Two Concepts of Freedom

Freedom[^1] is not the defining value of our age. This is not because freedom lacks importance, but because it has lost material meaning. Freedom is not some Platonic ideal floating in the ether, waiting to be discovered. To mean anything at all, it must structure how people actually live. And freedom has been cannibalised by the current historical moment’s (1979 to the present) obsession with efficiency—specifically, Pareto efficiency.

The ancients understood what it meant to live freely: you were not a slave. Between the fall of the western Roman empire and the Enlightenment, freedom took on a more spiritual dimension. It came to mean acting in accordance with your station in life—what Hegel called the “unhappy consciousness” of scepticism, stoicism and early Christianity.

After the French revolution, freedom acquired substantial meaning. People need not act according to their station in society. They could create their own actions and give themselves meaning. This is the lesson of the spirit sections of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”: we realise, through giving and accepting reasons, that our lives are governed by values we took to be natural but which we ourselves created. We could, collectively, act differently and thus change the world.

Two distinctly contemporary meanings of freedom emerged in the 20th century. Both relate to choice.

The first is revolutionary freedom. When the world becomes intolerable, people make an irrevocable choice to live differently and thus change it—through force or example. Think of 20th-century revolutionaries (communist or otherwise) or the gay- and trans-rights movements. These people rejected prevailing society entirely and set out to build something different. Once you have committed your first terrorist act or come out of the closet, there is no going back. In that self-defining act comes a kind of freedom. You need not concern yourself with giving and accepting reasons within a community. No norms structure your life apart from the revolution.

The second is consumer freedom. This conception places consumer choice as paramount. Agents are free to exchange on open markets rationally (that is, in utilitarian terms), so the unimpeded operation of markets is essential. Here there is no structuring norm beyond what each agent values, and no defining act beyond which one cannot return.

Neoliberalism can be defined as the system in which consumer freedom has cannibalised both revolutionary freedom and the post-Enlightenment conception of collective self-determination. We understand freedom today purely as choice. This is a cultural regression. Instead of creating new kinds of people or ushering in new concepts, we are frozen within a single market-based norm.

This is visible everywhere. Being gay or lesbian is no longer a counter-cultural choice. It is not about creating new types of self but one more option for how to be. Sexual practice has been normalised, and with it the meaning of gay freedom has changed. This is why politics cannot progress and why fascism is attractive: fascists promise something new.

We should return to something like revolutionary freedom: finding the world so intolerable that we are forced to change it. We must reject society completely, as the revolutionaries did, to have any hope for the future.

What would this look like? Instead of the “cash in the attic” economy and the “types of guy” approach to living, we need transformation. These ideas are connected: until we learn to become new kinds of people and resist reduction to pure consumer choice, we will never have a new economy.

[^1] I am trying out a more “low effort” approach this year, so strap in!