6 - Political Freedom?

Summary

“Freedom is found in no form of government;

it is in the heart of the free man.”

Rousseau

Unlike the (non)institution of academia discussed in the previous chapter, our supposedly “free” political system must strike one as something of an oxymoron. Indeed, as A. Bartlett Giamatti pointed out, in 1810 James Madison argued that “a national university <should> deny its national character”: “Such an institution, says Madison, though local in its legal character, would be universal in its beneficial effects.” In taking the name “university” literally, it is hard to see how the freedom that, as we just saw, defines the university might extend to the body politic. Moreover, Giamatti also notes that, in 1848, the great educational reformer Horace Mann argued that education would free one from the “domination of capital and the servility of labor,” thus also agreeing with Madison that it is education, and not Realpolitik, that sets us free from what is at best the negative freedom of this or that political system, including our own.

And yet, it is “political freedom” that, for most of us, comes to mind first when thinking about freedom. It is, for many, Realpolitik that constitutes real freedom. Thus, while acknowledging that positive freedom is different from the merely negative freedom of “independence,” which is the name given to the holiday when Americans supposedly celebrate their political freedom from England, I would argue for a middle ground between the two in which the ideal of positive freedom in the terms we have argued for throughout this book informs the latter in a positive way.

The goal here is to examine political freedom, which is largely “negative” in its concern with removing obstacles and other untoward infringements upon our independence, in relation to the more “positive” forms of freedom discussed here, such as “artistic” freedom, “academic freedom,” and, as we have defined it, the “divine” freedom to act “as God would,” that is, to do something in the best way possible regardless of the consequences. Indeed, it is noteworthy that all the forms of “positive freedom” discussed thus far have often been merely tolerated by the supposedly free society that contains— and often constrains—them.