How are Power and Unfreedom Related?

In previously published critiques of republicanism, Matthew Kramer and I have criticized the ‘third way’ supposedly identified by republican theorists of freedom (Carter, A Measure of Freedom, 1999, chs 7 & 8, in particular pp. 237-45; Kramer, The Quality of Freedom, 2003). The subject of our critiques was not the acceptability or otherwise of republican political prescriptions, but the meaning of freedom itself. The main thrust of our arguments was that republicans fail to provide an adequate justification for their rejection of the negative definition of freedom assumed by contemporary liberals. The liberal definition can, in our view, be shown to imply exactly those judgements about unfreedom that the republicans use to motivate the rejection. Even if republicans are right in accusing certain liberals of a blindness to the freedom-restricting nature of domination, they are wrong to lay the blame on the negative conception of freedom itself, and should instead accuse those liberals of failing fully to comprehend certain characteristics and implications of their own conception of freedom. Rather than doing this, they err with those liberals in embracing the same inadequate understanding of negative freedom and in seeing the liberal conception of freedom as therefore hostile to republican political prescriptions. In this article, I first attempt to clarify and reinforce the above line of reasoning by presenting it as an argument about the way in which freedom is related to certain forms of social power. These considerations support the claim, already advanced by Kramer and myself, that the negative view of freedom (or rather, a particular negative definition of freedom) implies comparative judgements about people’s freedom that are, to all intents and purposes, equivalent to those comparative judgements implied by the republican view of freedom (or rather, one influential republican definition of freedom). I call this thesis the “equivalent-judgements thesis”. According to the equivalent-judgements thesis, while two people are in disagreement about how freedom is to be defined, they can nevertheless be shown to give very similar answers to questions like “Who is freer than whom?”, “Has this person’s freedom been reduced?”, and “How is freedom distributed in society?”. Now the equivalent-judgements thesis constitutes an answer to the republican critique of negative freedom, but it does not amount to the claim that the two rival definitions of freedom are themselves equivalent, nor does it entail that one definition should be preferred to the other. Equivalent judgements about freedom might be reached because the phenomena respectively identified by the two definitions are ultimately the same (one being reducible to the other), but they might also be reached because the two phenomena are distinct but empirically correlated. This is a point that my previously published critique of the republican conception failed to clarify. In the present contribution, I therefore go on to ask whether and how far the phenomena identified by republican and liberal conceptions of freedom can indeed be thought of as distinct.