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From Freedom to Liberty: The Construction of a Political Value
Abstract
Philosophy & Public Affairs 30.1 (2001) 3-26
My subject is freedom and in particular freedom as a political value. Many discussions of this topic consist of trying to define the idea of freedom, or various ideas of freedom. I do not think that we should be interested in definitions. I leave aside the very general philosophical point that if we mean, seriously, definitions, there are no very interesting definitions of anything. There is a more particular reason. In the case of ethical and political ideas, what puzzles and concerns us is the understanding of those ideas -- in the present case, freedom -- as a value for us in our world. I do not mean that we are interested in it only as it figures in precisely our set of values -- meaning by that, those of a liberal democratic society. Manifestly it is equally part of our world that such ideas are also used by those who do not share our values or only partly share them -- those with whom we are in confrontation, discussion, negotiation, or competition, with whom in general we share the world. Indeed, we will disagree among ourselves about freedom within our own society. We experience conflicts between freedom and other values, and -- a point I shall emphasize -- we understand some desirable measures as involving a cost in freedom.
Whatever our various relations may be with others in our world who do or do not share our conception of freedom, we will not understand our own specific relations to that value unless we understand what we want that value to do for us -- what we, now, need it to be in shaping our own institutions and practices, in disagreeing with those who want to shape them differently, and in understanding and trying to co-exist with those who live under other institutions.
In all their occurrences, these various conceptions or understandings of freedom, including the ones we immediately need for ourselves, involve a complex historical deposit, and we will not understand them unless we grasp something of that deposit, of what the idea of freedom, in these various connections, has become. This contingent historical deposit, which makes freedom what it now is, cannot be contained in or anticipated by anything that could be called a definition. It is the same here as it is with other values: philosophy, or as we might say a priori anthropology, can construct a core or skeleton or basic structure for the value, but both what it has variously become, and what we now need it to be, must be a function of actual history. In the light of this, we can say that our aim is not to define but to construct a conception of freedom.
I shall not attempt a general account of what might count as constructing one or another conception of freedom. One might say that the notion of construction applies at different levels. We need to construct a value of freedom specifically for us; and we need a more generic construction or plan of freedom which helps us to place other conceptions of it in a philosophical and historical space -- which shows us, one might say, how other specific conceptions might be constructed in their own right. Some of the questions raised by these requirements would simply be a matter of terminology, of how we might use the term 'construction.' But there is a more significant consideration which links these two levels. The conception of freedom we need for ourselves is both historically self-conscious and suitable to a modern society -- and those two features are of course related to one another. Because of this, our own specific and active conception of freedom, the one we need for our practical purposes, will contain implicitly the materials for a reflective understanding of the more general possibilities of construction.
However, it is just as important that the disputes that have circled around the various definitions and concepts of liberty do not just represent a set of verbal misunderstandings. They have been disagreements about something. There is even a sense in which they have been disagreements about some one thing. There must be a core, or a primitive...
... After all, as Nietzsche (1995) was keen to emphasize, human beings can tolerate almost anything if they see the sense in it. 10 I n t e r e s t i n g l y , these variants echo two moral doctrines criticized by political realists as prototypically moralist (Williams 2005b). Kantian deontology focuses on the type of action to be taken, dictating absolute limits that no actor can ever cross, no matter how tempting the consequences. ...
... They do not deny all normative claims or complacently accept any status quo, as is sometimes implied by their critics (Estlund 2019). On the contrary, they acknowledge that we could not make sense of human beings at all without considering their capacity to make normative judgments: we can only survive in our dangerous world thanks to our ability to understand and distinguish what we do from what we should do (Williams 2012). And yet "within this very broad category of value-assessments there is a much smaller one of specifically 'moral' judgments" (Geuss 2016, 27). ...
This paper aims to offer a critique of a rigidly moralistic temperament in public discourse from the perspective of political realism. It unpacks three types of moralism in public discourse, and for each, it explains why it is normatively problematic from a realist perspective: ‘Moralist Causalism’ is the belief that moral preaching is an apt way to affect the world for the better; ‘Moralist Manicheism’ is a dichotomous division of the world between good and evil; ‘Moralist Absolutism’ is the conviction that only morality matters when we answer the question, ‘What should we do?’. The paper then turns these negative criticisms into a positive recipe for how to look realistically at what is valuable in the world. First, there are not only multiple values in the world but also different sources of values (epistemic, instrumental, aesthetic…) which may conflict with one another. We call this requirement ‘Meta-Normative Pluralism’. Second, politics is pivotal because it is the sphere where the clashes among all other spheres of value are authoritatively resolved—a role which moralists usurp for morality.
... While realist authors are right in viewing politics as essentially yielding 'order, protection, safety, trust, and the condition of cooperation' (Williams, 2005a: 3), sometimes they overplay stability as the optimal strategy with which to reach these aims. ...
... For a recent overview of Machiavelli's interest in democracy, see McQueen (forth.). 5 However, both liberty(Hall, 2015;Williams, 2005a) and equality(Jubb, 2015) can be justified realistically. The general idea is that realist theories seriously consider the 'realism constraint' that political opposition and real motivation pose on normative theorising, rather than arising from 'purified regulative ideas'(Hall, 2017: 288, 397). ...
