political life. For this reason, the intervention of the deus ex machina (be it the Pope, the King or Mussolini) seems almost to respond to a psychological need of the Italians: Mussolini triumphed because of almost universal defection.
Fascism was nothing more than the autobiography of a nation that had abandoned the political struggle and dreamed of the triumph of ease, of confidence, of enthusiasm: that is why the fight against Fascism is first and foremost a problem of moral and political education and means fighting against a certain type of mentality, of sensibility, of Italian tradition, which unfortunately, unconsciously, belongs to large sections of the population, but the struggle - says Rosselli - is beautiful, the struggle is vital, the struggle is truly worthy of all sacrifices.
It is possible to believe, however, that institutions of a certain kind are also needed to 'educate' nations. Even before the First World War, some pragmatic pacifists (mostly British, Robert Seeley and Philipp Kerr come to mind) believed that war, however terrible, was a necessary means for the survival and security of states in a context in which states do not recognise any higher authority and are therefore in the Hobbesian state of nature.
So the solution they proposed was to cede part of the national sovereignty of states to a supranational entity that could, in a sense, obtain the 'legitimate monopoly of force': the idea was a social contract between states.
Regarding the distinction between citizens and human beings, David Miller's theory of national responsibility comes to mind.
According to Miller, a nation is first and foremost a group with a common identity, and membership of the nation is partially constitutive of each member's identity (partially constitutive because national membership does not exclude membership of other identity communities, such as religious or ethnic groups).
In this sense, nations are not simply collections of individuals juxtaposed in physical space, but groups of people who feel they belong to the same community because of what they have in common (even Mazzini, like Miller, argued that the fatherland is not an aggregate but an association: perhaps it can be interpreted in this sense, and perhaps Europe can be interpreted in this way).
Second, they share a public culture, a set of ideas about how their collective life should be conducted, including the principles that define the terms of their political association and, more generally, guide political decision-making.
This shared public culture does not preclude significant cultural differences between sub-groups within the nation, nor does it mean that there will be no political disagreements between members (people who share a public culture may disagree quite radically about what the principles embedded in that culture mean in relation to particular issues).
Third, nations are groups whose members recognise special obligations to each other, so in this respect they are not like groups formed on a contractual basis to achieve the pre-determined goals of the members, where the reason for becoming and remaining a member is purely instrumental.
Fourth, the continued existence of the nation is regarded by its members as a valuable good, so that even if we could imagine that the instrumental benefits of membership, such as personal security, could be provided elsewhere, they would regard with horror and dismay any proposal to dissolve the nation and assimilate its individual members into other national groups, or simply to absorb the entire nation into a larger entity without preserving its distinct identity.
Moreover, it is necessary for the existence of a nation that the beliefs and attitudes in question be generally held (and considered correct by those who hold them), not that they be held by each individual member.
This is true of communities of all kinds. For example, for a religious community to exist, its members must share certain beliefs and behave in certain ways towards each other, but it can survive in the presence of some dissident members whose beliefs are heterodox or whose behaviour violates the principles of reciprocity.
Belonging to a nation also entails a fifth characteristic: the aspiration to political self-determination. In the real world, however, this aspiration is realised to very different degrees and across a spectrum of possibilities. A nation may have no self-determination at all (as when it is subject to imperial rule from without), it may have its own state but have a despotic or authoritarian form of government (where the ruler or ruling elite are drawn from the people and claim to act on their behalf, but there is no mechanism for subjecting them to popular control), or it may be governed democratically, with key decision-makers accountable to the people as a whole in periodic elections.
Moreover, nations can be thought of as acting collectively in two different senses: first, because their members share a public identity and culture, both the practices they adopt and the behaviour of individual members can be seen as expressions of that common identity and culture; second, given an appropriate political structure, the political decisions that are taken embody, to a greater or lesser extent, the articulated beliefs and attitudes of the nation in question. The closer we get to the democratic end of the spectrum, the more this will be true.
Where nations are subject to external domination, any attribution of national responsibility becomes problematic because the nation is governed in a certain way but does not act politically (in the absence of a political forum in which national goals and values can be articulated and debated, it will be difficult to determine the extent to which the population as a whole is involved in supporting the activities in question).
In the case of democratically self-governing nations, the policies pursued by the state can reasonably be regarded as policies for whose effects the citizens as a whole are collectively responsible, since they have authorised the government to act on their behalf in a free election.
In this sense, don't you think that we should also speak of responsibility for the duties necessary to keep alive the freedoms and rights that have been created?