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standard-bearers for his ‘negative’ conception of freedom, are ultimately
concerned with whether or not someone is able to exercise his or her
power to act, that is to bring something about, to do something.
But it is in the work of Marx that we see the full efflorescence of the
substantive, concrete account of modern freedom as power that underpins
my argument here. Marx unequivocally identifies freedom with
power. Unlike Berlin’s distinction between two concepts of freedom,
Marx distinguishes three concepts of freedom. The first is what Marx
associates with the anarchism of Max Stirner, but in today’s parlance
we would call ‘negative’ freedom or the ‘freedom’ of libertarianism. [9]
The second concept of freedom Marx discusses he identifies with
Kant’s view of freedom and which he defines as the ability a creature
has to make its own decisions, or govern itself. [10] The third concept is
the one Marx calls the ‘materialist’ notion of freedom that identifies
freedom with power and that he thinks is the full, sophisticated notion.
He argues that in this account, freedom comprises the ‘the conjunction
of the ability to determine what one will do and the power to do
what one decides to do’, and anything less than this is a mere shadow
of the concept of freedom. [11] This means that for Marx the other two
concepts he discusses, and a fortiori the main three concepts analysed
in the modern literature, are poor approximations of this real form of
freedom.
Another way of construing the importance of this more substantive
account of freedom is that it provides a means of thinking about
how freedom relates to the exercise of our powers as individuals and
how we are enabled and disabled by a variety of internal and external
abilities, obstacles, mechanisms and power relations. This is something,
again, that a number of other thinkers have identified and stressed from
a wide range of political perspectives. Here freedom is conceived as
‘effective power’, that is, freedom is rightly identified as a precondition
131
FREEDOM, POWER AND
REPRESENTATION
Lawrence Hamilton
9
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in MECW, Vol 5 (Lawrence and Wishart 1976),
pp. 304-6.
10
Ibid., pp. 193-5. For Kant, freedom is the mere ability to determine the will, irrespective
of whether this is even translated into actual action in the world. Geuss, Politics and the
Imagination (Princeton UP 2009), p. 57.
11
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp. 305-6; quote is from Geuss, ‘Metaphysics
of Right’, p. 57.