Kenneth Boulding on Freedom

"Freedom is a troublesome concept and all the more important for being troublesome... The confusion arises because freedom is a concept with more than one dimension, and all its dimensions are important. A great deal of unnecessary political controversy and many false images of the world arise out of the failure to recognize the existence of these various dimensions. A person or society may be moving towards more freedom on one dimension and less freedom on another. Under these circumstances it is not surprising if we concentrate on the dimension which is favorable to us and neglect the dimension which is not. Hence we get into seemingly irreconcileable arguments about the meaning of these movements, with each party perceiving himself as becoming more free and the other party as becoming less." from The Dimensions of Economic Freedom, 1964

Bleeding Heart Libertarians on "What is liberty"?

This new blog, Bleeding Heart Libertarians, is living up to the hype in my opinion. Lot's of good stuff so far. Today they ask "what is liberty?" and provide a variety of answers based on the way people use and understand the word. They have:

"1.Freedom as Absence of Obstacles: Someone is free to the extent that no obstacles impede her ability to do as she pleases.
1a.Freedom as Absence of Interference: Someone is free to the extent that no one interferes with her ability to do as she pleases.
1b.Freedom as Absence of Deliberate Interference: Someone is free to the extent that no one deliberately interferes with her ability to do as she pleases.
1c.Freedom as Absence of Wrongful Interference: Someone is free to the extent that no one wrongfully interferes with her ability to do as she pleases.
2.Freedom as Capacity: Someone is free to the extent that she has the power, ability, capacity, or means to do as she pleases.
3.Freedom as Autonomous Self-Control: Someone is free to the extent that she exhibits sufficient deliberative self-control, such that she is authentically the author of her actions.
4.Freedom as Non-Domination: A person is free to the extent she is not subject to another person’s or group’s arbitrary will.
5.Freedom as Moral Virtue: A person is free to the extent she has the power to recognize and act upon her moral obligations.
6.Freedom as Absence of Pressure: A person is free to the extent she feels no social pressure to do anything.
7.Freedom as Absence of Reasons: A person is free to the extent she has no grounds or reasons for making decisions."

I especially like this point in response:

"Most of the right libertarians I’ve met are hardcore revisionists (about the English language) when it comes to freedom. Most of them think the only valid conceptions of liberty are 1b or 1c above. They think other uses are confused, ideological, or demonstrably wrong."

They promise to demonstrate why this is wrong, and to make a case for liberty as capacity. I've made this point recently as well, and made a case for a sort of "liberty as capacity" argument here, where I wrote:

"All social life is about power and coercion. The exercise of the fruits of that coercion - the exercise of rights - can't be thought of as the opposite of coercion. Liberty is not the opposite of coercion, so what is it? Liberty is the arrangement of these coercions in a way that is consistent with human dignity and human potentiality."

I'm not sure if others have made this point or not, but it will be interesting to see the argument presented on Bleeding Heart Libertarians over the next couple days.

They did forget one definition from their list, though:

Texas Independence

Evan and I were born in Texas, so I have to mention this - 175 years ago, today, Texas declared itself a republic, independent from Mexico.

I went to the 2009 Southern Economic Association conference in San Antonio, and although I wasn't there long I made sure I stopped by the Alamo before I left. The Battle of the Alamo was raging when independence was declared. One thing that amazed me was how small the building was. It was not a place that I would like to be outnumbered ten-to-one. They've done a really nice job presenting it - a nice walk-way around the building, and good literature and presentation of the battle outside. I didn't even go in but I got a good view of a lot of the complex. It's definitely worth seeing.

Losing my contractarianism...

...I haven't entirely yet, but I feel as if it is looming. I'm attempting a controlled descent into this pragmatism business, which I feel is warranted. James, after all, willed himself to believe in God and argued that he had warrant for doing that. This idea that beliefs are functional and we can pick up beliefs like we pick up hammers or rakes - trying them out, assessing their utility - seems to give me warrant to do this. If there is no chance of conclusively establishing a correspondence between perception and reality, all that we have available to us is to assess experientially the value of certain beliefs in navigating the every day world we live in.

One belief I have consciously "kept" is a contractarian emphasis on property rights (because it's easier to talk about how rights function if you conceive of all rights as a sort of property right). Social contract theory has always bothered me tremendously, and although I've always agreed with Bentham on rights ("nonsense on stilts"), we certainly act as if rights meant something, even if they are fundamentally meaningless. That seemed to make them more productive than the idea of a social contract, which we don't even pretend is real (or so I think). So I've been interested in talking about democratic self-governance in contractarian terms in order to justify the common sense of how democratic self-government works without slipping into a naive libertarianism (i.e. - "I didn't agree to be governed so the state is illegitimate"). A lot of these attempts in the past have been "government of the gaps" attempts, similar to "God of the gaps" apologetics. I find both of these to be unsatisfying. It seems both insufficient and something of an insult to your subject of inquiry. "Government of the gaps" proofs amount to a litany of market failures. "God of the gaps" proofs amount to fillers for where science hasn't made a case (yet). But you can also understand why people might make these attempts. With the tremendous progress of science, they hypothesis of God (to uses Laplace's formulation), no longer seemed necessary. Anyone truly interested in justifying the idea of God had to reckon with this. There was no point in denying the science. The same goes with market economics. No modern non-Marxist economist wants to overthrow market economics. The advances are obvious, and yet there is an intuition that this doesn't simply negate the state. But the state can't be justified on claims that do violence to our insights about the market. If I were given the choice, I would choose the market - hence a "government of the gaps" argument emerges. But that just doesn't seem right. A lot of us don't feel like the government is naturally opposed to the market the way naive libertarians suggest, but because of the way the argument is structured it can be hard to explain why. So in my attempt at understanding why democratic self-government is "justified", but not on the basis of a "government of the gaps", I've hit on a few basic reasons that I find to be convincing and not "government of the gaps":