Is democracy a realistic political ideal? This paper historically recovers and normatively assesses Machiavelli's intuition that democratic institutions are realistically desirable in virtue of their resilience. The paper takes inspiration from Machiavelli's work in two ways. Methodologically, it argues that there is a distinctive realist normativity based on political virtues, i.e., those skills that are instrumentally required to thrive in politics. Substantively, it probes Machiavelli's idea that the most important political virtue, for both individuals and institutions, is resilience: the ability to continuously adapt to new circumstances. Machiavelli observes that democratic regimes are very resilient because, while individuals cannot change their character to adapt to new circumstances, democracies can just change the individual in charge. The paper then refines Machiavelli's intuition by building on the contemporary distinction between stability and resilience. It claims that authoritarian regimes are more stable, and yet less resilient. Democracies are instead characterized by a continuous flux of political outputs, which makes them seemingly wavering, and yet better equipped to experiment with unconventional adaptations that allow societies to survive extraordinary challenges. The two different literatures thus complement each other. The debate on resilience usefully clarifies and systematizes Machiavelli's intuition. Conversely, Machiavelli's work reveals the salience of resilience in politics, and shows why it counts as a realist political value.
... Such 16 These features of value conflicts are discussed in detail in Williams (1973) and Queloz (2024b). 17 On regret or a sense of loss as an acknowledgement of genuine conflicts of values, see Williams (1973Williams ( , 1981aWilliams ( , b, 2005a, Queloz (2024a), and Cueni (2024). 18 See MacIntyre (2007) and Williams (2005b, 136-37). ...
A key assumption fuelling optimism about the progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) in accurately and comprehensively modelling the world is that the truth is systematic: true statements about the world form a whole that is not just consistent, in that it contains no contradictions, but coherent, in that the truths are inferentially interlinked. This holds out the prospect that LLMs might in principle rely on that systematicity to fill in gaps and correct inaccuracies in the training data: consistency and coherence promise to facilitate progress towards comprehensiveness in an LLM’s representation of the world. However, philosophers have identified compelling reasons to doubt that the truth is systematic across all domains of thought, arguing that in normative domains, in particular, the truth is largely asystematic. I argue that insofar as the truth in normative domains is asystematic, this renders it correspondingly harder for LLMs to make progress, because they cannot then leverage the systematicity of truth. And the less LLMs can rely on the systematicity of truth, the less we can rely on them to do our practical deliberation for us, because the very asystematicity of normative domains requires human agency to play a greater role in practical thought.
... .), far from providing the necessary horizon of the democratic project, is something that puts it at risk" (p. 8) because, as Williams (2001) wrote, "political difference is of the essence of politics" (p. 6). As such, there is a question of whether it is possible or desirable to achieve "wholeness" in the classroom (p. ...
... 4 Williams readily recognises that it is a bad idea to try to ground liberalism in autonomy, because the political salience of the value of autonomy is entangled with the rise of the liberal state. But somehow this mechanism does not come to the fore in his analysis of the political value of liberty (Williams 2001). I cannot engage in a direct critique of this move here. ...
This paper examines how radical realism, a form of ideology critique grounded in epistemic rather than moral normativity, can illuminate the relationship between ideology and political power. The paper argues that radical realism can have both an evaluative and a diagnostic function. Drawing on reliabilist epistemology, the evaluative function shows how beliefs shaped by power differentials are often epistemically unwarranted, e.g. due to the influence of motivated reasoning and the suppression of critical scrutiny. The paper clarifies those mechanisms in order to address some recent critiques of radical realism. The paper then builds on those clarifications to explore the how tracing the genealogy of legitimation stories can diagnose the distribution of power in society, even if ideology does not play a direct stabilising role. This diagnostic function creates a third position in the debate on ideology between culturalists and classical Marxists, and it can help reconciling aspects of structural and relational theories of power.
... As opposed to the two other nuclear families, the social-democratic variety emphasizes the dependence of freedom on a conducive political environment. This means that the general role of the political in making freedom possible is increased (Williams 2001). Historically, the social-democratic understanding of the liberal script has its roots in the new liberalism that emerged in the 19th century as a reaction to the "social question" (Rosenblatt 2018: 220-33). ...
In this working paper, we aim to make the amorphous concept of “liberal script” more tangible, manifest, and concrete. We do so in three steps. First, we elaborate on the added value of the term “script” for the social sciences. While “script” has been used in other disci-plinary contexts, we translate it to the social scienc-es by delineating it from rival and more widespread terms like institution, order, practice, and ideology. Second, we map different methodological approach-es to the empirical study of what the liberal script is. We put forward a reconstructive approach that com-bines a sociological analysis with a philosophical fil-ter. Third, we engage into spelling out what the “liberal” in the liberal script could mean. We formulate theo-retical expectations about the content of the liberal script, its internal architecture, as well as its varieties.
... In 'From Freedom to Liberty', Williams (2005) sketches another pragmatic genealogical argument which he envisages as potentially leading to a justification of liberalism 23 . Let us imagine a hypothetical community sharing a language but no sophisticated technology. ...
Starting from the 'Dewey Lectures', Rawls presents his conception of justice within a contextualist framework, as an elaboration of the basic ideas embedded in the political culture of liberal-democratic societies. But how are these basic ideas to be justified? In this article, I reconstruct and criticize Rawls's strategy to answer this question. I explore an alternative strategy, consisting of a genealogical argument of a pragmatic kind-the kind of argument provided by authors like Bernard Williams, Edward Craig and Miranda Fricker. I outline this genealogical argument drawing on Rawls's reconstruction of the origins of liberalism. Then, I clarify the conditions under which this kind of argument maintains vindicatory power. I claim that the argument satisfies these conditions and that pragmatic genealogy can thus partially vindicate the basic ideas of liberal-democratic societies.
