The Antinomies of Liberty
Some Thoughts on Eric MacGilvray’s “Liberal Freedom. Pluralism, Polarization, and Politics” (CUP, 2022)
Nathan enjoys spending time on X. He finds discussions on this platform entertaining, though sometimes rude. He thinks that things have changed since Elon Musk took control of the social network to turn it into a political and ideological weapon. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, however. Nathan is happy to connect with people who think like him. True, it’s good to see that some people agree with you and don’t systematically buy the “truths” served by corrupt mainstream media. And, hell, what Nathan does during his free time is his own business, not yours. He doesn’t want to justify his leisure choices to anyone else, nor what he chooses to believe in. Those people who are considering banning X in Europe are just a bunch of corrupt socialists.
Andrea has left X last year. She has never been fully comfortable with this social network – and with any social network by the way – but everybody was there. It was the place to be in a connected world. Things changed when Musk arrived, and she left behind the hatred and misinformation that polluted the platform without any remorse. However, Andrea sees that many people continue to go on the platform. She has read studies that strongly suggest that social networks have adverse psychological effects on individuals, especially the youngest. She fully supports the Australian ban for teenagers below 16 for instance. She is also concerned that X contributes to the political polarization that makes her country more difficult to govern. She sees X as part of a broader threat to political and civic liberties and applauds those courageous European politicians who dare to stand against the new “techno-oligarchs.”
These two mini-portraits describe the kind of stances that all of us can nowadays take regarding issues where considerations of freedom are at stake. Current debates about social networks, with the talks now more and more frequent that X could/should be banned in Europe, provide a good illustration. From Nathan’s perspective, no doubt Andrea is one of those “socialists” who want to shut down people’s voices and curb their freedom. From Andrea’s viewpoint, Nathan is probably one of those libertarian fanatics who, behind the excuse of freedom, sides with the misogynists, the racists, and the despots. However, both of them talk about freedom. It’s just that they disagree about what freedom is and what this value implies in terms of practices and policies. Is there nonetheless a way to reconcile them?
Political philosopher Eric MacGilvray’s book Liberal Freedom. Pluralism, Polarization, and Politics also starts with small vignettes like this to give its reader the feel of two general sorts of freedom (or liberty) that, very often, collide.[1] These two general forms of freedom, which MacGilvray calls republican freedom and market freedom, are however the two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other, at the cost of otherwise succumbing to utopianism or authoritarianism – and the former is a sure path to the latter. Any liberal society must strike a balance between republican and market freedom. The relation between the two is however not settled in advance. While they are both needed, republican and market freedom can easily ground inconsistent demands and viewpoints, as the two vignettes above illustrate. It is the charge of liberal politics to find a way to articulate both so that individuals can peacefully coexist and flourish individually as well as collectively despite their many disagreements about the good life and the just.
MacGilvray’s book offers a refreshing, even if controversial, characterization of liberalism. Its thesis is indeed “that contemporary academic liberalism rests on a flawed and idiosyncratic understanding of what liberalism is” (p. 121). By “academic liberalism,” MacGilvray essentially means “Rawlsian liberalism” and more generally the social contract form of liberalism that Rawls has revived in the 1970s. He argues, quite convincingly, that social contract liberalism is based on the hopeless quest for fundamental principles that would ground a unanimous agreement on rules and institutions governing society. In this narrow version of liberalism, justice rather than freedom is the primary concern and, if any agreement there is, it must be on principles of justice. In social contract liberalism, politics no longer takes the driver’s seat. Everything is fixed by principles, rules, and institutions that everybody, by assumption, consents (or would have consented) to. Disagreement is itself settled by rules adopted in advance. There is no political discretion, nothing to make compromise about. The problem with this liberal conception is that it is out of place in polarized societies where, as a matter of fact, persons no longer share a public political culture based on which they can find an agreement on liberal principles of justice. Though he doesn’t put things like this, in substance MacGilvray argues that social contract liberalism is fine in a society of liberal persons who agree on what just institutions are, it’s largely irrelevant elsewhere.