1. Macroeconomic instability - Keynesian democratic socialization of investment. Macroeconomic stability emerges because of aggregation issues and monetary issues as a problem distinct from microeconomic stability and efficiency, which property rights and free exchange are able to guarantee.

2. Temporal autarky - Jefferson referred to it as "swindling futurity". We are coerced by generations that come before us and we coerce generations that come after us, so a contractarian system grounded on contemporary rights and exchanges is necessarily a coercive system. Democratic self-government is tasked with reducing these coercions.

3. Necrocratic political economy - Our system of political economy is necrocratic - it is ruled by the dead. Property rights crystallize past inequalities and pass them on to future generations by the roullete wheel that is birth. Coercion in the past only takes one generation to legitimize itself. This is also a major concern of Jefferson and Paine*.

These start to provide, without losing a contractarian perspective at all (indeed with introducing what I think is a more robust contractarianism), a basis for democratic self-government that may be coercive from a naive contractarianism, but which is ultimately a reduction of coercion. It provides a broad basis particularly for (1.) investments, (2.) egalitarianism, (3.) education, and (4.) social stabilization. Add to this basic agreed upon justifications for police powers, and you largely have a picture of that which American democratic self-government had taken for itself.

But it also provides the seeds of the unraveling of contractarianism. What you start to see is that "property rights" are historically contingent and are themselves inherently coercive (democratic self-government is, after all, a response to the coercion of the property rights regime). As Dewey wrote "this relativity of liberty to the existing distribution of powers of action, while meaning that there is no such thing as absolute liberty, also necessarily means that wherever there is liberty at one place there is restraint at some other place. The system of liberties that exists at any time is always the system of restraints or controls that exist at that time. No one can do anything except in relation to what others can do and cannot do. These... points are general. But they cannot be dismissed as mere abstractions. For when they are applied either in idea or in action they mean that liberty is always a social question, not an individual one. For the liberties that any individual actually has depends upon the distribution of powers or liberties that exists, and this distribution is identical with actual social arrangements, legal and political - and, at the present time, economic, in a peculiarly important way."

I feel like I've chased contractarianism to its implications, and come back out at something like social contract theory! I'm losing my contractarianism. If this gets pursued far enough, clearly the same old problems with social contract theory are going to come up.

So what does one conclude? Well, precisely the point that these are just beliefs that we use because they are useful, not because of any correspondence with reality. Rights are a convenient fiction. When we pretend that we are real and think about them long enough as if they are real, we run into all sorts of self-contradictions that force us to conclude that system of private property rights is necessarily coercive. The solution, however, is social and coercive as well. This is largely where I've come out; my respect for abstractions like "property rights" and "self-government" has both dwindled and been reinforced. It's dwindled because their fundamental fictive nature seems more or less obvious to me now. But it has been reinforced because I'm starting to see how the interplay of these two fictions produces real results. We have a guide of sorts for when self-government reduces and when it increases coercion. We have a guide for when property rights reduce and when they increase coercion.

Writing this is in many ways just an attempt to think through all these ideas again... I will be going to "debate" Jan Helfeld later today, and I am increasingly of the opinion that his method does not get to the heart of the issue... although I'm concerned I won't be able to adequately express why. We shall see.


* I recently came across an interesting post by Gavin Kennedy on Adam Smith that has a great passage from Cantillon emphasizing this "necrocratic political economy" problem: "It does not appear that Providence has given the Right of the Possession of Land to one Man preferably to another: the most ancient Titles are founded on violence and Conquest. … But howsoever people come into the property and possession of Land we have already observed that it always falls into the hands of a few in proportion to the total inhabitants"

Three thoughts and some links on Egypt and Tunisia

Thought 1: I've warmed considerably to Wikileaks because I've realized it's not about us. I've never been outrageously offended by Wikileaks the way some have, let me clarify. But I haven't been especially impressed with them either - and my lack of being impressed has been more due to the details of what they've done rather than their broader mission (I have no quarrel with their broader mission). The first video they released of an operation in Iraq bothered me because it vilified American soldiers who, from what I could tell, had no idea whether their target was friend or foe - and given the circumstances and the odd behavior of the target it was perfectly plausible for them to have concerns. I don't know the rules of engagement, but to call it "collateral murder" struck me as grossly unfair. This was nothing like the Abu Ghraib pictures where culpability was crystal clear. I wasn't initially all that impressed with the diplomatic cables either. It seemed like Wikileaks was leaking for the hell of it. These were not the Pentagon Papers. There was no great failure of the government they were exposing (I'm not surprised or bothered by the fact that our diplomats spy on, lie to, or insult other people). They made diplomacy look less credible and stole sensitive material for what? I could see no payoff so it was hard for me to see much value in the act, but I did see the potential for a lot of damage. Not damage to Clinton's prestige or anything silly like that - damage to the prospect of successful diplomacy. But now I'm starting to change my mind - I'm realizing it's not about us. Wikileaks' claims about Tunisia's leaders apparently played a central role in motivating the protests there. That's the value of this. There was no "Pentagon Papers" moment exposing problems with our government - but it did expose problems with other governments, and that is very good. And when our government does need exposing, I'm glad Wikileaks will be there. They'll still probably aggravate me as they needlessly expose things with little benefit and potentially great cost. But I'm starting to see a broader picture.