... The degree to which this requires a monopoly of violence is a separate question. Realists often think that the state's 'monopoly of legitimate physical violence' (Weber [1919] 2004, p. 33) is a necessary element of politics (Williams 2001) but some contemporary realists argue that dispersed coercion may be enough to sustain binding decisions, even without the monopoly of force (Raekstad 2018). Yet under present conditions, only modern states, given their monopoly of legitimate violence over a territory, seem to be able to provide order to large, conflicting social groups. ...
In this paper I unpack a realistic conception of politics by tightly defining its constitutive features: conflict and order. A conflict emerges when an actor is disposed to impose his/her views against the resistance of others. Conflicts are more problematic than moralists realize because they emerge unilaterally, are potentially violent, impermeable to content-based reason, and unavoidable. Order is then defined as an institutional framework that provides binding collective decisions. Order is deemed necessary because individuals need to cooperate to survive, but groups cannot spontaneously secure collective decisions and are prone to conflicts. Particularly, the fact that potentially violent conflicts emerge unilaterally means that order requires coercion. I conclude that mischaracterizing conflict and order leads to undesirable normative principles, and that this criticism can be leveraged not only against Rawlsian liberals who moralize conflicts away, but also against some agonists who underestimate the need for order and some communitarians who underplay both circumstances.
... Here, as he puts it, philosophy must involve itself in history in order to achieve what it sets out to achieve (2002, p. 93). Another example of a functional genealogy that is progressively tailored to a particular socio-historical situation is Williams's derivation of the modern liberal idea of liberty from a generic and primitive idea of freedom (Williams 2005b). justification when in fact they do not. ...
Can genealogical explanations affect the space of reasons? Those who think so commonly face two objections. The first objection maintains that attempts to derive reasons from claims about the genesis of something commit the genetic fallacy-they conflate genesis and justification. One way for genealogies to side-step this objection is to focus on the functional origins of practices-to show that, given certain facts about us and our environment, certain conceptual practices are rational because apt responses. But this invites a second objection, which maintains that attempts to derive current from original function suffer from continuity failure-the conditions in response to which something originated no longer obtain. This paper shows how normatively ambitious genealogies can steer clear of both problems. It first maps out various ways in which genealogies can involve non-fallacious genetic arguments before arguing that some genealogies do not invite the charge of the genetic fallacy if they are interpreted as revealing the original functions of conceptual practices. However, they then incur the burden of showing that the conditions relative to which practices function continuously obtain. Taking its cue from the genealogies of E. J. Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker, the paper shows how model-based genealogies can avoid continuity failures by identifying bases of continuity in the demands we face.
... There is a strong intuition, especially in autonomy-supporting cultures, in favor of independence and freedom as something of intrinsic value. Outlaws like Jesse James and his brothers became "great American action heroes" (Robinson, 2007, p. 55), simply because they appeared to be utterly free: James was not free in a legal or political sense but rather in a pre-political or "primitive" sense (Williams, 2001). Given that James lived a life of crime and violence and was betrayed and executed by a member of his gang at age 34, it is not immediately evident how this unlimited freedom contributed to a good life. ...
Self-authorship has been established as the basis of an influential liberal principle of legislation and public policy. Being the author of one’s own life is a significant component of one’s own well-being, and therefore, is better understood from the viewpoint of the person whose life it is. However, most philosophical accounts, including Raz’s conception of self-authorship, rely on general and abstract principles rather than specific individual psychological properties of the person whose life it is. We elaborate on the principles of self-authorship on the basis of Self-Determination Theory, an empirically-based psychological theory that has been at the forefront of the study of autonomy and self-authorship for more than 45 years. Our account transcends distinctions between positive and negative freedom and attempts to pinpoint the exact properties of self-authorship within the psychological processes of intrinsic motivation and internalization. If a primary objective of public policy is to support self-authorship, then it should be devised on the basis of how intrinsic motivation and internalization can be properly supported. Self-Determination Theory identifies three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness. The satisfaction of these needs is associated with the support and growth of intrinsic tendencies and the advancement of well-being. Through this analysis, we can properly evaluate the significance of rationality, basic goods and the availability of options to self-authorship. Implications for law and policy are discussed with an emphasis on legal paternalism and what many theorists call “liberal perfectionism”, that is, the non-coercive support and promotion of the good life.
Is it possible to do ideology critique without morality? In recent years a small group of theorists has attempted to develop such an account and, in doing so, makes claim to a certain sort of “radical realism” distinguished by the ambition to ground political judgments and prescriptions in nonmoral values, principles, or concepts. This essay presents a twofold critique of this realist ideology critique (RIC) by first offering an internal critique of the approach and then arguing that the very attempt to do political theory generally—and ideology critique more specifically—in a way that abjures morality is misguided. In doing so, I contribute both to current debates around “new” ideology critiques and to contested questions about what it means to do political theory realistically.
How do we justify the normative standards to which we appeal in support of our moral progress judgments, given their historical and cultural contingency? To answer this question in a noncircular way, Elizabeth Anderson and Philip Kitcher appeal exclusively to formal features of the methodology by which a moral change was brought about; some moral methodologies are systematically less prone to bias than others and are therefore less vulnerable to error. However, we argue that the methodologies espoused by Anderson and Kitcher implicitly appeal to the substantive principle of “moral universalism.” This sets up the positive project of the paper: an attempt to vindicate moral universalism with a pragmatic genealogy. Using resources from cultural evolutionary theory and the history of ideas we argue that the universalistic norms widely committed to in many societies today have the function of maintaining cooperation in large anonymous groups. Furthermore, while universalistic norms play this instrumental role, their functional benefits are best secured when people following such norms do so for intrinsic rather than instrumental reasons. Finally, having elaborated our pragmatic genealogy, we close by considering how this genealogy should affect our commitment to moral universalism and how it can complement the methods of Anderson and Kitcher.
