Republican
freedom model
Updated 10 Sep 2011
Throughout
time philosophers have and will continue to debate the concept of
Liberty/Freedom. For simple clarification
I am defining what I mean by the term Republican
freedom.
Republican
freedom is a condition where individuals, through a democratic process,
give up
freedoms to create a state of collective freedom for the whole, based
on the following principles:
“……freedom
is not merely
the enjoyment of a sphere of non-interference but the enjoyment of
certain
conditions in which such non-interference is guaranteed (see especially
Pettit
1997, 2001, 2007, and Skinner 1998, 2002, 2007)….
I am free only if I live in a
society with the kinds of political institutions that guarantee the
independence of each citizen from exercises of arbitrary power.
Quentin Skinner has called this view of freedom ‘neo-Roman’, invoking
ideas
about freedom both of the ancient Romans and of a number of Renaissance
and
early modern writers. Philip Pettit has called the same view ‘republican’,
and this label has tended to dominate in the recent literature
(Weinstock and
Nadeau 2004; Larmore 2004; Laborde and Maynor 2007).
Republican freedom can be thought of as a kind of status: to be a free person is to enjoy the rights and privileges attached to the status of republican citizenship, whereas the paradigm of the unfree person is the slave. Freedom is not simply a matter of non-interference, for a slave may enjoy a great deal of non-interference at the whim of her master. What makes her unfree is her status, such that she is permanently liable to interference of any kind. Even if the slave enjoys non-interference, she is, as Pettit puts it, ‘dominated’, because she is permanently subject to the arbitrary power of her owner.“ : http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/#ParPosLib
“….Rousseau's
theory of freedom,
according to which individual freedom is achieved through participation
in the
process whereby one's community exercises collective control over its
own
affairs in accordance with the 'general
will'.[3] Some
interpret the Social Contract to suggest that Rousseau believed that
liberty
was the power of individual citizens to act in the government to bring
about
changes; this is essentially the power for self-governance and democracy.[citation
needed] Rousseau
himself said, "the mere impulse to
appetite is slavery, while obedience to law we
prescribe ourselves is
liberty."[9]”
Rousseau's
theory of freedom,
according to which individual freedom is achieved through participation
in the
process whereby one's community exercises collective control over its
own
affairs in accordance with the 'general
will'.[3] Some
interpret the Social Contract to suggest that Rousseau believed that
liberty
was the power of individual citizens to act in the government to bring
about
changes; this is essentially the power for self-governance and democracy.[citation
needed] Rousseau
himself said, "the mere impulse to
appetite is slavery, while obedience to law we
prescribe ourselves is
liberty."[9]
However,
this is only one interpretation of Rousseau's work. This view
is not really describing the General Will in terms of its more modern
interpretations. Rather, it is describing more the 'Will of All' (in
Rousseau's
terminology). The Will of All contrasts to the General Will in that the
prior
comprises the composite desires and appetites of those who make up
society and
the latter the reasoned, objective opinions and beliefs of those who
see
themselves as part of a nation and of a group of men. A law cannot be
said to
be of the General Will unless it is general in its origins and
applications.
Particular wills cannot be homogeneous in the way which the General
Will requires.
However, this does not mean that Rousseau's liberty is incompatible
with
positive liberty. Rather, we have to remove the implication that
positive
liberty requires collective control over affairs which is derived from
the
conscious and expressed decisions of men. The task which Rousseau gives
'The
Lawgiver' in the Social Contract is that of deciphering the General
Will from
the mass of particular wills. If The Lawgiver, whatever form this may
take, is
able to do so, then the individuals who comprise a society have truly
participated (via their real, reasoned and tempered will) in the
collective
control of their own affairs. As the extract above says, government by
the Will
of All is slavery. Rousseau's usual solution to how the Lawgiver may be
able to
do this is cultural homogeneity on the one hand and physically small
states on
the other. These two themes recur within Rousseau's works often with
the view
to homogenising inharmonious particular wills.
: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty
The
US constitution
is based on the republican freedom model.