Positive Liberty in the Time of the Great Asshole Flowering

Liberty is an important political concept. Political theorists typically divide liberty into two kinds, positive and negative liberty. Negative liberty entails freedom from coercion, freedoms not to be interfered with, freedom from excessive governmental regulation. This is clearly an important idea as any list of human rights--such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the Declaration of Independence--asserts. But positive liberty is a more peculiar concept for it denotes the concept of freedom to act, freedom to do, freedom to be someone. But for every 'thou shalt not' there are ten thousand 'thou shalts'. Therefore, positive liberties--liberties to act and to do and be are seen as incapable of being brought under a single rubric or, if they are, are not the proper sphere for governmental action. Indeed, positive liberty is here the realm of the personal, the private, and the economic man. Liberals have typically focused on negative liberties to the exclusion of positive liberty for the reason that a concept of positive liberty is associated with a particular view of the purpose of man, of his ends and function, and his non-public work as a private citizen. With respect to the final end of man we should note that this conception--let's call it a 'comprehensive doctrine'--is the business of personal choice and of religious designation, in other words, a part of the private sphere of life and not of the public sphere of rights. On the other hand, positive liberty can refer to the economic sphere and, in this sense, the realm of economic freedom has long been understood to be the "private" realm. (Perhaps this is because the right hand of government is not supposed to know what the other hand is up to because, after all, the invisible hand is supposed to be working things out in everybody's interest. Just a thought)

But a theory of positive liberty is an important feature of a republican theory of virtue for it describes the conditions needed for citizens to actually be citizens and not mere serfs or dependents upon the state. But the public character of positive liberty shouldn't be that hard to identify. I'd like to say that positive liberty is to be understood as that active use of human capacities which assists in the furtherance of autonomy and freedom from servitude. This is not to say that a fully actualized human being is a social atom, cut off from his fellows, but rather it is to say that positive liberty is actualized in those human beings who have developed their skills and capacities so as to become contributing members of society and, in so contributing, are able to procure their own freedom from servitude. When a person has developed the capacities to become a member of a profession of some kind, they thereby have positive liberty in the requisite sense. This is because they thereby possess the active basis of political equality in the sense that they actually contribute through their labor to society, have a stake in its decisions, and really care about its structure. This is more than the passive possession of negative rights, a mere empty formal possession of "rights", for it puts the individual in a relationship of active concern for the direction of the society in the sense of a stakeholder rather than a mere ward.

If we think of our own society--American society--as one dedicated to the furtherance of the cause of freedom, then we must not merely understand that freedom in the negative sense as providing a resistance-less social playing field in which the free market can do whatever it will. Rather, we must understand that freedom entails positive liberty as well--of the valid interest of individuals in cultivating their positive freedom. This may entail governmental curtailing of the free market where it denies, as a matter of structural necessity, the widescale development of positive freedom in the citizenry. Where jobs are constantly being shed in the name of market efficiencies, one must look and see whether such job losses are a matter of choice or of necessity. The market technicians and servants of Capital have decided lately that positive liberty is not very important. Rather, they appear to have decided that real positive liberty can be substituted with apparent wealth rather than real virtue. Given the entrenchment of the consumer mentality, the expanded ability of citizen-consumers to buy goods is just as good as if they were able to provide for themselves through meaningful labor. The carefully orchestrated boom in the housing market persuaded many citizens that they were positively free. Their wealth increased and they enjoyed a higher standard of living for a time.

But we should notice that this newfound wealth is evaporating with the collapse of the subprime housing markets. And, in the total collapse of such wealth, will the citizenry have been made more or less free in the relevant sense? Arguably, the average citzen will be less free because he will have enjoyed an artificially high standard of living without cultivating the relevant virtues of postive liberty. Here wealth accrued to individuals without their actually doing anything to get that wealth and, in the mean time, turned a blind eye to the direction of the society as a whole. Rather, they played a game of 'don't ask, don't tell'--if you don't ask more of me, I won't tell on your corrupt and impossible housing scam in the offing, the deficit spending on a hopeless war in Iraq, the fact that I don't have any health care, and so on. And now--now that the great asshole flower of the Bush administration has been allowed to bloom--we are left impovershed as a society: our dollar tanking, our citizenry reeling under the weight of debts, our jobs offshored and oversea'd, our infrastructure ever more dependent upon petroleum--all of this at a time when the spectre of Peak oil is beginning to emerge.

What we need is a culture that honors work--productive, useful, socially beneficial work--and that penalizes corrupt, scamming, derivative work. But look, we might just yet witness that age come to be. The age of the sunburnt, Jeffersonian pauper is yet to arrive!