The norms and institutions of liberal democracy, market economy, and open society have become increasingly contested worldwide. Is the rise of illiberal and authoritarian contestations reflected in a decline of citizens’ acceptance of liberal
ideas and values? Are these contestations a response to unfulfilled promises, inherent tensions, or other unresolved challenges?
The comparative public opinion survey “Public Attitudes towards the Liberal Script” (PALS) provides data that lets scholars address these questions. The goal of PALS is first and foremost to measure attitudes towards what we call the liberal script. PALS was conducted in 26 countries (+50,000 respondents) using CAWI (quota sampling)
and CAPI (random probability sampling) modes of data collection. The sample draws from a diverse set of countries to provide a global perspective. Here, we give a comprehensive description of the conceptual framework, content, and methodology of the survey as a background paper for the overall endeavor.
The concept of negative liberty as non-interference is operative in the concept of a free market and stipulates that market relations remain outside the purview of social control. As a purported self-regulating system, however, the market functions as a system of necessity that facilitates and rules social life. I argue that Isaiah Berlin’s defense of negative liberty leads to a paradox as it entails subjection to the external necessity of a self-regulating market. The argument for the self-defeating nature of negative liberty relies on two philosophical insights that have their roots in G. W. F. Hegel’s theory of self-determination. First, negative liberty fails to account for the inner and outer conditions of freedom and thus reduces to mere whim or arbitrariness, subject to heteronomous forces but masquerading as license. Second, individual freedom is intersubjectively mediated in its deliberative process and framed by social and political institutions in its exercise; thus, free agency must be theorized as embedded agency. I challenge the association of freedom and the market and the automatic and unchallenged implication of deregulation and freedom. Deregulation, rather, leaves the community’s future development to the whims of economic players using a rhetoric of freedom as both lure and principle.
In this paper, I identify a central problem for conceptual engineering: the problem of showing concept-users why they should recognize the authority of the concepts advocated by engineers. I argue that this authority problem cannot generally be solved by appealing to the increased precision, consistency, or other theoretical virtues of engineered concepts. Outside contexts in which we already aim to realize theoretical virtues, solving the authority problem requires engineering to take a functional turn and attend to the functions of concepts. But this then presents us with the problem of how to specify a concept’s function. I argue that extant solutions to this function specification problem are unsatisfactory for engineering purposes, because the functions they identify fail to reliably bestow authority on concepts, and hence fail to solve the authority problem. What is required is an authoritative notion of conceptual function: an account of the functions of concepts which simultaneously shows why concepts fulfilling such functions should be recognized as having authority. I offer an account that meets this combination of demands by specifying the functions of concepts in terms of how they tie in with our present concerns.
In dieser Arbeit untersuche ich die Frage, ob die liberale Konzeptualisierung des Politischen adäquat ist, um genuin politische Kategorien wie Macht, Konflikt und Ungerechtigkeit zu erfassen. Ich identifiziere diese drei Kategorien unter Bezugnahme auf die nicht-ideale Theoriebildung, die realistische Kritik sowie die feministische soziale Standpunkttheorie. Ich argumentiere, dass das Rawlsianische Paradigma liberaler Theoriebildung weder genuin politische Kategorien wie politische Macht und Konflikte, noch den Begriff der Ungerechtigkeit einschließlich ihrer spezifisch epistemischen Dimension konzeptuell erfassen kann. Ich zeige, dass Judith Shklars konfliktiver Liberalismus sowohl konzeptuell als auch normativ in der Lage ist, diesen drei Herausforderungen der liberalen Theoriebildung produktiv zu begegnen und die genannten Kategorien zu konzeptualisieren. Ich zeige, dass Shklar eine genuin politische liberale Theorie formuliert, die politische Macht sowie deren notwendig asymmetrische Verteilung zum Ausgangspunkt nimmt. Die aus diesem Machtgefälle resultierenden Positionen politischer Machtlosigkeit und Marginalisierung führen wiederum zu einer konfliktiven politischen Dynamik. Ich zeige, dass Shklars Orientierung an der Perspektive der Marginalisierten Gemeinsamkeiten mit der sozialen Standpunkttheorie aufweist, und ihr Ansatz die situierte Epistemologie der Ungerechtigkeit integrieren kann, weshalb ich diesen als besonders emanzipativ verteidige. Daher schließe ich, dass Shklars konfliktiver Liberalismus den eingangs genannten Herausforderungen begegnet und eine adäquate liberale Theorie des Politischen darstellt.
This essay argues for the conceptual connection of legitimacy, resistance and ‘the people’ within liberal theories of public justification by making two primary claims: that legitimacy and resistance are mutually constitutive of one another and that together legitimacy and resistance are constitutive of an aspirational conception of ‘the people’. These claims revolve around the idea that the legitimacy of democratic regimes necessarily entails the questioning of that legitimacy through resistance, which concerns demands that say something about the makeup of ‘the people’. The concern is conceptual, examples of resistance showing how the conceptual connection manifests itself.