Thought 2: This is going to bury the idea that democracy (1.) is impossible in the Middle East, or (2.) must be imposed by violence from the West, and that is an unbelievably good thing. I can see lots of potential reverberations from this. For one thing, it's a serious blow to the Bush legacy. The one silver lining to Bush for the history books was that he was bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East. It's an extremely dubious claim for him, but it is even less tenable if we see Egyptian and Tunisian autocracy fall (and Iranian autocracy at least shaken) by twitter and Wikileaks and domestic protest. If history looks back and sees the bulk of Middle Eastern democracy emerging from these sorts of protests, and a mess (without Saddam Hussein, to be sure) in war-torn Iraq, they are not going to look at Bush as favorably as they might have. It also is going to have more impact in the region. It's not clear what will happen in Egypt yet, but clearly it seems like there's going to be an improvement. Other countries are going to follow. Even more if Julian Assange makes a concerted effort at it. The final ripple effect I could imagine is with Israel. Israel is an odd duck. I'm not willing to completely write it off as a democratic, free society. Given the pressures it faces and the environment it finds itself it preserves these institutions remarkably well. But we also have to be honest - it is a repressive, heavy handed, police state, apartheid of a democracy insofar as it is a democracy. What's been keeping it in the good graces of America (aside from our evangelical eschatology) is that the rest of the Middle East is even worse. If we see a spate of popular revolutions that overthrow dictatorships there will be considerably more pressure on Israeli reform.

Thought 3: I'm glad Christopher Hitchens is alive to see this. Part of it is simply that he's a friend to human freedom and the revolution. Part of it is also that he's been cozy with neoconservatives and the Bush administration on the idea of democracy from the barrel of a gun. Hitchens hasn't been quite as bad as them, of course. He's more about overthrowing dictators and killing terrorists than he is about the violent imposition of democratic institutions on foreign populations. I personally think overthrowing dictators and killing terrorists is perfectly respectable business (although perhaps not always the wisest or most appropriate move from the perspective of both national interest and collateral damage). Nevertheless, even if he's "better than Bush", he's still hads a trigger finger this last decade. Maybe a little homegrown revolution will bring him back to his roots and reform his mindset a little before he passes on. I say this as a tremendous admirer of Hitchens - not to say "this'll show him!!!". Hitchens has written about Tunisia here, but as far as I can tell he hasn't written about Egypt yet. I'm confident we'll be seeing something shortly.

Some links:

- John Quiggen with thoughts similar to my Thought 2.

- The Economist strikes a somewhat pessimistic note when it channels Keynes: "In the long run, if Tunisia's authoritarian dictatorship is replaced by a more open and democratic government, and if something similar happens in Egypt, that will probably lead to greater stability and security for everyone. Unfortunately, this is one of those long runs in which many of us are dead."

- Mark Thoma shares lots of links.

- Peter Boettke calls our attention to theories of revolution.

Reading things like this makes me want to drop economics and pick up political or social philosophy as a full time pursuit...

Much of what passes for libertarian thought today boils down to philosophical elginism - the robbing of a rich classical liberal tradition of one of its featured pieces - human liberty - to serve baser ideological or political ends. This does not characterize all libertarian thought. There are certainly classical liberals with sincere emphases that can be described as "libertarian" who are not arguing in the service of some ideological end. Robert Nozick springs to mind. Hayek as well, as far as I can tell. Others barely try to hide it.

Robert Higgs on Ed Glaeser, in its entirety (HT Mark Thoma):

"In yesterday’s New York Times appears an op-ed article by Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard. Glaeser’s article is remarkable because arguments in favor of freedom, insisting that economic analysis implicitly rests on a moral presumption that individual freedom has fundamental value, do not appear every day — or every month — in “the newspaper of record.” So, I am glad to give two cheers to Glaeser, one for his theme and another for his courage in placing the argument in such a hostile outlet.

I cannot give Glaeser a third cheer, however, because toward the end of the article he inserts a concession that I find wholly inconsistent with the rest of the argument. He writes:

Economists’ fondness for freedom rarely implies any particular policy program. A fondness for freedom is perfectly compatible with favoring redistribution, which can be seen as increasing one person’s choices at the expense of the choices of another, or with Keynesianism and its emphasis on anticyclical public spending.

Many regulations can even be seen as force for freedom, like financial rules that help give all investors the freedom to invest in stocks by trying to level the playing field.

