Lowering the Bar on Freedom, Part 2

Someone recently joked that the latest endangered species in America is a liberal liberal. He had in view recent efforts to silence dissent in the public square by university administrators and attorneys general.

I chuckled with him, but he’d pressed one of my buttons.

I ranted: It is unfair to blame liberalism, even if the perpetrators may self-describe as liberal. For it’s not liberalism that authorizes such censorship, but muddled forms of continental communitarianism. While on my bandwagon, I managed to pin at least some of the blame for our increasingly imperial American presidency on 18th century French republicanism. Let’s not blame liberals. Let’s blame the French!

I was only half joking.

For the French Revolution is a story of what-could-have-been. With the newly-ratified US Constitution in their hands, the French republicans, as Yogi Berra would say, came to a fork in the road and took it.

Like us, they began with the Roman republic’s insight that a free person lives under his own authority: freedom is deliverance from domination. They also embraced the concept of equality under the law.

But how might a revolutionary government best promote liberty, equality, and fraternity? Here the French republicans took the other path that made all the difference.

Inspired far more by Jean-Jacques Rousseau than the American founders, they embraced the principle of government by the people, but were skeptical that three contestatory branches could express the people’s will. Instead, a single secular national assembly, elected directly by the people, would replace the monarch, and, importantly, that majoritarian assembly would be absolute and sovereign.

The revolutionaries invested almost a mystical belief in conciliar governance. (They would have been better served by a healthy skepticism.) Empowering a body of representatives, they instructed them to vote impartially and only according to the national good. The assembly alone would enact just and wise laws that liberated citizens from domination and established equality.

In other words, they decided the best way to deliver the solitary citizen from domination by another citizen was for that citizen to subject himself instead to the sovereign will of the democratically-elected national assembly. In Rousseau’s words, “each, by giving himself to all, gives himself to no one.”

But if one begins with the premise that a majoritarian assembly mystically determines what justice is, who can dispute any law it enacts? The assembly’s laws embody justice, by definition! As Rousseau put it, “no law supported by the general impartial will ‘can be unjust, since no man can be unjust towards himself’”(Pettit, 15).

Ironically, the secular national assembly’s consensus can be seen analogously to later Roman Catholic doctrine regarding the decisions of the pope: its decisions were, by definition, infallible dogma, invulnerable to critique except by the assembly itself.

In such a communitarian regime, the role of the citizen is radically different from that envisioned by the US Constitution. Dissent from the mystical majoritarian consensus is not just irrational, it’s out of bounds. One could lose one’s head. And many did!

For our purposes, the thing to notice is that freedom is re-defined. What began with the shared objective of delivering the citizen from domination veered towards a new conception of freedom. Freedom became merely a voice in the democratic process by which the majoritarian assembly is formed.

As we know, the government envisioned by the French revolutionaries did not survive. But their ideology did, evolving and inspiring European communitarian approaches to government ever since, including a plethora of socialisms such as Italian and German fascism and Leninism.

Communitarian concerns rightly influence Americans, serving as healthy antidotes when our rugged individualism becomes excessive. Yet when Americans tacitly begin to conceive of freedom as merely the right to a voice in determining who will rule, two unhealthy habits of thought may arise.

First, sustaining the balance of power between the branches may seem less consequential. If freedom is participation in elections and nothing more, then citizens may tend towards a passivity that tolerates and even encourages asymmetries in power between the branches. If my vote is what makes me free, then government by presidential fiat is not much different than congressional fiat.

Second, as the French revolutionaries discovered, our civil discourse may become uncivil and our liberality illiberal. For if the consensus has spoken, say, on climate science, then debating the mystical consensus is irrational and protest intolerable. Given such ideological commitments, it may seem right and proper to use government power to silence dissent.

Which is, of course, the opposite of the American way. Our constitution does not merely tolerate dissent, it counts on it.

Yet freedom is not merely having a voice. That’s just the beginning. Results matter: freedom is deliverance from domination.

Let freedom reign!

Pettit, Phillip. 2013. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. The Seeley Lectures. Cambridge University Press.

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