This review essay is occasioned by two books on the moral and political thought of William James. Sarin Marchetti’s Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James and Trygve Throntveit’s William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic pose crucial questions for how we are to frame, interpret, and assess the philosophical contributions of William James more than one hundred years after his passing. In offering interpretations of James as contributing to social and political questions through his moral philosophy, both books raise important questions that bear on contemporary debates in political philosophy between ideal theorists and political realists. If ideal theorists put moral philosophy first and extract a political vision therefrom, political realists seek to begin theoretical reflection in the specifically political circumstances of our lives. This review essay is centered on the following question: through which of these two lenses should the writings of William James be received?
The Long Arc of Legality breaks the current deadlock in philosophy of law between legal positivism and natural law by showing that any understanding of law as a matter of authority must account for the interaction of enacted law with fundamental principles of legality. This interaction conditions law's content so that officials have the moral resources to answer the legal subject's question, 'But, how can that be law for me?' David Dyzenhaus brings Thomas Hobbes and Hans Kelsen into a dialogue with H. L. A. Hart, showing that philosophy of law must work with the idea of legitimate authority and its basis in the social contract. He argues that the legality of international law and constitutional law are integral to the main tasks of philosophy of law, and that legal theory must attend both to the politics of legal space and to the way in which law provides us with a 'public conscience'.
The Long Arc of Legality breaks the current deadlock in philosophy of law between legal positivism and natural law by showing that any understanding of law as a matter of authority must account for the interaction of enacted law with fundamental principles of legality. This interaction conditions law's content so that officials have the moral resources to answer the legal subject's question, 'But, how can that be law for me?' David Dyzenhaus brings Thomas Hobbes and Hans Kelsen into a dialogue with H. L. A. Hart, showing that philosophy of law must work with the idea of legitimate authority and its basis in the social contract. He argues that the legality of international law and constitutional law are integral to the main tasks of philosophy of law, and that legal theory must attend both to the politics of legal space and to the way in which law provides us with a 'public conscience'.
Is the idea of the voluntary important? Those who think so tend to regard it as an idea that can be metaphysically deepened through a theory about voluntary action, while those who think it a superficial idea that cannot coherently be deepened tend to neglect it as unimportant. Parting company with both camps, I argue that the idea of the voluntary is at once important and superficial—it is an essentially superficial notion that performs important functions, but can only perform them if we refrain from deepening it. After elaborating the contrast between superficial and deepened ideas of the voluntary, I identify the important functions that the superficial idea performs in relation to demands for fairness and freedom. I then suggest that theories trying to deepen the idea exemplify a problematic moralization of psychology—they warp psychological ideas to ensure that moral demands can be met. I offer a three-tier model of the problematic dynamics this creates, and show why the pressure to deepen the idea should be resisted. On this basis, I take stock of what an idea of the voluntary worth having should look like, and what residual tensions with moral ideas this leaves us with.
Is the idea of the voluntary important? Those who think so tend to regard it as an idea that can be metaphysically deepened through a theory about voluntary action, while those who think it a superficial idea that cannot coherently be deepened tend to neglect it as unimportant. Parting company with both camps, I argue that the idea of the voluntary is at once important and superficial-it is an essentially superficial notion that performs important functions, but can only perform them if we refrain from deepening it. After elaborating the contrast between superficial and deepened ideas of the voluntary, I identify the important functions that the superficial idea performs in relation to demands for fairness and freedom. I then suggest that theories trying to deepen the idea exemplify a problematic moralization of psychology-they warp psychological ideas to ensure that moral demands can be met. I offer a three-tier model of the problematic dynamics this creates, and show why the pressure to deepen the idea should be resisted. On this basis, I take stock of what an idea of the voluntary worth having should look like, and what residual tensions with moral ideas this leaves us with.
Der Liberalismus wird aktuell unter der Perspektive seines Versagens als Paradigma einer progressiven Politik diskutiert. Globale Ungerechtigkeit und politische Konflikte stehen in diametralem Gegensatz zu seinem ursprünglichen Versprechen der gleichen Freiheit aller. Auf der Ebene politischer Theoriebildung gilt diese Kritik primär der derzeit prominentesten liberalen Theorie, John Rawls’ idealer Gerechtigkeitstheorie. Ich werde die methodologische und konzeptuelle Kritik nicht-idealer und realistischer Theoriebildung bezüglich der Defizite von Rawls’ Theorie kritisch diskutieren und zwei Defizite dieser Art der Theoriebildung feststellen: die Konzeptualisierung von Macht und Konflikt sowie ihre Unfähigkeit der Darstellung von Ungerechtigkeit. Davon ausgehend verteidige ich Judith Shklars Liberalismus der Furcht als eine Konzeptualisierung des Liberalismus, deren konfliktives Verständnis des Politischen einen Fokus auf Ungerechtigkeit eröffnet sowie einen Modus des Umgangs mit dieser entwickelt. Shklar wendet das konfliktive Potenzial ihres Liberalismus positiv und entwickelt so eine progressive Perspektive auf politischen Konflikt als notwendiger Komponente des Umgangs mit Ungerechtigkeit.
RESUMO:O artigo é um diálogo com o livro póstumo de Dworkin, Religion Without God. Em um primeiro momento, busco reconstruir fielmente o argumento de Dworkin neste livro e em outros escritos recentes, para então ver como a ideia dworkiniana de um direito geral à independência ética, em vez de um direito especial à liberdade religiosa, se aplicaria em um caso concreto. Em um segundo momento, eu analiso duas objeções que conservadores religiosos poderiam fazer contra o projeto liberal de Dworkin. A primeira objeção defende que o autor importa indevidamente para a religião uma distinção entre fato e valor que é típica da filosofia, mas não da religiosidade. A segunda objeção alega que a religião é um bem básico de caráter reflexivo, e não algo individualista como Dworkin dá a entender. Minha conclusão será de que a liberdade religiosa é um problema que demanda uma solução política, e que talvez a postura mais respeitosa em relação à religião reconheça que parte dela pode ser sacrificada em nome de outros valores que reputamos importantes.
