> Freedom did not entail escaping from government rule but rather making it democratic.
I don’t see how getting a fractional vote in choosing your oppressor can be equated with “freedom” by any means, just by the meaning of the word alone. This seems wholly absurd.
They repeatedly compare democracy with absolute monarchies, not with ideal republics. That important context takes a back seat to current events, which makes the beginning very peculiar, but the book is likely better crafted.
The thing that is missing is that your interests are not completely atomic and isolated. You share most of your important political interests with many other people, forming a class. Making politics democratic means you can collaborate with your class to find common freedom.
The near death of popular politics in America and its replacement with TV spectacle obscures this. Basically, your complaint is that your vote doesn't matter and that's a function of how deteriorated American democracy is, now best characterized as a plutocracy, that people think this way.
and a functioning democracy has many more consultations and participatory processes than just voting a fraction of an election result. its ongoing work.
Reminder that The Nation carries a strong Left bias (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings). They've featured Professor Annelien de Dijn's work in an interview previously in 2020 (https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/annelien-de-dijn-f...), and it's clear from that interview that her core perspective on freedom aligns with The Nation's left-leaning worldview that state actions restricting individual liberties don't constitute a violation of freedom. De Dijn's work is funded by the ISRF, a Netherlands-based organization that funds (typically progressive) social science work via grants.
Of course, de Dijn's words can be interpreted on their own merit without regards to her bias or the bias of these publications. My opinion, however, is that her writings seem to amount to an unconvincing claim that state-imposed restrictions do not constitute a violation of freedoms, because the state is a collective representation formed via a Democratic process. Essentially, she does not place value on the notion of the individual, or on concepts like tyrannies of the majority, which an emphasis on individual freedoms protects against. This is clearest in her pro-lockdown articles (https://theconversation.com/why-lockdowns-dont-necessarily-i...), where she says "even the strictest lockdown can count on broad democratic support, and the rules remain subject to scrutiny by our representatives and the press, they do not infringe on our freedom".
The rest of her support for her opinions about freedom seems rather arbitrary - appeals to historical authorities like selectively chosen philosophers, and vague dots connected across historical events to trivialize the value of individual freedom and place collectivist rule on a pedestal. This type of historical framing to justify or vilify a contemporary political position just feels too speculative to be helpful. I've seen this in other contexts as well, for example when people will claim that zoning laws are "racist" because they were used by racists in a discriminatory manner many decades ago - I'm simply not sure what relevance it bears on the conversation today.
In this article, the author presents de Dijn's book as a balanced and comprehensive analysis of the history of freedom. But the article's author's bias is clear in sentences like "she challenges conservatives who wrap their ideology in the glorious banner of freedom, revealing the long history of a very different vision of human liberation, one that emphasizes collective self-government over individual privilege". Individual freedom is recast as "privilege", a scary negative term to The Nation's readers, while restrictions of freedoms by the state are recast as "collective self-government" when really it should be seen more as "collectivist rule".
Ultimately, I'm not sure an academic debate on this topic is worth it. It's pretty simple - do you believe a large government should dictate how every individual, every jurisdiction, every organization within its borders should live? Or should it err on the side of being permissive and granting local and individual freedoms? It's a question of personal values, and not something that has to be justified using selectively chosen elements of Western history.
That's a false dichotomy. You could have a highly democratic, highly local government with a lot of authority for example. The choice isn't between Big Brother and a Wild West town.
It also completely ignores that like 90% of what governments do is not to supply or withhold a right but to settle disputes between individuals when their rights are in contest.
That's a purely rhetorical - not to mention simplistic - dichotomy.
When you clear away the rhetoric, can you think of a compelling historical example of conservatives not operating as if their personal exercise of privilege is the most complete possible definition of freedom, and the only one that matters - no matter the cost to everyone else?
This assumes that the best road is in the middle in modern parlance of English in America, I.E. the "left" versus the "right".
If you look at other nation's, this dichotomy breaks down and you see people who would call America's left far right. So when you talk about strong bias to the left or right, know that you have your own bias you are ignoring.
