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