To be sure, many mainstream economists do think about policy just as Glaeser says they do. But in doing so, they are mistaken. I find it difficult to believe that a man of Glaeser’s intelligence has really given much thought to what he is saying in these passages.

In fact, a presumption in favor of freedom rules out virtually everything that modern governments do, certainly nearly everything they do in interfering in economic affairs. Redistribution of income, for example, requires that the government rob Peter in order to benefit Paul (and its own functionaries, who serve as middlemen in this transfer). This action is not freedom; it is a crime against Peter, a raw violation of his right to his own legitimate property. Keynesian countercyclical spending requires the government to spend borrowed money whose acquisition is premised on future taxation (that is, robbery) of taxpayers in order to service the debt and repay the principal. Again, innocent persons have their rights violated. How can anyone fail to see that robbery is incompatible with freedom? Finally, the financial rules that Glaeser finds compatible with freedom entail threats of violence against financial transactors who do not follow arbitrary government rules — often extremely foolish and even destructive rules — in making their transactions, notwithstanding the fact that the parties to the transaction may be perfectly willing to proceed without such regulatory compliance. Such regulation is the very opposite of freedom; it is instead the sheer imposition of outside force, intruding on willing transactors, and thereby discouraging them to some extent, if not entirely, with consequent loss of the wealth that such transactions would have created, in addition to the loss of liberty.

Perhaps it is unseemly for someone such as I to make a recommendation to a Harvard professor, yet I cannot resist the urge to suggest that Glaeser read, say, Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market. Expositions of that sort would help him to gain a clearer vision of the distinction between individual freedom and state domination in economic affairs. Glaeser quotes Milton Friedman to good effect in his article, but Friedman’s writings ought to be the beginning, rather than the end of wisdom in this area. In regard to freedom, Friedman’s arguments were good as far as they went, but they did not go nearly far enough. Like Glaser [sic], Friedman was prepared to make many concessions to state power, and his focus on utilitarian arguments, as opposed to moral principles, diminished the intellectual force of his laudable efforts to enlarge the scope of liberty in economic affairs."

Philosophy, Values, and Economics

Ed Glaeser at the New York Times says that freedom is the moral center of gravity for economics. He writes:

"Economists often present a cold public persona, emphasizing dollars and sense over the rousing rhetoric of moral argument. But by appearing as technocrats who seem concerned only with the bottom line, we allow ourselves to be portrayed as people without a sense of right and wrong.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about ethics and economics, calling for appropriate steps that economists could take to disclose conflicts of interest. Today, I focus on a larger issue: the complaint that economics is a discipline without a moral core.

Modern economics began with Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, a movement full of ethical debate by thinkers like David Hume, Francis Hutcheson and Lord Kames. Smith himself, who followed his teacher Hutcheson in the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, wrote “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” which included such ideas as “to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.”

As Smith moved from moral sentiments to political economy, his focus changed from the perfection of private nature to the improvement of public systems. Most economic writing since then has typically shied away from offering moral advice to individuals and instead focused on improving public institutions and policies.

But that shift doesn’t mean that there isn’t a deep moral tenet – a belief in the value of human freedom – at the core of our discipline."

He mentions The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which reminds me - Robert Shiller was recently interviewed about his five favorite books and "human traits essential to capitalism". The interview is here. The first book on his list was Moral Sentiments.

*****

Peter Boettke also has a great post up on philosophy and economics that comes to much the same conclusion that Glaeser does. He writes:

"In his very readable On Ethics and Economics, Amartya Sen argues that modern economics has existed in the corner solution of economics as engineering as opposed to economics as philosophy. At the time he wrote that book, Sen was agitating for a movement away from economics as engineering and toward economics as philosophy.

I agree with Sen. I have made the distinction in my writings between the "mainline of economic teachings" that can be traced back to David Hume and Adam Smith and runs forward to F. A. Hayek, James Buchanan, etc., and "mainstream economics" which is more or less a sociological concept related to what is currently scientifically fashionable among elite academic economists. It is contributing to the "mainline" of economic thought that is more important in the long run, whereas fashion is fleeting. A phrase I often invoke in conversation with my PhD students is "shelf-life", which simply means how long will that idea stay in the heads of economists. I first heard this distinction between "mainline" and "mainstream" from Kenneth Boulding, and I got my attitude about "shelf-life" from James Buchanan.

Anyway, I am optimistic that the last decade has seen considerable movement along the lines Sen argued for in On Ethics and Economics, and with that a renewed appreciation for the "mainline" of economics as opposed to an exclusive pre-occupation with what is considered "mainstream" in the contemporary literature. Economics continues to be a more fascinating discipline year after year, and it is more interesting precisely because that leading thinkers are compelled to rethink the sort of questions in moral philosophy that David Hume, Adam Smith, F. A. Hayek and James Buchanan wrestled with throughout their careers.

I was very interested to see this article in today's NYT by Edward Glaeser on "The Moral Heart of Economics." Glaeser reaches back in time to Hume and Smith and forward to Milton Friedman in his essay, and concludes that:

Economists are often wary of moral exhortation, as many see the harm so often wrought by arguments that are long on passion and short on sense. But don’t think that our discipline doesn’t have a moral spine beneath all the algebra. That spine is a fundamental belief in freedom."

