Human freedom: from pericles to measurement.

• Author: McMahon, Fred
• Position: Essay

Although people have been seeking freedom for millennia, it has not been freedom for all--excluded were slaves, serfs, women, outsiders, the defeated, and so on. That changed in the past few centuries as the circle of those considered deserving of freedom expanded. Along the way, a rigorous debate on freedom and what it is took root, blossoming during the Enlightenment when the great freedom philosophers explored both the nature of freedom and what came to be viewed as a universal right to it. They also identified the relationship between economic freedom, including property rights, and other freedoms.

It seems undeniable that the circle of freedom has expanded, but the very concept is one of the most contested ideas in political and philosophical discourse as well as one of the most vital. The contests run along several fronts, which can be transposed to the following questions: What is freedom? Who has freedom? Is freedom always good? Is more freedom always better? What are the consequences of freedom in different areas of human endeavor? How is freedom achieved? How is it made stable and secure? How is it smothered and ultimately extinguished?

All subsequent questions depend on the answer to that first question: What is freedom? Without an objective measure, it is impossible to determine whether action X leads to increases or decreases in freedom, whether it lends stability to freedom or causes instability, or whether freedom leads to superior outcomes. Efforts to measure freedom have emerged only in the last quarter-century or so. Unfortunately, these efforts have been flawed, blurring various definitions of freedom, confusing "other good things" with freedom, using subjective rather than objective measures, and either failing to account for economic freedom or focusing exclusively on it (See Sidebar 2).

The Human Freedom Index (HFI) project--a joint venture of the Fraser Institute in Canada, the Fiberales Institut in Germany, and the Cato Institute in the United States--aims to provide a durable, comprehensive, and objective measure of freedom. This article begins with Isaiah Berlin's 1958 essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" and then examines earlier influential views of freedom--detailing the philosophical underpinnings of the HFI, which we hope will become an important contribution to the canon of liberty.

Berlin's Concepts of "Positive" and "Negative" Freedom

Berlin's essay examines two concepts: "negative" freedom and "positive" freedom. The concept of negative freedom, which Berlin favors, concerns lack of humanly imposed barriers to action. "By being free in this sense I mean not being interfered with by others. The wider the area of non-interference, the wider my freedom" ([1958] 2002, 170). In Berlin's view, this concept of freedom, which he traces to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, is the only one having empirically determinate meaning. By contrast, the concept of positive freedom is metaphysical. Positive freedom involves freeing oneself from whatever constraints one imposes on oneself. This enables the person to find his or her true self. It implies some sort of higher and lower plane of being, with the higher plane freeing itself from constraints imposed by the lower plane. For example, Communists would have perceived class consciousness as part of a lower self, blocking the real freedom one experiences under the higher form of "socialist liberty."

As Berlin explains, "positive freedom" is also called "autonomy," meaning self-control or control by reason rather than control by one's personal passions. In short, it is the freedom to govern oneself autonomously and is different from the freedom to do as one wishes because individuals may wish to do what their ideally rational self would disapprove of. The definition of positive freedom depends on a metaphysical theory of the self--conceived as divided into will, reason, and desire. Berlin distinguishes between two variations of positive freedom. He has no objection to "positive freedom" conceived as individual choice--for example, voluntarily joining a religious order, which a person can also voluntarily leave. He notes that this choice is in fact another side of negative freedom--an individual choosing what to do free of constraint.

However, he spends much more time discussing what he views as a malignant form of positive freedom, which he views as an attack on negative freedom. The danger of taking positive freedom as the paradigm of freedom, for Berlin, is if people may be unfree in acting as they wish and freer in acting in some other--more rational, more moral, and so on--way, the state has the justification to treat people like children who need to be told what to do in the same manner that parents tell children they have to go to school because they really do want education even though they don't realize it. If people don't know what their higher, more rational selves would choose, it is possible for a tyrant to declare they would choose to submit to him if they knew their true selves and that therefore they can be coerced into submission now.