Social and political concepts are indispensable yet historically and culturally variable in a way that poses a challenge: how can we reconcile confident commitment to them with awareness of their contingency? In this article, we argue that available responses to this problem–Foundationalism, Ironism, and Right Wittgensteinianism–are unsatisfactory. Instead, we draw on the work of Bernard Williams to tease out and develop a Left Wittgensteinian response. In present-day pluralistic and historically self-conscious societies, mere confidence in our concepts is not enough. For modern individuals who are ineluctably aware of conceptual change, engaged concept-use requires reasonable confidence, and in the absence of rational foundations, the possibility of reasonable confidence is tied to the possibility of critically discriminating between conceptual practices worth endorsing and those worth rejecting. We show that Left Wittgensteinianism offers such a basis for critical discrimination through point-based explanations of conceptual practices which relate them to the needs of concept-users. We end by considering how Left Wittgensteinianism guides our understanding of how conceptual practices can be revised in the face of new needs.
Realists and non-ideal theorists currently criticise Rawlsian mainstream liberalism for its inability to address injustice and political conflict, as a result of the subordination of political philosophy to moral theory (Bernard Williams), as well as an idealising and abstract methodology (Charles W. Mills). Seeing that liberalism emerged as a theory for the protection of the individual from conflict and injustice, these criticisms aim at the very core of liberalism as a theory of the political and therefore deserve close analysis. I will defend Judith N. Shklar’s liberalism of fear as an answer to these challenges. I will argue that the liberalism of fear maintains realism’s conflictual and inherently political thrust while also integrating a perspective on injustice. I will defend the claim that in contrast to the two aforementioned criticisms, the liberalism of fear develops its own normative standard from which political arrangements can be assessed. It does so by replacing the idealising approach to political philosophy with a non-utopian methodology, which opens a negative perspective on what is to be avoided in the political sphere, and how to detect and deal with injustice. Due to this standard, it is a liberal theory that is uniquely able to meet the realist and non-ideal challenge.
‘May the safety of the people be the supreme law!’ Cicero’s slogan is invoked to justify the claim that during a state of emergency, the political sovereign may do whatever in his judgement is required to secure the people, including acting against the law. It would seem to follow that when human rights are made into legal entitlements, they may legitimately be suspended along with other legal protections during a state of emergency. As a result, human rights would be relativized to what we can think of as a political judgement about when the safety of the people is not in issue. The author contests this claim through an argument based in Hobbes’s political and legal theory that the safety of the people is a juridical concept, as is sovereignty itself. The sovereign cannot act outside of law and his exercises of power have to be justified to his subjects as being according to law, where accordance with law requires respect for human rights. These ideas are located in the constitutionalist tradition which stretches back to Cicero and his much-misinterpreted slogan.
This chapter addresses the connection between the right to justification and power. It reconstructs Forst’s noumenal understanding of power by analyzing his argumentative steps from the recognition of reasons by subjects of power to the thesis that this recognition requires justification and, ultimately, to the conclusion that power requires justification. It then challenges different aspects of this account related to a conceptual link and a normative link between power and justification. As far as the conceptual link is concerned, the chapter critically explores Forst’s various premises in order to challenge his conclusion that power requires justification. This critical exploration raises doubts about Forst’s starting point that to be a subject of power is to be moved by reasons.
Questions of how to define public values (PVs), measure specific values and form a paradigm with broad applicability have perplexed elites for decades. This paper introduces a five-dimension integrated PV theory and evolves the paradigm of Public Value Account (PVA) proposed by Moore. Through the annual PVs “loss-creation” statistical table, PVA exhibits the process, in which area, in what ways, of PVs creating or losing in a “T- shaped” and open-ended account. A G20 case study using cross-sectional date for 2006 and 2016 is presented to prove the availability of PVA in trans-regional and inter-temporal comparison.
If a short list of keywords had to be proposed in order to explain why John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was a great liberal thinker, it would certainly include utility, liberty, and equality. These concepts express his view of liberalism, which lies between classical liberalism and a social, if not socialist, vision, calling for a significant intervention of the state. Apart from his insights in many domains of the individual, economic, social, and political life, Mill’s specific position in the history of liberalism justifies to devote particular attention to his work.
The articles comprising this thematic symposium suggest options for exploring the nexus between freedom and unfreedom, as exemplified by the British abolitionists’ anti-slavery campaign and the paradox of freedom. Each article has implications for how these abolitionists achieved their goals, social activists’ efforts to secure reparations for slave ancestors, and modern slavery (e.g., human trafficking). We present the abolitionists’ undertaking as a marketing campaign, highlighting the role of instilling moral agency and indignation through re-humanizing the dehumanized. Despite this campaign’s eventual success, its post-emancipation phase illustrates a paradox of freedom. After introducing mystification as an explanation for the obscuring rhetoric used to conceal post-emancipation violations of freedom during the West’s colonial phase, we briefly discuss the appropriateness of reparations. Finally, we discuss the contributions made by the articles in this thematic symposium.
