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| Image credit. Continued from here, here and here. |
Contemplating the structure of Attempts at Liberty, I have discovered a number of theses that could serve as mottos prefixed to the respective chapters of my contrarian account of liberty.
Far from being the natural enemy of the state, liberty is a state-based project, depending on an affirmative conception of government and the state.
Far from being a movement to ever more encompassing de-politicisation, liberty is equivalent to a form of society more politicised than any other society.
Far from being wedded to a certain type of economics and a certain conception of the economy, liberty fosters and protects the natural pluralism of economic thinking, the need to thrash out differences of interest, value and perspective embodied in economic reasoning and to face with open minds undecided as well as undecidable issues of the economic discourse. Economic theory may or may not offer convincing answers to puzzles concerning the most effective way of attaining certain goals; but they do not lay out a royal road to "the public purpose." Economics is not the science - if it is a science at all - that tells us what the common weal consists of and how best to bring it about. In a tyrannical society, economics is an idiom of commandeering, in a free society it is a medium of disagreement and an arena of propagating divergent approaches.
Far from being wedded to the notion that law is ultimately derived from relatively insulated private concerns - ideally, in a Hayekian world, being a matter only affecting two private parties and an arbitration entrepreneur - , far from being wedded to the doctrine that liberty unfolds in a private law society, with public law playing a minimal role, liberty is a public good that can only be delivered by collective action, law being among the most fundamental public goods in a free society. The justice of liberty is social justice (or public justice or "public law," in a broad sense) in that it is predicated on collectively derived determinations and impositions. Logically, we first need to know what kinds of behaviour, what kinds of rules and rights, "society" is prepared to demand and enforce, before we can have a rules-based society at all, which a free society by its very nature is.
Far from being indivisible, the every nature of liberty is divisibility. If anything is evident from the history of freedom it is her unfolding in concentric rings of growth. It is possible - and one might conjecture, her requirement - to grow in certain places before she can grow in other places.Historically, freedom is divisible, and contemporaneously, in our free societies today, divisibility of freedom remains a decisive condition of her efficacy. We need to engage in trade-offs between the various elements of freedom to accommodate our mutual desires peacefully.
Far from representing an exhaustive and authentic reflection of feasible freedom, the various liberalisms tend to be projects inspired by ideologically parochial hopes for a normative ideal. They seek closure when liberty is open-ended. They ascribe implications to the basic conditions of freedom far beyond the deductions that may be validly derived from them. Liberalisms tend to be distortions of liberty. Their biases are mostly grounded in an unwillingness to acknowledge (a) the indeterminacy of freedom, and (b) her fundamental prerequisite to accommodate thoughts, ideals, and practices which lie outside the confines of theories of liberty that are chiefly concerned with intellectual completeness.
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