The alternative liberalism that MacGilvray elaborates on puts freedom back on the frontline as the main value of the liberal society. However, as we know, freedom is actually not a single homogenous value but rather a complex articulation of different considerations that may easily conflict. MacGilvray’s “freedom liberalism” finds inspiration in the writing of authors who displayed a deep understanding of this aspect and never had the pretense to elaborate a finely streamed theoretical system ordering the different forms of freedom within a conception of justice. Chapter 4 in particular discusses the “tragic liberalism” of Tocqueville, the “individualistic liberalism” of Constant, and the “progressive liberalism” of Mill, as well as (more briefly) elements from the “new liberalism” of figures like Hobson or Dewey. This is a very heterogeneous set of authors, but their views share an important feature. They were all, in one way or another, a response to the fast-changing economic, social, and political conditions marking the emergence of Modernity. Like Constant and even more Tocqueville, they were aware of the new democratic political reality, its potentialities but also its dangers. Like Mill and the new liberals, they were also concerned by the consequences for masses of industrialization, with the rise of poverty along with an unprecedented creation of wealth. Their liberalism (like the one of some of their indirect successors in the 20th century such as Aron or Berlin) resists any attempt at theoretical systematization precisely because it is sensitive to what I would call the “antinomies of liberty,” i.e., the fact that liberty is a complex value that makes inconsistent demand on individuals and societies.[2]
MacGilvray’s book focuses on one of these antinomies, between republican and market freedom. Contrary to what is usually assumed by political philosophers, MacGilvray contends that freedom is not a property of actions but rather a property of persons. A free person is one whom a particular status is ascribed to. The nature of this status differs between republic and market freedom. A free person in the republican sense is responsible and viewed as accountable for her acts. As its name suggests (and as I’ve discussed in my previous post), republican freedom is conceptualized in terms of non-domination. To be free in the republican sense is to be immune from the arbitrary will of someone else.[3] Being dominated – the fact that one’s choices and life are guided by the possibility that someone else arbitrarily forces one to do something – undermines one’s responsibility. In the paradigmatic example of republicanism, even if the slaves were not actually coerced, they could not nonetheless be regarded as responsible for their acts because they remain subjugated to the will of their master. That disqualifies the slave from any pretension of self-governance. To self-govern, you have to be regarded as accountable by others. Self-governance is typically achieved if persons, thanks to their status, can decide how to live, not in the individualistic sense, but collectively. Modernity means that one’s fate is (largely) not in one’s hands. Republican freedom nonetheless demands that each person has sufficient control over their destiny. This can only be achieved by political (and probably democratic) means.
Market freedom is the domain of non-responsibility. A free person in the market sense can act as they see fit without having to provide any reason to others. MacGilvray rightly notes that market freedom extends beyond commercial transactions of property rights. Market freedom is indeed more generally coextensive with the domain of sovereignty delineated by “jurisdictional rights.” It therefore also includes actions covered by privacy and association rights, e.g., what you decide to watch or do on your computer, or whom you decide to marry. There are many reasons to insist that some level of market freedom should be guaranteed to everyone – MacGilvray provides a list of sixteen such reasons, ranging from efficiency considerations and benefits from experimentation to skepticism about paternalism. In some cases, republican and market freedom seem to go hand-in-hand. This is something recognized by some neo-republican authors who acknowledge that market freedom disperses power and makes one less vulnerable to the arbitrary will of powerful persons. However, it is also easy to see that very often, conflicting reasons will militate to make one responsible and non-responsible for the same act. This is at this stage that liberal politics becomes central.
The two vignettes with which I’ve started this discussion illustrate one version of the conflict between republican and market freedom. The person I’ve called Nathan expresses a firm commitment in market freedom, at least insofar as going on social networks is concerned. Andrea probably illustrates a more nuanced position but decidedly tilts toward the primacy of republican freedom, again, insofar as social networks are the issue at stake. Two sets of considerations are clashing. Unconditional freedom of expression on the one hand, mental well-being and fear of undesirable political consequences on the other. The former is paradigmatic non-responsibility. The latter quite the contrary expresses the judgment that, as individuals-qua-citizens, we are responsible for what we do on the internet because this has self-governing implications for everybody. Note that in the previous sentence, I’ve italicized “self-governing.” That my action has potential effects on you is not enough to make me responsible, for otherwise market competition would automatically be ruled by republican, not market, freedom. Hence, where market freedom stops and where republican freedom starts is not settled by a fundamental principle (such as the harm principle or a principle of justice). It is settled collectively by individuals in their quality of self-governed beings. This has a huge implication: whatever the extent of market freedom that a society is willing to grant, republican freedom is, at the bottom, the only source of legitimacy. The only way for Andrea and Nathan to solve their disagreement about X is political.
This claim has corollaries. Neither libertarians nor “neoliberals” are liberals once this account of liberal freedom is granted. This is relatively straightforward regarding the former and their principled (even if sometimes fake) rejection of politics.[4] This is more subtle for the latter but, in substance, the argument is that neoliberals put too much confidence in their faith that governance (including economic competition) can entirely proceed through impersonal rules – a belief that is indeed at the core of Hayek’s social and political philosophy.[5] In both cases, republican freedom is altogether ignored, and “governance” is left to the (non-)responsibility of the market. Politics is either rejected or reduced to untouchable rules.
Another corollary is that right-wing and left-wing critics of liberalism address in reality features of modernity rather than liberalism:
“Critics of liberalism who are concerned about the social consequences of those developments – who complain, for example, about the rise of secularism, technocracy, colonialism, and capitalism – are not really objecting to liberalism; they are objecting to modernity itself: after all, nonliberal societies have been just as profoundly implicated in an affected by these developments as liberal ones… The essential point for our purposes is that liberalism is not coextensive with modernity, it is a particular way of responding to the social and political forces that modernity has unleashed.” (p. 184-5)
This is a thought-provoking point. If critics are not satisfied with the liberal response to modernity, they have to propose an alternative, one in which either republican freedom or market freedom (or both) are suppressed. In MacGilvray’s framework, that implies either authoritarianism or a form of market utopianism that, ultimately, is also authoritarian in its own rights. So, there is no alternative to respond to modernity than a liberal answer, though it can take a large range of shapes.