This essay is critical of two standard interpretations of Hannah Arendt’s political thought which either praise her agonistic conception of politics or assume that she in fact embraces the need for normative institutional structures that give democratic pluralism form. I argue that Arendt’s emphasis on the existential primacy of freedom does not hold up to constitutional and political realities, especially within the context of the debates about civil rights in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. Paradoxically, it is precisely the existential primacy of freedom over rights, and over their institutional forms, that leaves democratic pluralism undefended. The stability of democratic pluralism requires a constitutional state, but Arendt consistently rejects the administrative demands of this state.
John Rawls is a central figure in contemporary philosophical and theoretical discussions of civil disobedience, which hope to contribute to significant political debates around when and in which forms political dissent, protest and resistance are appropriate. Ignoring the frame in which Rawls discusses civil disobedience has led critics to wrongly attack his theory for being too restrictive when it is more likely to be too permissive. That permissiveness depends on treating any political order which does not come close to fulfilling his theory of justice as absolutely illegitimate. In this sense, Rawls’ theory of political authority is binary and demanding. The problems his theory shares with most others, including his critics’, show that political authority needs to be disaggregated to make sense of the conditions under which different forms of protest and resistance are appropriate.
Il confine tra realismo politico e liberalismo non è teoricamente così chiaro come l’asprezza del dibattito sembrerebbe suggerire. Tra le due tradizioni non c’è una forte distinzione né sul piano metodologico né su quello sostanziale. Il dibattito sul metodo, che ruota attorno alle condizioni di realizzabilità dei propri ideali, non basta a qualificare una posizione come realista, perché questa preoccupazione è presente anche nella tradizione liberale della cosiddetta teoria non-ideale (Valentini 2012). Molti realisti, come Matt Sleat (Sleat 2014), Enzo Rossi (2015b) ed Edward Hall (2015), ritengono riduttivo assimilare le loro tesi a questa posizione. Nemmeno sul piano sostanziale è facile distinguere tra realismo e idealismo perché entrambi gli approcci sostengono istituzioni liberali e democratiche. I realisti in questo caso si limitano a criticare il modo in cui queste vengono giustificate dagli idealisti (Finlayson 2015). Per cercare di chiarire questo dibattito, è dunque necessario specificare che la «caratteristica che lo definisce […] è il tentativo di dare autonomia al politico» (Rossi e Sleat 2014, 2). Questo articolo mira perciò a mettere a fuoco la «concezione fondamentalmente diversa di che cos’è la politica» (Sleat 2014, 5) adottata dai realisti politici. Utilizzando questa come criterio è possibile distinguere il realismo dal liberalismo politico kantiano di ispirazione rawlsiana, variamente criticato nella letteratura come «umanesimo liberale» (Gray 2002a, xI), «moralismo politico» (Williams 2005, 1), «approccio ethic-first» (Geuss 2009, 1), e «alto liberalismo» (Galston 2010, 385).
Neither self-styled radical ‘realists’ who reject the sort of liberalism inspired by John Rawls, nor liberal ‘realists’ who reject other forms of apparently utopian politics, properly take the measure of how far their accounts of realism recall the historical political theory of nineteenth-century European Realpolitik. This article sketches the evolution of that style of political theory in the thought of its conceptual pioneer, August Ludwig von Rochau, and outlines the bases of his understanding of state power. Reconstructing his argument not only suggests an alternative genealogy for modern realism in political theory, but it also offers a challenge. For behind Rochau’s Realpolitik lies a strong judgment about how ideas are politically consequential only when aligned with state power under modernity, and that such alignments are both historically conditioned and difficult to judge. Rochau’s challenge for realism in contemporary liberal political theory implies that its general antipathy towards writing about the historical evolution of the state and its structural power threatens to leave it as unmoored from practical politics as the so-called ideal-theorists that realists so often profess to criticize.
Jean-Luc Nancy claims that the establishing of working definitions of rights, exemptions, and moral values in respect of freedom has tended to divert attention from any direct questioning of freedom itself. But what is it to question freedom without bringing in those ideas that ally freedom with education? To broach this point, this paper analyses the received discourse within philosophy concerning the idea of freedom, specifically its differentiation between negative and positive freedoms, considered as freedom of something: a genitive condition of human being. In reading of Martin Heidegger, I attempt to take a stance on the idea of freedom as a phenomenon that in education appears ‘as’ something. In order to illustrate and explore the phenomenon of freedom in education, finally, this paper addresses the five themes of freedom as possibility, as movement, as a leap, as language, and as thinking.
John Coggon argues that the important question for analysts in the fields of public health law and ethics is 'what makes health public?' He offers a conceptual and analytic scrutiny of the salient issues raised by this question, outlines the concepts entailed in, or denoted by, the term 'public health' and argues why and how normative analyses in public health are inquiries in political theory. The arguments expose and explain the political claims inherent in key works in public health ethics. Coggon then develops and defends a particular understanding of political liberalism, describing its implications for critical study of public health policies and practices. Covering important works from legal, moral, and political theory, public health, public health law and ethics, and bioethics, this is a foundational text for scholars, practitioners and policy bodies interested in freedoms, rights and responsibilities relating to health.
