Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

1) the power to get what I want, to act or be as I would choose in the
absence of either internal or external obstacles or both; 2) the power
to determine the government of my political association or community;
3) the ability to develop and exercise my powers and capacities
self-reflectively within and against existing norms, expectations and
power relations; and 4) the power to determine my social and economic
environment via meaningful control over my and my groups’ economic
and political representatives. Freedom is power in the sense therefore
that it depends upon my power, control and self-control within these
four domains.
Freedom as power depends upon avoiding or overcoming situations
of domination by ensuring control over the four above-listed domains.
However, given the economic and political reality within large, complex
modern capitalist states, our individual freedom as power will
normally not be a simple matter of direct individual control over these
domains. Given that our lives within complex modern capitalist states
are characterised by membership of a whole variety of overlapping and
interdependent groups, our freedom (and avoidance of domination)
is determined to a significant degree by three associated matrices of
freedom as power, as I argue below: a) the material conditions and
power of the groups that we find ourselves (or in some cases choose)
to be members of; b) the relative power of our groups’ representatives;
and c) the relationship between our groups’ representatives and our
formal political representatives. [15]
Since this account conceives of freedom as power in fully substantive
and material terms and conceives of group freedom in terms of
the power of a group’s representative(s), it avoids the mistakes of its
predecessors, especially regarding the stubborn tendency to focus
uniquely on individual and state freedom, and the associated libertarian
position that ‘[t]he freedom of the group is nothing other than the
sum total of the degrees of freedom of its individual members’. [16] And
it remains realistic about freedom and domination. As Foucault, Lukes
and Geuss have argued convincingly, the concept of ‘power’ is a relation
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FREEDOM, POWER AND
REPRESENTATION
Lawrence Hamilton
15
I prefer the term ‘group’ to ‘class’ because the former is a more catch-all category for
collections of individuals who are connected with each other in relevant and meaningful
ways that affect their behaviour or that of others.
16
Carter, Measure of Freedom, p. 267.