I have a comment on it - third one down.

A Revolution of Liberty, a Philosophy of Equality

Tyler Cowen noted a Google book search function yesterday, and he charted the fate of "liberty" since the mid-18th century. I was curious about doing some comparisons with "equality". Liberalism is really a philsophy of liberty, equality, and self-government, but the relative weight placed on each of these concepts shifts over time. One of the tough things about this google function is that the scales are not always comparable - but "liberty" and "equal" seemed to show up at roughly the same scale, so that their relative position could more easily be observed.

Below I've presented findings for American English, British English, French, and German (Blue is "liberty", red is "equal". The years are fuzzy, but its from 1720 to 2000). A few things stand out to me:

1. "Liberty" is a fightin' word. The spikes for "liberty" associated with the French Revolution and the American Revolution are obvious. You also have a run-up to increased levels of "liberty" that peak at 1848 for Germany. France's radical mid-19th century maintains mentions of "liberty", in contrast to America which largely sets the term aside after the Constitution is ratified.

2. "Equal" emerges as a dominant term in America, not with the Revolution or the Constitution, but with the Jeffersonians. It maintains its position until present times. What's even more interesting is that if you substitute "freedom" for "liberty", then "freedom" surpasses "equal" in the late 1840s - at the end of the dominance of the Jeffersonians. I think there are two forces at work here: first, "freedom" was the word of choice in the abolitionist literature, rather than "liberty" - and after the war it stuck. Second, of course, is the Jeffersonian liberalism was a democratic liberalism rather than a strictly libertarian liberalism. It was liberalism. It's not like ideas of liberty were left out in the cold by any means. But it was a liberalism that emphasized both liberty and equality, and of course democratic self-government.

3. The British case is the only case where "equal" dominated "liberty" for the entire period (although Germany came close). This would likely look very different if the data stretched back to the 17th century. If "liberty" is truly a fightin' word, as I suggested in point #1, then the British had already had their fight.

It's dicey to draw too much from this data, but that's what I noticed - the point that "liberty" is associated with revolutionary breaks, while "equal" is more stable I think comes across very clearly, though. Is there anything else worth noting?

American

British

French

German

Catalan on Progressives

Jonathan Catalan wrote a great post clearing up a bizarre assessment of libertarians on the "Ground Zero Mosque". Great until this line at least:

"Is the libertarian position regarding Islam and the United States “leftist”? If that means that the progressive-left position is similar to ours: yes and no. I think that the progressive-left offers Muslim-Americans prioritization over other Americans, for the sake of political correctness (when talking about Muslim rights in the United States). This is not the libertarian position. The libertarians hold Muslims equal to others, and this includes rights to property."

I'm going to refrain from the recent fad of whining that "Jonathan doesn't understand progressives", and simply say that "Jonathan is wrong". This is something I'd expect out of Arnold Kling, not Jonathan Catalan.

To borrow and paraphrase from Mayor Bloomberg, there isn't a single inch of the United States of America that is off-limits to Muslims or any other faith. If you don't like that, tough. If you repudiate that to win an election in Nevada, you're an asshole. If you think your small ideological cadre is the only group of people that thinks this, you're wrong and you need to get better acquainted with people who don't agree with you.

Hitchens on the grandiosity of the claim to be "pro-freedom"

Christopher Hitchens speaks with Charlie Rose about a variety of things, but I thought the opening portion of this segment was interesting. Hitchens distinguishes between being pro-freedom and anti-totalitarian, and claims that the former is too grandiose a claim. I would also add that it becomes a very complex claim very quickly. I, for example, don't consider the libertarian movement to be at the forefront of the fight for liberty for reasons I've outlined ad nauseum here. Like Dewey and Foucault, I see society as composed of a dense web of relations and obligations and it can be hard to call any single arrangement of those relations and obligations "free" and another one "unfree". That's not at all to say that freedom is an illusion - but just that its exact definition can be illusory. Many, many, people substitute ideologically convenient definitions of "freedom" for real freedom.



Part 1 of the interview is here, Part 2 here, 3 here, and 4 here.

August 28th, 1963

"I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation"

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28th, 1963

Bloomberg, the Mosque, and Religious Toleration

I had of course heard about Mayor Bloomberg's unequivocal opposition to those criticizing the mosque project at the World Trade Center site. I hadn't read the whole statement, particularly the interesting history he provides at the beginning:

"In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue, and they were turned down. In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies, and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780s, St. Peter's on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site, and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center."

I know of at least one "formal political petition for religious freedom" in the American colonies before this 1657 event. In 1634-35, the town of Salem lodged a formal protest with the General Court of Massachusetts in Boston which demanded that they oust Roger Williams from the pulpit for his heresies. Eventually, under pressure from Boston involving some land deals, Salem relented and Williams left to found the colony of Rhode Island. Hopefully the supporters of the Cordoba Mosque initiative don't similarly buckle under pressure.

Scott Kuhagen has a great review of the issue here.

What are readers' fondest moments in the promotion of religious liberty in American history?