Let me finish this already long essays with a small number of more personal comments. Though he doesn’t explicitly address this point, I think that MacGilvray’s account provides an original though partial interpretation of the mechanisms behind the rise of populism. On the one hand, some populist voters may be motivated by a more or less articulated willingness to recover control over their destiny, a control they lost (or never had) due to the mass effects of modernity. They want to recover control of their borders, their industry, of the social mores that make up their social environment, and so on. On the other hand, some populist voters (especially in the U.S. but also in Germany[6]) quite the contrary reject all forms of political authority (the political authority that forces them to wear masks or to abide by rules of inclusivity). They conceive freedom in the very narrow “don’t tread on me” sense and view all forms of coercion as illegitimate. In the former case, populist politics is viewed as the reaffirmation of republican freedom to the detriment of market freedom. In the latter case, populist politics is more a pragmatic means to realize absolute market freedom. This doesn’t seem to exactly correspond to the distinction between left-wing and right-wing populism, especially as we find both cases in the latter. It suggests however that populist politics is an authoritarian response to what many regard as the incapacity of liberal politics to respond to the aporias of modernity.
Besides, there are several aspects of MacGilvray’s account that the academic philosopher (or economist for that matter) may wish to discuss. For instance, it’s unclear what is gained exactly by making freedom a property of persons rather than of acts. Probably partly due to this theoretical choice, MacGilvray is silent about the role of rules and institutions that can organize the interplay between republican freedom (democratic political institutions) and market freedom (the economic institutions of capitalism). Also, one could argue with what can be viewed as a reductionist characterization of market freedom in terms of non-responsibility. Again, social interactions, especially market ones, rely on a variety of norms and rules. There are a great many ways to organize “non-responsible” social interactions and the republican/market distinction seems insufficient to account for the many debates in liberal societies about how to provide specific goods and the role played (or not) by trust, solidarity, or reciprocity in social interactions. Finally, one may find that MacGilvray’s rejection of social contract theory and the idea that liberalism is tied to the issue of justification is excessive and that his account is in principle compatible with a non-Rawlsian version of social contract liberalism. These are however arcane issues for which I’ll leave the exploration to more specialized outlets.[7]
As a final note, a thought that may come to the mind of all readers, not only academic ones, is that MacGilvray’s book leaves us in a relatively uncomfortable practical position. On the one hand, because seemingly the only alternatives to liberalism are authoritarian or utopian, we may definitely want to stick with one form or another of liberal society. On the other hand, it doesn’t give us any guidance about the concrete forms that such a society could take. Again, this may due to the fact that MacGilvray doesn’t discuss rules and institutions. This is a significant limit. The array of socioeconomic and political orders that are plausibly compatible with the requirements of liberal politics is quite large. In a way, this is reassuring. However, many will be dissatisfied with this indeterminacy. For instance, what can be answered to those (like this reader) who think that a strong and wide system of private property rights is not an option but a requirement for a free society. Or what about the best way to organize self-governance in a society where voters may display an unwillingness or an inability to endorse the kind of responsibility that republican freedom involves? These are questions that belong to the level of what the political philosopher John Tomasi calls “political theory,” in contrast with issues located at the more abstract level of “political philosophy.”[8] MacGilvray’s book is an illuminating discussion of the latter, elaborating on the implications of what I’ve called the antinomies of liberty. It doesn’t really address the former. More metaphorically, we know where the highest peaks we want to climb are, we just don’t know which one to aim at and how, yet.
[1] Eric MacGilvray, Liberal Freedom: Pluralism, Polarization, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
[2] For a very nice 20th-century example of the treatment of what I call the antinomies of liberty, see Raymond Aron, An Essay on Freedom (World Pub. Co, 1970).
[3] See for instance Philip Pettit, On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
[4] MacGilvray has a nice argument about the fact that libertarians tend to use two mutually incompatible reasons justifying the exclusiveness of market freedom, see pp. 86-91.
[5] See for instance Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order (The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
[6] See Carolin Amlinger, Oliver Nachtwey, Offended Freedom: The Rise of Libertarian Authoritarianism (Polity Press, 2024). These two German sociologists argue, based on interviews, that the profile of AfD voters corresponds to what they call “libertarian authoritarianism.”
[7] John Thrasher addresses some of them in his discussion of MacGilvray’s book in the Independent Review.
[8] John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
I'm increasingly sceptical of (most streams of) liberalism, because of the centrality of market freedom, which often comes at the expense of political freedom. The result is that liberals regularly capitulate to the far right, when the alternative is socialism. That happened with Mussolini and Hitler, and is happening again today. AfD and Fidesz both started out as liberal parties. The UK Liberals went in with the Tories, even as the latter drifted from centre-right to far right. Macron has repeatedly tried to put together a government reliant on Le Pen rather than deal with the left.
As a point in the other direction, I plan to read Matt McManus on liberal socialism, to see how he addresses these issues