> De Dijn argues, however, that this is not the only conception of freedom and that it is a relatively recent one. For much of human history, people thought of freedom not as protecting individual rights but as ensuring self-rule and the just treatment of all. In short, they equated freedom with democracy. “For centuries Western thinkers and political actors identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with exercising control over the way one is governed,” she writes. Liberty in its classic formulation was thus not individual but collective. Freedom did not entail escaping from government rule but rather making it democratic.
This is right out of Philip Pettit. Pettit is a living philosopher of Republicanism. His argument is that we should move away from Isaiah Berlin's negative/positive freedom dichotomy toward an ideal he calls "freedom as non-domination". He argues that this was, in fact, the pre-modern version of freedom that existed in Ancient Rome and in various Italian City states.
Non-domination is a synthesis of negative and positive liberty: it is negative in that it is against something (domination), it is positive in that it allows you to set goals for your government. Freedom as non-domination states that people should be free from arbitrary interference and from the possibility of arbitrary interference (i.e. even if you are not arbitrarily interfering with me, but you have the ability to, something is wrong). "Arbitrary" here means at the pleasure of the person doing the interfering. Pettit also, sometimes, considers interference to be arbitrary if the person being interfered with has no ability to contest the interference.
Pettit is explicitly making a left-wing argument. He wants to appeal to feminists, environmentalists, and socialists. He argues that all of these perspectives can be placed under the umbrella of freedom as non-domination.
> “Ideas about freedom commonplace today…were invented not by the revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but rather by their critics.”
This is also an argument from Pettit. Pettit points to Hobbes as the progenitor of freedom-as-non-interference (negative liberty) and notes that Hobbes was a monarchist, i.e. an enemy of democracy and republicanism. Pettit then argues that Hobbes failed to convince anyone but that, later, during the American Revolution, his ideas had a resurgence among opponents of American Independence (he puts William Paley and Jeremy Bentham in this group).
I would respond to Pettit (and this article) in a few ways. First, Isaiah Berlin is a value-pluralist not a freedom-as-non-interference theorist. He says there are more values than negative and positive liberty, that all of these values are sometimes worth pursuing, and that they are often incommensurate with one another ("freedom for the pike is death for the minnows"). Berlin is explicitly telling us not to do what Pettit is doing: trying to create a single ideal and use that ideal to harmonize society. For Berlin, this is (as the article says) what happened in the Soviet Union.
Berlin links this tendency to try to harmonize society with the idea that you should be able to choose "what other people should rationally want". As a result of this, Berlin is sometimes seen as "being against positive liberty". But this isn't quite right. For Berlin, positive liberty is not bad, just dangerous. It is a value that we should pursue, but in a measured way. Positive freedom is associated with self-mastery and democracy.
A second objection to Pettit/de Dijn comes from Paley. Petitt is aware of it, but doesn't see it as a significant obstacle. I do. Paley argues that "freedom as non-domination" is simply impossible in a society where everyone is a citizen. The subtext here being that, in ancient Republican societies, only rich men were citizens and that their non-domination was secured by literal slavery. Freedom-as-non-interference may not be as good as...
>Pettit includes no discussion of nature at all: he is only interested in people dominating people. To me, this misses a fundamental truth about the human condition.
This is probably because nature is nature - it is a fundamental fact of human existence, where as "human nature" in terms of social relations between producers and owners in society is not a fact of nature, and over the course of human history, has seen many forms. We're talking about sociology, not about biology. While biology certainly gets a look-in via, say, evopsych, that's not the main concern of the article, or the author's point. The idea that nature is itself dominating assumes a conception of nature in which nature oppresses, rather than creates us. The idea that 'nature' itself is oppressive is a Hobbesian tale that has not fared well in philosophy and the social sciences.
Hurricanes are oppressive, sure; but we can't change that fact. Maybe we should focus on what we can change, and investigating the limits of what we can change. Meteorologists and physicists have safely ruled out the idea that we can get rid of hurricanes.
I have a stomach and if I don't fill it I'll die. Food isn't easy to come by. I don't see how you can build a political philosophy without taking facts like that into account. If we lived in Eden, if I could walk around and do whatever I want without dying, we wouldn't need politics or government.
But nature's oppression isn't an immutable fact. We have vaccines, GMO crops, houses, and other technology. To some degree, we are liberated from nature today. I've ignored every hurricane I've ever lived through.
