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DEMOCRACY TODAY
‘free from impediment’ or ‘living in a free state’, but rather a series of
much more concrete political, economic and social goals: being free
to determine who rules and how they rule; being free to produce,
exchange and consume wherever and whenever; being free to love,
procreate, entertain oneself and others, bring up one’s children and
so on in conditions free of poverty and racial and gender discrimination
and domination.
It turns out, moreover, that thinking about freedom as both about
being able to determine what one will do and having the power to do
what one decides to do is more common than is normally supposed. A
surprising number and variety of political theorists associate freedom
and power in exactly these terms. It is a mainstay of much of Antiquity,
in particular Roman thought and practice. As Livy put it, ‘freedom is
to be in one’s own power’. [4] Then, at the beginning of the modern era,
Hobbes argues that: ‘A FREE-MAN, is he, that in those things, which by
his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindred to doe what he has a will
to do’. Hobbes therefore sees two essential elements in the concept of
human freedom. a) The idea of possessing an underlying power or ability
to act: it is in relation to a ‘man’s power to do what hee would that
we speak of his being or not being at liberty’. [5] b) The matter of being
unimpeded in the exercise of such powers. Rousseau too argues that
power is one of two essential elements in freedom: ‘Every free action
has two causes which concur in producing it, one moral, namely the
will which determines it, the other physical, namely the power which
executes it’. [6] And then Burke, a very different sort of political thinker,
argues that ‘liberty, when men act in bodies, is power’. [7] Even Mill, late
in On Liberty, argues that, amongst other things the ‘political education
of a free people’ requires ‘habituating them to act from public or
semi-public motives’ and that ‘[w]ithout these habits and powers, a
free constitution can neither be worked nor preserved.’ [8] In other
words, a whole array of thinkers, even thinkers that Berlin lauds as
4
‘Libertas suis stat viribus’: Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Book 35, Ch 32, 11.
5
Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 146, 62, 91.
6
Rousseau, Social Contract, p. 82.
7
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Penguin 2004),
p. 91.
8
Mill, On Liberty, pp. 121-2; and pp. 7, 16-17, 116.