Guest Blogger: John Dewey

Liberty and Social Control, 1935

...In the second place, the posession of effective power is always a matter of the distribution of power that exists at the time. A physical analogy may make clear what I mean. Water runs down hill and electric current flows because of difference in potentials. If the ground is level, water is stagnant. If on the level ocean, there are dashing waves, it is because there is another power operating, that of the winds, occasioned ultimately by a difference in the distribution of temperature at different points. There is no such thing physically as a manifestation of energy or effective power by one thing except in relation to the energy manifested by other things. There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual, group, or class, except in relation to the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups, and classes.

Demand for retention of powers already possessed on the part of a particular group means, therefore, that other individuals and groups shall continue to possess only the capacities in and for activity which they already possess. Demand for increased power at one point means demands for change in the distribution of powers, that is, for less power somewhere else. You cannot discuss or measure the liberty of one individual or group of individuals without measuring the difference of levels.

In the third place, this relativity of liberty to the existing distribution of powers of action, while meaning that there is no such thing as absolute liberty, also necessarily means that wherever there is liberty at one place there is restraint at some other place. The system of liberties that exists at any time is always the system of restraints or controls that exists at that time. No one can do anything except in relation to what others can do and cannot do.

These points are general. But they cannot be dismissed as mere abstractions. For when they are applied either in idea or in action they mean that liberty is always a social question, not an individual one. For the liberties that any individual actually has depends upon the distribution of powers or liberties that exists, and this distribution is identical with actual social arrangements, legal and political -- and, at the present time, economic, in a peculiarly important way.

Return now to the fact that historically the great movements for human liberation have always been movements to change institutions and not to preserve them intact. It follows from what has been said that there have been movements to bring about a changed distribution of power to do - and power to think and to express thought is a power to do - such that there would be a more balanced, a more equal, even, and equitable system of human liberties.

The present movement for social control of industry, money and credit, is simply a part of this endless human struggle. The present attempt to define liberty in terms of the existing distribution of liberty is an attempt to maintain the existing system of control of power, of social restraints and regimentations. I canno go here into the nature and consequences of this system. If one is satisfied with it, let him support the conception of liberty put forth by, say, the Liberty League which represents the present economic system. But let him not be fooled into thinking that the issue is liberty versus restraint and regimentation. For the issue is simply that of one system of control of the social forces upon which the distribution of liberties depends, versus some of ther system of social control which would bring about another distribution of liberties. And let those who are struggling to replace the present economic system by a cooperative one also remember that in struggling for a new system of social restraints and controls they are also struggling for a more equal and equitable balance of powers that will enhance and multiply the effective liberties of the mass of individuals. Let them not be jockeyed into the position of supporting social control at the expense of liberty, when what they want is another method of social control than the one that now exists, one that will increase significant human liberties.

Guest Blogger: Thomas Jefferson

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman

Monticello, June 24, 1826

Respected Sir-

The kind invitation I receive from you, on the part of the citizens of the city of Washington, to be present with them at their celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of American Independence, as one of the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world, is most flattering to myself, and heightened by the honorable accompaniment proposed for the comfort of such a journey. It adds sensibly to the sufferings of sickness, to be deprived by it of a personal participation in the rejoicings of that day. But acquiescence is a duty, under circumstances not placed among those we are permitted to control. I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

I will ask permission here to express the pleasure with which I should have met my ancient neighbors of the city of Washington and its vicinities, with whom I passed so many years of a pleasing social intercourse; an intercourse which so much relieved the anxieties of the public cares, and left impressions so deeply engraved in my affections, as never to be forgotten. With my regret that ill health forbids me the gratification of an acceptance, be pleased to receive for yourself, and those for whom you write, the assurance of my highest respect and friendly attachments.

Th. Jefferson

Anniversary of Constitutional Government in Virginia

Yesterday, June 29th, in 1776, Virginia adopted a constitution for the commonwealth. It was the first state to do so. Patrick Henry would serve as the first governor of the free and independent Virginia. For the better part of the following decade, Virginians would give their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the cause of American independence and union.

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Democracy, the State, and the Web of Power Relations

Jonathan Catalan has a brief post with an extensive comment section that works through the classic critique of democracy and "social contract" ideas more broadly. I concur with a lot of these critiques of the social contract, and I've said as much in the past. I've been meaning to flesh out my thoughts on this in more detail for a while, but I'll mention it briefly here as a sort of response to Jonathan.

1. Human beings are social beings and they are constantly interacting. These interactions are sometimes voluntary and consistent with human liberation, and sometimes involuntary and inconsistent with human liberation. Voluntary and involuntary interactions can both be either private or corporate. In Truth and Power, Foucault talked about an idea that I think is very similar - the "web of power". We are caught in a web of involuntary impositions on our liberty. It is the human condition.

2. There is often recourse for these impositions. Sometimes we have institutions like courts, or we have parents that arbitrate disputes between siblings. We can always revolt or strike back (self-defense is almost universally considered an appropriate justification for violence). But the ability to respond to an imposition doesn't make that imposition voluntary. Recourse to courts does not change the fact that pollution is an assault on personal liberty. Recourse to revolt does not change the fact that a tyranny is an assault on personal liberty. It is very good that we have recourse in many situations, but it doesn't make the involuntary act voluntary.

