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elationships. In order to understand this, it is worthwhile to dwell
for a second on a remark by Quentin Skinner in order to become
aware of what is at stake while shifting between different paradigms
of freedom. Skinner reminds us in his famous pamphlet Liberty before
Liberalism that there was a shift between two different paradigms of
freedom before the liberal doctrine claims the overwhelming status in
our contemporary world. The shift, however, amounts to a loss, since
we may miss “a repository of values we no longer endorse, of questions
we no longer ask.” (Skinner 1998, 112) According to Skinner, it is the
eclipse of the “neo-roman theory of free states” that has faded in our
way of looking at politics. Skinners states:
With the rise of the liberal theory to a position of hegemony in contemporary
political philosophy, the neo-roman theory has been so much lost to
sight that the liberal analysis has come to be widely regarded as the only
coherent way of thinking about the concept involved. (Skinner 1998, 113)
For the clarification of the “neo-roman theory of free states,”
Skinner claims:
What the neo-roman writers repudiate avant la lettre is the key assumption
of classical liberalism to the effect that force or the coercive threat of
it constitute the only forms of constraint that interfere with individual
liberty. The neo-roman writers insist, by contrast, that to live in condition
of dependence is in itself a source and a form of constraint. (Skinner
1998, 84)
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ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE’S
NOTION OF POLITICAL
FREEDOM
Demin Duan
In this regard, Tocqueville may not be properly characterized as
a “neo-roman theorist” as such, but what he proposes for the notion
of freedom is akin to their claims. More importantly, Tocqueville and
the “neo-romans” share a similar distance from the liberal-democratic
discourse on freedom and similar penchant for the “political” condition
of freedom. From here we turn to Tocqueville’s view on freedom
in modern democracy.
Concerning the notion of freedom in Tocqueville, there has been a
lot of speculation on what it exactly means. For instance, some classify
him as a liberal thinker, together with theorists like John Locke and