The social bases of freedom

ABSTRACT

I argue social and political freedom is not primarily about the absence of constraints, whether those constraints be in the form of interference or domination. Instead, social freedom is centrally about what makes us free. That is, the question of social freedom is first and foremost about determining the positive preconditions of being a free person within society. Social freedom is about what I call the social bases of freedom, or those features of our social world that we have a reason to rely on in making plans or going about our business.

KEYWORDS:

• Freedom
• liberty
• republicanism
• status

Acknowledgments

Previous versions of this manuscript were presented at the 2018 MPSA conference in Chicago, University of Georgia, University of Virginia, and at Princeton University. In addition to those audiences, I would like to thank Colin Bird, Michael Kates, George Klosko, Ted Lechterman, Erin Miller, Emma Saunders-Hastings, Jordan Thomson, Stephen White, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For interpretations of social freedom as modally demanding, see List (2006); Pettit (2015, pp. 2–3); Southwood (2015, pp. 508–511); and List and Valentini (2016).

2. While Pettit in later work abandons the language of ‘arbitrary interference’ in favor of ‘uncontrolled interference,’ we can read ‘uncontrolled’ as an interpretation of arbitrary (Pettit, 2012, pp. 58–59).

3. There is some question as to whether non-domination is equivalent to robust non-interference, or whether robust non-interference is a conception of freedom in its own right (e.g. List & Valentini, 2016).

4. In earlier work, Pettit makes a similar distinction between conditioning and compromising (1997, pp. 75–76). It is not clear why Pettit abandons the earlier language.

5. It is important to stress that we are discussing practical deliberation in a normative key as opposed to a descriptive one. The notion of ‘registering in practical deliberation’ being used here and in what follows is a normative idealization of sorts, and not an empirical description. It is about what one has reason to believe.

6. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this case.

7. This would be parallel to the worry about desire-dependent accounts of freedom (e.g. you are free to the extent you are able to do the things you want to do) that you can make yourself more socially free by minimizing your desires (see Berlin, 1969, pp. xxxviii–xxxix).

8. For an expanded and accessible discussion of hostile design, see Lam (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Harrison Frye

Harrison Frye is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Georgia. He works on the nature and value of social freedom and the moral dimensions of the market. His publications have appeared in journals such as Politics, Philosophy, and Economics and Economics and Philosophy.