3. The state is involuntary. A social contract is distinct from other contracts precisely because the parties to the contract don't necessarily agree to their inclusion. However, the state can evolve or be designed (or a little of both... and after all, when it comes to human institutions what is "evolution" and "emergence" except for an accumulation of designs over time?) in a way that deliberately privileges citizen participation, control, and decision making. So yes it is involuntary, but that does not mean it is the equivalent of slavery. We need to be careful not to embrace sentimentalism that confuses the issue in either direction: the state is involuntary, but it is also an institution that is controlled by the people (at least the kind of states I'm concerning myself with here are).

4. The purpose of the liberal state is to minimally impose itself on human liberty but act as a bulwark against private tyrannies that emerge in the "web of power" that is natural to the human condition. The reason why non-libertarian classical liberals still embrace the state is precisely because they are concerned about private tyrannies that would threaten liberty in the absence of the state, and they conclude that in the optimal balance between private tyrannies and the public tyrannies implicit in the social contract, there is a role for the state. This brand of classical liberalism is not libertarian precisely because we consider libertarian restrictions on the state to threaten human liberty. Libertarians act like we don't care about human liberty, but the whole point of why we're not libertarians is because of what we perceive to be the libertarian threat to liberty. Libertarians downplay or ignore private tyrannies for some always unexplained reason. Tyranny is almost always public for them, and discussions always come back to government. Why? I still don't know. But because they see things that way they are always going to have a blind spot and they will always be an inadequate defense of human liberty. I don't really care about the etymology of their label - I'm not a libertarian because of how much I value liberty. There are definitely worse things to be than a libertarian if you value human liberty, of course. Libertarianism is definitely high on the list of second-bests. But it is not ideal.

5. This conception of the liberal state excludes non-liberal states as surely as it excludes libertarian states (and libertarians almost universally embrace the existence of some form of state). I don't have to answer for Nazi Germany or some other tyranny any more than any other non-anarchist, non-Nazi does. Slippery slopes are legitimate to talk about, but (1.) don't ignore the slippery slopes of libertarianism, which slide to anarchy on one side and crony capitalist oligarchy on the other, and (2.) don't think you'll get away with convincing me that the liberal state is on the road to serfdom. Libertarians love to bring up the slippery slope but they hate to apply it to themselves. Whenever crony capitalism emerges it's never the bottom of their own slippery slope. They won't even consider the possibility.

6. I'll also note that my thinking on this has been influenced by John Dewey's political writings as well. There's a piece where he talks about freedom in the same way that Foucault talks about the "web of power". I'll track it down, but he basically points out the path dependence of our ideas of freedom. Often (not always) when people complain about violation of their rights as a result of a state action, that state action has relieved a violation of other people's rights. When people complain about state imposition on BP and violations of liberty, what they forget is that this action helps to relieve impositions on the liberty of people suffering from the spill. Bastiat might call it the "seen and the unseen". Defenders of BP ignore the "unseen" violations of the liberty of the people the state is helping. In other words, we're dealing with a dense web of freedoms and rights, just like Foucault's dense web of power. Often it's a trade-off between competing liberties, and often we accept involuntary state action because it is less pernicious than involuntary private action.


So that's a long sketch, but believe me it's still just an outline. I think you get the gist, though.

Caplan on Liberalism

Bryan Caplan has an interesting discussion of what he calls "liberal conflation". The discussion wanders, but it seems pretty clear that he is frustrated by how many different views political philosophers call "liberal", he wants to think more narrowly about what we call "liberal", and he wants it to center on some sort of libertarianism. I think he is unnecessarily bothered by this. Caplan is thinking about this in partisan/ideological terms when I think what we're really talking about is a political-philosophical school of thought. From an inherently partisan perspective, of course it seems weird to "lump almost everybody together". From a philosophical perspective this really isn't as problematic.

I see "liberalism" as having a few guiding tenets, including:

1. Individualism - individuals have agency and responsibility distinct from the collective, and they are equals.

2. Negative rights - liberalism is at its base a philosophy of negative rights

3. Freedom - the idea that individuals should be free from coercion

4. Secular, representative, government.

5. Tolerance and pluralism.

6. Private property rights, protected by law.

It's just a list off the top of my head, but I don't think it would be too controversial and I think it covers all the bases. As a philosophical framework, this does have a lot of adherents, at least in the West. But as a philosophical framework, I think it also has to be considered a general foundation rather than a specific or partisan creed. For example, some people put stock in the idea of positive rights as well as negative rights. I'm extremely skeptical of that for all the canonical reasons for being skeptical of positive rights, but I don't think that automatically disqualifies them from being considered "liberals", although that idea itself is not a "liberal" idea. Libertarians are quite good on 1., 2., 3., 5., and 6., but they often at the very least day-dream about (if not actively pursue) sabotaging 4. if there are ever any tensions between 4. and the other tenets. And this point about "tension" is an important one to raise. There are tensions in liberalism precisely because it is a broad philosophical disposition, rather than a partisan position with a platform that can be crafted to minimize internal tensions.

