An Encounter with “Liberty before Liberalism” by Quentin Skinner.
Liberty before Liberalism is about liberty. Specifically, about the difference between a ‘Neo-Roman’ definition of liberty that was influential during the English, French and American revolutions, and the liberal model that has prevailed in its place. The difference is mind control. Liberals believe in freedom from oppression, but the Neo-Romans believed in freedom from the threat of oppression. For them, a King’s subject is never free, because he can be imprisoned by the King at any time. (I say ‘he’, just like Skinner, because this book is about ideas debated between men in the 17th & 18th centuries, and ‘she’ is not a consideration.)
A subject’s liberty is at the whim of the monarch, so it is in fact no liberty at all.
I have recently become interested in the history of political thought, and so this book is bursting with ideas that are new to me. It’s not only Skinner’s dissection of the nuance between competing ideas that I find fascinating, but also everything these ideas have in common. By picking through a narrow seam of thought from the 17th century, Skinner also lays bare the bones of a civil society — the skeleton of beliefs and assumptions upon which the flesh of post-revolutionary British politics has grown, ever since.
One of these is the belief in the role of the citizen. A citizen is an alternative to a subject (for the Neo-Romans), or a slightly strange bedfellow (for those who settled for constitutional monarchy). It’s formed in the same mould, either way: the model of the Roman citizen. And the model of the Roman citizen remains the ideal we use today.
A Roman citizen, Skinner explains, was defined in relation to what he was not: he was not someone who was enslaved. The category of enslaved people included actual slaves, but also anyone ‘in potestate, within the power of someone else’ (41) — such as, for instance, a child.
I ache to be free, don’t you? I watch children playing in the park and I ache for it on their behalf, too. When I was a child I used to think that being an adult meant doing whatever you wanted, all of the time.
Skinner doesn’t mention them, but presumably the category of enslaved people included women, too. And foreigners. It must have included foreign women like the Briton Boudicca, Queen of the Icenis, a client kingdom under the Roman Empire during the first century AD. When Boudicca’s husband died, he left the kingdom to his two daughters as well as the Roman emperor. But for the Romans, partial ownership was not enough. They wanted to annexe the kingdom and so (according to the Roman historian, Tacitus), they publicly flogged Boudicca and gang-raped her children.
I ache to be free, don’t you? I watch children playing in the park and I wonder when they will come to know that some of them are freer than others.
A citizen of Rome would never be gang-raped by Roman soldiers, so gang-raping the heirs to the Iceni throne must have proved they were not Roman citizens. It was a show of force designed as a humiliation, intended to put the Britons in their place. The Roman empire would have depended on this kind of distinction.
If a citizen is someone who is not enslaved, then citizens keep slaves to better taste their own freedom.
I ache to be free, don’t you? When I was a child I never understood why my parents were so patriotic. In the last decade or so, I have watched as the word ‘migrant’ has come to mean ‘foreigner’, which has come to mean ‘illegal’, which has come to mean, ‘unwanted other’ which has come to mean ‘someone who is not one of us’ which has come to be how British identity is defined.
For the Romans, a citizen is not just not a slave, but also sui iuris, says Skinner: within his own jurisdiction (40). This means that a citizen is someone who shapes the jurisdiction of his society — someone who takes an active role in civic life, like a member of parliament. Not everyone can be a member of parliament, so some citizens are represented by others.
Like the Romans, I am represented by someone else. A few years ago my MP stood in front of a TV camera to demand compensation for British holiday makers, whose plans were disrupted by the failures of French border control. For some time, a city of migrant camps had been growing in the French border town of Calais: fetid swamps filled with destitute people, who’d travelled hundreds of miles to escape conflict, fatal poverty, or both. Some of these migrants tried to cross the water to the UK. Their deaths were delaying trains and ferries.
The theories Skinner explores were revolutionary for their time. They were testing out ways to escape the tyranny of Kings. They encountered problems, for example: the way the body politic of free men must move, clumsily, with the majority will. It’s not that minority rights are irrelevant, Skinner says. It’s just that unless they’re suppressed, nothing will move at all. ‘As [Algernon] Sidney explains, the reason why we are bound to regard the will of the majority as conclusive is that movement becomes impossible if everyone retains ‘a right, by their dissent, to hinder the resolutions of the whole body.”’ (29)
My MP is my representative and so she stands for my civil liberty. She stands in for it. She facilitates the movement of the whole body. She must bend to the majority will. She campaigns for my rights to move. This campaigning takes the form of the denial of other bodies’ rights. Specifically, it has taken the form of a racist denial of the rights of migrant bodies and migrant lives, as if migrant bodies themselves represent a threat to the sanctity of the state. In fact, her arguments constitute the movements of other people not as a threat but as an outline. Like slaves, migrants’ real lives are not a concern to the state, at all. They are simply the people whose movement threatens our own.
We keep (talking about) migrants to better taste our own freedom.
I don’t feel like my MP represents me, I said to a friend recently. “The difference between you and me,” she replied, “is that you ever thought you would be represented at all.”
The Neo-Romans believed that a subject is never free, but a citizen is. A citizen is someone who participates in society, and society is a body that bends to the majority will. A citizen is someone who follows this direction. I ache to be free. I struggle to find any liberty here.
My friend is a migrant. She is subject to the whim of the Home Office, who have introduced 45,000 new immigration laws in the last eight years, including an ever-rising minimum income requirement and a limit on the number of days you can leave the country. I am just the white skinned grand-daughter of migrants, so I’m not supposed to care.
How can you be a citizen of a society that is structurally unfair, even if it is structured in your name? How can you play an active role in a society that is based on exclusion, even though it doesn’t exclude you? How do you participate in a system that you don’t believe in, even though the system believes in you? How do you shift the blame from the people outside to the people within, when one of those people is you?
Which brings me back to mind control. The theories Skinner explores were bold and revolutionary, and perhaps they were built on the legacy of the Roman empire to make themselves sound strong. Perhaps the Roman empire was just a given, an idea so profoundly good, that it didn’t raise any questions. Sometimes that happens with history. In one breath we talk of progress, in the next we squeeze inside an idealised version of the past. At school we learn to celebrate the Romans for their culture, their power, and the straightness of their roads. Look how sleek and desirable the Roman empire was, sliding through Europe like a hot knife through enslaved skin.
We still travel on its scars: slick, industrial, bordered by barbarians.