In my 2009 book Moral Realism as a Moral Doctrine, I argued that morality is objective in several distinct though overlapping senses, and I further maintained that questions about the objectivity of morality are substantive moral questions (albeit usually at high levels of abstraction). In the course of that book, I made several laudatory references to Ronald Dworkin’s well-known 1996 article ‘Objectivity and Truth’ as well as to some of his other writings. In regard to the two main themes of my book that have just been mentioned, I took myself to be firmly allied with Dworkin. Though Moral Realism as a Moral Doctrine adverts only occasionally to his work, it makes clear my esteem for his reconception of meta-ethics as a branch of ethics.At a few other junctures in my 2009 volume, however, I criticized Dworkin. My criticisms were focused not on his legal philosophy ─ with which I have sustainedly taken issue elsewhere ─ but instead on some of his ethical positions. One such position to which I took exception is his value-monism. That is, I took exception to his opting for the hedgehog side of the ancient hedgehog/fox dichotomy that was made famous in modern times by Isaiah Berlin. Dworkin’s allegiance to the former side of that dichotomy is starkly proclaimed by the title of his sprawlingly ambitious recent book Justice for Hedgehogs. In what follows, I will leave aside many sections of that impressive tome in order to concentrate on the main portion that deals with meta-ethics and on one portion that deals with the putative unity of value. Given that I am almost entirely in agreement with the former portion and largely in disagreement with the latter, this brief review will naturally impugn Dworkin’s assumption that his anti-Archimedeanism and his value-monism are integrally connected.
What is liberty? There are by now a number of familiar answers to this question. One such answer is that liberty consists in the absence of interference, in not being constrained against one’s will. Another is that liberty consists in self-mastery in the exercise of moral or political self-determination. A third is that liberty consists in the absence of arbitrary rule, in not being vulnerable to the whim of others. These answers can be seen as alternatives, among which you take your pick, refuting the others as somehow mistaken or wrong. This is reinforced, I believe, by the fact that definitions of freedom get to be associated with different ideological positions. Noninterference is “liberal” freedom,1 the absence of arbitrary rule is “republican” freedom, and the exercise of self-mastery or self-determination is perhaps “communitarian”, or “socialist.” Both the definitions, to put this starkly, and the ideological associations are, of course, simplistic and cover up a lot of variety. Unpacking that variety is not my concern here.2 Instead I will slightly shift focus and discuss the role played by the concept of liberty in our social and political theorizing. A general claim I wish to make is that the social world is too complex for any single one of these accounts to fill the part we seem to want “freedom” to play.
Freedom is often analysed in terms of the absence of intentionally imposed constraints. I defend the alternative view on which the relevant constraints are those for which some agent can be held morally responsible. I argue that this best captures the relation between freedom and respect. Berlin (1969) correctly points out that intentional restrictions exhibit ill will and hence are disrespectful. However, the same holds, I argue, for restrictions that are due to indifference. Berlin also observed that it would be counterintuitive if an agent could increase her freedom by changing her preferences. I criticize the argument that Dowding and Van Hees (2007, 2008) present according to which this observation counts in favour of explicating freedom in terms of intentionality.
What can--and what can't--philosophy do? What are its ethical risks--and its possible rewards? How does it differ from science? InPhilosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, Bernard Williams addresses these questions and presents a striking vision of philosophy as fundamentally different from science in its aims and methods even though there is still in philosophy "something that counts as getting it right." Written with his distinctive combination of rigor, imagination, depth, and humanism, the book amply demonstrates why Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Spanning his career from his first publication to one of his last lectures, the book's previously unpublished or uncollected essays address metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as well as the scope and limits of philosophy itself. The essays are unified by Williams's constant concern that philosophy maintain contact with the human problems that animate it in the first place. As the book's editor, A. W. Moore, writes in his introduction, the title essay is "a kind of manifesto for Williams's conception of his own life's work." It is where he most directly asks "what philosophy can and cannot contribute to the project of making sense of things"--answering that what philosophy can best help make sense of is "being human." Philosophy as a Humanistic Disciplineis one of three posthumous books by Williams to be published by Princeton University Press.In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argumentwas published in the fall of 2005.The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophyis being published shortly after the present volume.
Using the history of political thought and real-world political contexts, including South Africa and the recent global financial crisis, this book argues that power is integral to freedom. It demonstrates how freedom depends upon power, and contends that liberty for all citizens is best maintained if conceived as power through political representation. Against those who de-politicise freedom through a romantic conception of ’the people’ and faith in supposedly independent judicial and political institutions, Lawrence Hamilton argues that real modern freedom can only be achieved through representative and participative mechanisms that limit domination and empower classes and groups who become disempowered in the conflicts that inevitably pervade politics. This is a sophisticated contribution to contemporary political theory that will be of interest to scholars and students of history, politics, philosophy, economics, sociology, development studies and Southern African studies.
In this wide-ranging interdisciplinary work, Paul W. Kahn argues that political order is founded not on contract but on sacrifice. Because liberalism is blind to sacrifice, it is unable to explain how the modern state has brought us to both the rule of law and the edge of nuclear annihilation. We can understand this modern condition only by recognizing that any political community, even a liberal one, is bound together by faith, love, and identity. Putting Liberalism in Its Placeis a real success. It is learned, clear, forceful, and loaded with quotable lines. Most importantly, it takes a much needed shot across the bow of academic liberal theory.
In Andrea Sangiovanni’s words, practice-dependent theorists hold that “[t]he content, scope, and justification of a conception of [a given value] depends on the structure and form of the practices that the conception is intended to govern”. They have tended to present this as methodologically innovative, but here I point to the similarities between the methodological commitments of contemporary practice-dependent theorists and others, particularly P. F. Strawson in his Freedom and Resentment and Bernard Williams in general. I suggest that by looking at what Strawson and Williams did, we can add to the reasons for adopting one form or another of practice-dependence. The internal complexity of the practices we hope our principles will govern may require it. However, this defence of practice-dependence also puts pressure on self-identified practice-dependence theorists, suggesting that they need to do more work to justify the interpretations of the practices their theories rely on.
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