As I've stated on this blog many times, the ideal of 6. is imperfectly implemented in life (and certainly the same can be said of any of these). That leads to tensions between an imperfect implementation of 6. and the ideals of 1. and 3.. My freedom (number 3.) is imposed upon by polluters precisely because 6. (private property rights) has never been and probably can never be perfectly implemented. What is the "liberal" solution? There is no clear liberal solution (this would be a problem if "liberalism" were an ideology). One of the important things about liberalism is that when all six tenets are reasonably well respected, society has a tendency to right itself. The free market is by far the best example, but in more complicated cases like pollution externalities, 4. combined with 5., tempered by reminders of 2. can come up with a solution where 1. and 3. alone might not have been able to. So "liberalism" is an extremely robust philosophical disposition in that sense. But when you start privileging or removing any of these elements, it becomes less robust. This is one of my biggest concerns about libertarianism - not an error of commission so much as an error of omission.

So does this "lump everyone together"? It does and it doesn't. If you restrict the analysis to the West, it lumps an awful lot of us together. But there is differentiation - libertarians stress some elements, "progressives" stress others, and "conservatives" stress others. I think it is quite a strain to fit "socialists" into liberalism, unless we're talking about distinctly non-Marxist/non-Leninist socialists (and even these have pruned liberalism down).

I think the other thing to keep in mind is that this is only even on our radar as a "conflation" because the alternative has been so decisively destroyed so recently. A very popular illiberal political philosophy fell only twenty years ago. That isn't that long ago, and a new one may still emerge. Why splinter victorious liberalism just to pick an internecine fight when in a matter of decades there might be a new challenge? Former illiberal socialists are turning into liberals in droves, and libertarians want to shun them because they want to hijack liberalism and make it in their own likeness? I don't see the point, even if I were to sympathize more with libertarianism.

And what challenges could emerge? Well, with the improvement of data collection and information technology we shouldn't write off illiberal socialism just yet. People could easily come back to the opinion that they can plan society as technology develops. And what's even more scary is that they probably could fake it longer and more successfully than the Soviet Union did. It's doomed to failure, of course - but it could gain adherents. Pre-modern fundamentalism is presenting an increasing challenge to liberalism in many quarters of the world. If any of these threats become more formidable, "liberalism" is going to look less and less like a conflation to Caplan.

Part of me was simply frustrated when I read Caplan. "Liberalism" if anything started with 1., 4., and 5., with 2. being added as 4. and 5. became better defined, and 3. and 6. added as market capitalism began to emerge out of economic nationalism and mercantilism. If 1. and 4. form the basis of "liberalism" (which I think they do), it's not clear at all why libertarianism is the "first among equals" or the "true" liberalism. The more libertarians try to make these claims for themselves, the more someone else is going to get frustrated and push them out of the club (Caplan points out that "modern liberals" have a lot in common with illiberal socialists, but by the same token couldn't we say libertarians have a lot in common with illiberal anarchists?). There's good reason to be frustrated with Caplan in this way - he makes some pretty bad arguments. However, I think the best way to tackle this "liberal conflation" issue is simply to remember that this is a philosophical disposition we're talking about - not an ideology. An ideology that everybody buys into is indeed diluted and might require some purges. A philosophy that everybody buys into, on the other hand, is probably just a very sensible philosophy. After all, Bryan Caplan is well known for aruging that we should limit the franchise based on a person's economic and policy enlightenment. I don't get as apoplectic over that as some people - I can respect speculative, out of the box thinking. But it seems rather strange that an advocate of limiting the franchise should be so bold in claiming the liberal mantle.

A Salutary Servitude

Tim Lacy offers a great quote from Tocqueville on the inability to pursue comprehensive analysis, and the social basis of our beliefs.  I think the wider paragraph is worth quoting, and further, I think it applies to more than simply the philosophers.  This is how we all reason in whatever capacity we do so, and as Tocqueville points out, this isn't a bad thing.  I have for some time been quite interested in the relationship between freedom and constraint, and I think this passage highlights a large part of what is significant about constraint and lack of freedom:

If I now consider man in his isolated capacity, I find that dogmatical belief is not less indispensable to him in order to live alone, than it is to enable him to co-operate with his fellow-creatures. If man were forced to demonstrate to himself all the truths of which he makes daily use, his task would never end. He would exhaust his strength in preparatory exercises, without advancing beyond them. As, from the shortness of his life, he has not the time, nor, from the limits of his intelligence, the capacity, to accomplish this, he is reduced to take upon trust a number of facts and opinions which he has not had either the time or the power to verify himself, but which men of greater ability have sought out, or which the world adopts. On this groundwork he raises for himself the structure of his own thoughts; nor is he led to proceed in this manner by choice so much as he is constrained by the inflexible law of his condition. There is no philosopher of such great parts in the world, but that he believes a million of things on the faith of other people, and supposes a great many more truths than he demonstrates. This is not only necessary but desirable. A man who should undertake to inquire into everything for himself, could devote to each thing but little time and attention. His task would keep his mind in perpetual unrest, which would prevent him from penetrating to the depth of any truth, or of grappling his mind indissolubly to any conviction. His intellect would be at once independent and powerless. He must therefore make his choice from amongst the various objects of human belief, and he must adopt many opinions without discussion, in order to search the better into that smaller number which he sets apart for investigation. It is true that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another, does so far enslave his mind; but it is a salutary servitude which allows him to make a good use of freedom.