Convivium Irenicum 2019 Part 3.2

(Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3.1 here.)

I began my most recent post about Brad Littlejohn's exploration of the concept of freedom in the Western tradition with two questions: What is freedom? And what is freedom good for? After a brief historical recapitulation of what freedom has meant at different times, I ended with two slightly different questions:

Is there a framework or schema that takes seriously the different historical "takes" on freedom? Alternatively, is there a way to correlate freedom from external necessity, the rule of law, reason, pursuit of the Good, and to allow room for moral agency?

What follows is my diagrammatic representation of Littlejohn's four-fold concept of liberty (thus doubling Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts).

                                        FOUR CONCEPTS OF FREEDOM

                                     Individual                                    Social

Negative                 A Non-Interference                B Non-Domination
                                  (Mill; Libertarians)                  (Romans; English Constitutionalists)

Positive                  C  Rationality                         D  Recognition
                                   (Kant)                                     (?)
                                             

                                   CORRELATIVE THREATS TO FREEDOM

Negative                 A' Coercion                            B'  Arbitrariness


Positive                  C' Irrationality                         D'  Alienation

Rather than the common two axes--positive and negative--Littlejohn adds another set of perspectives, individual and social. This makes sense given the inherent social nature of human beings. We often desire our liberty as much as my freedom. And after at last reading Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty in advance of the Convivium, I am surprised that Berlin didn't explicitly account for the social aspect of liberty. He did, after all, spend an entire section of his essay (VI, "The Search for Status") substantiating the following point:

I am a social being in a deeper sense than that of interaction with others. For am I not what I am, to some degree, in virtue of what others think and feel me to be? When I ask myself what I am, and answer: an Englishman, a Chinese, a merchant, a man of no importance, a millionaire, a convict - I find upon analysis that to possess these attributes entails being recognised as belonging to a particular group or class by other persons in my society, and that this recognition is part of the meaning of most of the terms that denote some of my most personal and permanent characteristics. I am not disembodied reason. Nor am I Robinson Crusoe, alone upon his island. It is not only that my material life depends upon interaction with other men, or that I am what I am as a result of social forces, but that some, perhaps all, of my ideas about myself, in particular my sense of my own moral and social identity, are intelligible only in terms of the social network in which I am (the metaphor must not be pressed too far) an element.

Thus the desire for recognition as a social group is as much an aspect of liberty as any other. Of course, especially in today's ecosystem of what Littlejohn described as "social flopping," the need for an historically principled means to distinguish natural from artificial groups has never been more necessary. In other words, a strong claim for recognition can be weaponized in a way that denies rationality and negates both the negative and positive freedom of others. Yet it should be acknowledged that privileging any of the other quadrants of freedom has led to a similar result.

I short, Littlejohn's lecture was quite stimulating and I look forward to reading the paper that brings all his insights together.