Liberty in the Modern State

CHAPTER I. The Nature of Liberty

THE NATURE OF LIBERTY

I mean by liberty the absence of restraint upon the existence of those social conditions which, in modern civilization, are the necessary guarantees of individual happiness. I seek to inquire into the terms upon which it is attainable in the Western world, and, more especially, to find those rules of conduct to which political authority must conform if its subjects are, in a genuine sense, to be free.

Already, therefore, I am maintaining a thesis. I am arguing, first, that liberty is essentially an absence of restraint. It implies power to expand, the choice by the individual of his own way of life without imposed prohibitions from without. Men cannot, as Rousseau claimed, be forced into freedom. They do not, as Hegel insisted, find their liberty in obedience to the law. They are free when the rules under which they live leave them without a sense of frustration in realms they deem significant. They are unfree whenever the rules to which they have to conform compel them to conduct which they dislike and resent. I do not deny that there are types of conduct against which prohibitions are desirable: I ought, for instance, to be compelled, even against my wish, to educate my children. But I am arguing that any rule which demands from me something I would not otherwise give is a diminution of my freedom.

A second implication is important. My thesis involves the view that if in any state there is a body of men who possess unlimited political power, those over whom they rule can never be free. For the one assured result of historical investigation is the lesson that uncontrolled power is invariably poisonous to those who possess it. They are always tempted to impose their canon of good upon others, and, in the end, they assume that the good of the community depends upon the continuance of their power. Liberty always demands a limitation of political authority, and it is never attained unless the rulers of a state can, where necessary, be called to account. That is why Pericles insisted that the secret of liberty is courage.

By making liberty the absence of restraint, I make it, of course, a purely negative condition. I do not thereby mean to assume that a man will be the happier the more completely restraints are absent from the society to which he belongs. In a community like our own, the pressure of numbers and the diversity of desires, make necessary both rules and compulsions. Each of these is a limitation upon freedom. Some of them are essential to happiness, but that does not make them for a moment less emphatically limitations. Our business is to secure such a balance between the liberty we need and the authority that is essential as to leave the average man with the clear sense that he has elbow-room for the continuous expression of his personality.

Nor must we confound liberty with certain other goods without which it has no meaning. There may be absence of restraint in the economic sphere, for example, in the sense that a man may be free to enter any vocation he may choose. Yet if he is deprived of security in employment he becomes the prey of a mental and physical servitude incompatible with the very essence of liberty. Nevertheless, economic security is not liberty though it is a condition without which liberty is never effective. I do not mean that those who can take their ease in Zion are thereby free men. Once and for all, let us agree that property alone does not make a man free. But those who know the normal life of the poor, its perpetual fear of the morrow, its haunting sense of impending disaster, its fitful search for beauty which perpetually eludes, will realize well enough that, without economic security, liberty is not worth having. Men may well be free and yet remain unable to realize the purposes of freedom.

Again, we live in a big world, about which, at our peril, we have to find our way. There can, under these conditions, be no freedom that is worth while unless the mind is trained to use its freedom. We cannot, otherwise, make explicit our experience of life, and so report the wants we build upon that experience to the centre of political decision. The right of the modern man to education became fundamental to his freedom once the mastery of Nature by science transformed the sources of power. Deprive a man of knowledge, and the road to ever greater knowledge, and you will make him, inevitably, the slave of those more fortunate than himself. But deprivation of knowledge is not a denial of liberty. It is a denial of the power to use liberty for great ends. An ignorant man may be free even in his ignorance. In our world he cannot employ his freedom so as to give him assurance of happiness. A compulsory training of the mind is still compulsion. It is a sacrifice of some liberty to a greater freedom when the compulsion ceases.

Two other preliminary remarks are important to the thesis I am urging. Everyone knows the danger to freedom which exists in any community where there is either special privilege on the one hand or what is termed the tyranny of the majority on the other. John Stuart Mill long ago pointed out that in the early history of liberty it was normally and naturally conceived as protection against the tyranny of the political rulers. The latter disposed of a power to which its subjects were compelled to conform; and it became vital in the interest of freedom to limit that power either by the recognition of special immunities or by the creation of constitutional guarantees. But even in the modern state the underlying substance of the argument may not be neglected. Power as such, when uncontrolled, is always the natural enemy of freedom. It prevents the exercise of those capacities which are released for activity by the absence of restraint. Wherever it is possessed in excess, it tilts the balance of social action in favour of its possessors. A franchise limited to the owners of property means legislation in the interests of that class. The exclusion of a race or creed from a share in citizenship is, invariably, their exclusion also from the benefits of social action. In any state, therefore, where liberty is to move to its appointed end, it is important that there should be equality.

Now equality is not the same thing as liberty. I do not, indeed, agree with Lord Acton’s famous dictum that the ‘passion for equality makes vain the hope of freedom’; liberty and equality are not so much antithetic as complementary. Men might be broadly equal under a despotism, and yet unfree. But it is, I think, historically true that in the absence of certain equalities no freedom can ever hope for realization. The acute mind of Aristotle long ago saw that the craving for equality is one of the most profound roots of revolution. The reason is clear enough. The absence of equality means special privilege for some and not for others, a special privilege which is not, so to say, in nature but in a deliberate contrivance of the social environment. Men like Harrington and Madison and Marx all insisted, and with truth, that whatever the forms of state, political power will, in fact, belong to the owners of economic power. We need not argue that our happiness depends upon the possession of political power; we can argue that exclusion from it is likely to mean exclusion from that which largely determines the contours of happiness. And it follows that the more equal are the social rights of citizens, the more likely they are to be able to utilize their freedom in realms worthy of exploration. Certainly the history of the abolition of special privilege has been, also, the history of the expansion of what in our inheritance was open to the common man. The more equality there is in a State, the more use, in general, we can make of our freedom.

Here, perhaps, it is worth while for a moment to dwell upon the meaning of equality. Nothing is easier than to make it a notion utterly devoid of all common sense. It does not mean identity of treatment. The ultimate fact of the variety of human nature, our differences of both hereditary capacity and social nurture, these are inescapable. To treat men so different as Newton and Byron, Cromwell and Rousseau, in a precisely similar way is patently absurd. But equality does not mean identity of treatment. It is an insistence that there is no difference inherent in nature between the claims of men to happiness. It is therefore an argument that society shall not construct barriers against those claims which weigh more heavily upon some than upon others. It shall not exclude men from the legal profession because they are black or Wesleyans or freemasons. It shall not deny access to the Courts to men of whose opinions society in general disapproves. The idea of equality is obviously an idea of levelling. It is an attempt to give each man as similar a chance as possible to utilize what powers he may possess. It means that he is to count in the framing of decisions where these affect him, that whatever legal rights inhere in any other man as a citizen, shall inhere in him also; that where differences of treatment are meted out by society to different persons, those differences shall be capable of explanation in terms of the common good. It means the recognition of urgent need in all--food, for instance, and clothing, and shelter--before there is special recognition of non-urgent claims in any.

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