Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

FREEDOM, POWER AND REPRESENTATION:
GROUP FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH AFRICA
Lawrence Hamilton
LIBERAL AND REPUBLICAN PROPONENTS OF FREEDOM HAVE BEEN THE MAIN
PROTAGONISTS IN A CENTURIES OLD IDEOLOGICAL BATTLE., So it is therefore
one of the ironies of history that, despite this conflict, the accounts of
freedom they defend share a central trait: they both conceive of freedom
in terms of individual freedom and state freedom alone, either
making them analogous to one another or making one a condition
for the other. [1] This means that normally little or nothing is offered
regarding the freedom of groups, thereby excluding from consideration
a whole range of conditions that can limit or enable our freedom
of action. Most of these conditions are to be found within and between
the groups intermediate between individuals and the state: the various
and cross-cutting groups to which all individuals find themselves
associated and out of which many of the more important forms of
127
FREEDOM, POWER AND
REPRESENTATION
Lawrence Hamilton
1
Eg., Machiavelli, Discourses, ed. Crick (Penguin 2003), pp. 104-11, 116, 153-7, 197-8; Rousseau,
Social Contract, ed. Gourevitch (CUP 1997), pp. 54, 82, 116; Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Tuck
(CUP 1996), p. 149; Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett (CUP 1967), Bk II, 4,
22, 27, 57-59, 61, 87, 95, 121-24, 217; J. S. Mill, On Liberty, in On Liberty and Other Essays,
ed. Gray (OUP 1991), pp. 16-17; 121-2; 124-5; Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard UP 1971);
Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia UP 1994); Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (CUP
1998); Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (CUP 2008); Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory
of Freedom and Government (OUP 1997); Feinberg, ‘Freedom and Liberty’, in E. Craig (ed.),
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Routledge 1998).