Berlin strongly objects to "positive freedom" in this context, when the idea is coupled with an attack on negative freedom and is imposed by some powerful group--for example, Communist reeducation camps supposed to "liberate" people from class consciousness so they can find true Marxist freedom.

Berlin's essay came at a time when increasing claims for positive freedom were contesting the essentially negative view of freedom that had emerged from Enlightenment thinkers. Both the recently defeated Nazis and the Communists in the then-ongoing Cold War contained strong strains of nonbenign positive freedom. Both opposed negative freedom in practice, if not in word. Berlin brought clarity to the contest, and for that reason his essay became highly influential.

Positive freedom cannot be measured outside of some ideology, one that has a version of "true" freedom. Positive freedom has very different meanings for an evangelist, an Islamist, a Marxist, a supporter of Robert Mugabe, and so on. The HFI project is instead seeking a measure of freedom that transcends particular ideologies and has a universal application. By contrast, because negative freedom comes in only one flavor and concerns observable constraints on observable behavior, it is amenable to empirical measurement.

Is there a "malign" version of negative freedom: when someone uses his or her negative freedom to impose barriers to the actions of others--in other words, to limit their negative freedom?

There are two possible responses to this question. The first is to say an individual's freedom stops at the point where he or she is imposing restraints on the freedom of others. This is the approach largely taken by the Economic Freedom of the World Index, as the italicized section of the following excerpt shows: "Individuals have economic freedom when property they acquire without the use of force, fraud, or theft is protected from physical invasions by others and they are free to use, exchange, or give their property as long as their actions do not violate the identical rights of others" (Gwartney, Lawson, and Block 1996, italics added).

As discussed later, this approach is similar to John Locke's view that freedom ends where one individual interferes with the freedom of another. The other approach is to say that such actions are a manifestation of negative freedom, albeit a malign one. This is similar to Thomas Hobbes's view on abuses of "negative" freedom, which led to his call for an absolutist state to limit what he saw as the chaos of unrestrained freedom. Here, the amount of freedom is a kind of maximizing trade-off, where limits on "malign" negative freedom produce increases in "benign" negative freedom until the losses from one balance the gains from the other at a maximizing point. Hobbes, though, would not have viewed his priority as "freedom" maximizing because his concern was maximizing political stability and peace.

These differing interpretations of freedom constraints, however, do not change the single nature of negative freedom--lack of constraint--and do not create an intractable problem for the purposes of this HFI measurement project. As discussed later, our goal is to measure the barriers themselves, whether they are imposed by a "malign" use of negative freedom or not. First, however, let us look at some of the relevant history.

An Ancient Aspiration

Many thinkers, including Berlin, believe that the concept of freedom is not merely unique to the West, but also of relatively recent vintage, developed in post-Middle Ages Europe. Illustrative thinkers here are Benjamin Constant ([1816] n.d.) and Rodney Stark (2006). Both argue that the ancients (Greek and Roman) had a fundamentally different idea of freedom--either in concept or extent--than the one that evolved in the Enlightenment, though they disagree on why.

Constant allows that the ancients knew "collective freedom," in effect the limited forms of democracy found in some Greek states. Of course, they also knew "positive freedom" from Plato's Republic, which gave an early statement of the idea. However, Constant argues that "you find among them [the ancients] almost none of the enjoyments which we have just seen form part of the liberty of the moderns. All private actions were submitted to a severe surveillance. No importance was given to individual independence, neither in relation to opinions, nor to labor, nor, above all, to religion.... Individual liberty, I repeat, is the true modern liberty" ([1816] n.d.).

But the ancients did have the concept of individual liberty, just not individual liberty for all. In his famous Funeral Oration as represented in Thucydides's Histones, Pericles addresses Constant's arguments so clearly it might seem to be a direct debate between the two. "[I]n our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry...