Book Review: Freedom Is Power: Liberty through Political Representation, by Lawrence Hamilton

• Author: Laurence Piper
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591716688266
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

986
Political Theory 46(6)
8. Ibid.
9. Tucson Herpetological Society v. Salazar, 566 F.3d 870, 9th Cir. 2009.
10. Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Inc. v. Servheen, 665 F.3d 1015, 9th Cir. 2011.
Freedom Is Power: Liberty through Political Representation, by Lawrence Hamilton.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Reviewed by: Laurence Piper, Professor of Political Studies, University of the Western
Cape, South Africa
DOI: 10.1177/0090591716688266
Hamilton is a republican, albeit a deeply uncommon one, who holds that the
fundamental and complex interconnectedness of modern society means that
freedom requires the exercise of power in individual and group and national
domains. This demanding conception of freedom is rooted in a Marxian con-
ception of freedom as the capacity to bring about a choice, as well as to make
that choice at all. Thus, Hamilton defines freedom as the “combination of my
ability to determine what I will do and my power to do it—that is, bring it
about” (10). It is this definition that located in a theory of contemporary
social and political life, yields the Hegelian style synthesis of “freedom as
power” across four domains.
Hence freedom as power requires (a) the power to overcome existing
obstacles in my life, (b) the power to determine who governs, (c) the power
to resist the disciplining power of the community, and (d) the power to deter-
mine social and economic environment via control over representatives (95).
Critically, Hamilton notes that these domains are not definitional, so much as
a list of the ways in which freedom depends on power, and further that, for
the individual, there is more to freedom than dependence of power in these
ways as there is always a personal and subjective component to freedom. For
society more widely, and specifically for groups, Hamilton believes that his
account offers “objective” and “necessary” conditions for freedom. They are
objective because they are shared by all in a society, and necessary because
all in that society need them too (96).
Hamilton’s account means that securing freedom is demanding as it
requires constant work by both individuals and groups on many fronts. In
addition, it is difficult work, as Hamilton follows Machiavelli in imagining
politics in agonistic terms of group (and usually class) struggle (38–49).
Hence, he conceives of democracy as about institutionalised conflict between

---

Book Reviews
987
contending groups, and stands in significant contrast to familiar republican
accounts of democracy as about constructing the “common good” and or “the
people.” Freedom may require that citizens are empowered to participate in
decision making in a free state, but there is no “people” undifferentiated by
needs and interests. Rather, groups fights for themselves in the political pro-
cess, and cannot be...