Unhappily, domination (as in, arbitrary interference, not as in literal slavery) is necessary in order for us to escape from nature. In order for that to change we either have to decide we don't mind being dominated by nature (opt out, a perfectly reasonable decision, be my guest hackernews posters) or we have to invent lots of science fiction technology to do all the labor that keeps civilization running. Small countries with lots of natural resources may be able to achieve non-domination but that's only because there are big countries to buy the resources.
>I don't see how you can build a political philosophy without taking facts like that into account.
We already have political philosophy which takes that into account; it concerns material conditions and relations of production, and the reproduction of labour-power. Economists on all sides of the political spectrum from Austrians to classical Marxists talk about population, growth, sustainability, and the need for necessities and shelter.
Where people disagree is the subsumption of natural disaster and the basic human fact of life into a naturalistic conception of production relations. Production relations are built on top of natural requirements, but they are not the same thing, as evidenced by the wide variety of production relations which serve those natural requirements through history (whether slave societies, feudal societies, 'communal' societies, or capitalist societies). When talking in political philosophy, you abstract from raw physical facts of caloric intake to how those calories are organized and distributed in society, and to what degrees. "Domination by nature" is an irrelevant question to political philosophy, which strictly concerns matters known (natural disaster, food, shelter, sex) or hypothesized to be (transhumanism, gender relations, distribution and production of medicines, urban or rural life, the work day) in the hands of humans.
I would agree with the article that the idea of freedom is old precisely because it was misunderstood.
Freedom for most of history meant the degree one was free to act / work under the thumb of a capricious landowner / empowered polity (ie majority rule). There was no clearly defined line and that led to constant conflict.
Discussion of freedom prior to 18th century did not touch on the freedom of the state vs freedom of the individual precisely because it treated everyone as part of the same body of rights. There was no dividing line, and thus no freedom, as we know the term, today.
Is a benevolent dictator any different from a democracy that is unencumbered by constitutional rights ?
Historically, freedom did indeed have different meanings.
For example, in the German Democratic Republic, you were shot when you wanted to leave. But it is just insufficiently sophisticated people that would conclude from that that they were lacking freedom.
They did have freedom, but just had a different definition for it.
Their definition of freedom was "understanding of the necessity" / "Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit". The definition comes from the famous German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, so surely it is more valid that the thought of some stupid redneck that thinks freedom means not being shot when you want to leave the country.
Being shot when leaving is consistent with this definition of freedom. It is not a shallow western individualist definition, with negative freedoms (freedom from...), but a collectivist definition. If you leave, you deprive the collective of your work, thereby reducing their positive freedoms. Surely it is just to shoot somebody for such an egregious violation of other people's freedom.
Rant over.
I am really sick of people trying to twist the meaning of terms to suit their own political agenda. If you want to argue that other things are more important than freedom, fine. But at least make up your own terms.
The confusion comes from the conflation of 'liberty' and 'freedom' as meaning the same thing.
Your "stupid redneck" is right if by 'freedom' he really means 'liberty', and to most people these two terms are completely interchangeable.
Far from being the same thing, these two ideals are actually contradictory. As you touch on, negative rights must be violated in order to secure positive rights.
Now, If you want to claim one is more legitimate than the other, I have a John Locke to match your Friedrich Hegels.
I think the point of the OP is that both definitions of freedom and liberty are going to be understood to mean different things depending on what people you are addressing.
You go ask the Kashmir people what they think liberty and freedom are, and I bet they will define it in terms of Islam and Hinduism.
Those particular definitions that you take for granted are a product of America being an immigrant nation populated by people who had at the time, little shared identity.
Now to your credit I will say, the Americans are probably the most far ahead in this domain. Most of the rest of the world are still stuck with a freedom-with-exceptions mentality.
That is a very interesting idea. I never considered that freedom can either contain or exclude liberty, depending on who you are talking to. But i'm still pretty sure that you can't confuse the term 'liberty', as it has a more defined meaning, regardless of cultural contexts. What changes is the value associated with the ideal.
Every people on Earth strives for freedom, but the form of this freedom may be different in every cultural context. In the Western tradition, as developed by John Stuart Mill, Frederick Bastiat, Thomas Paine and John Locke, etc., this means liberty which is characterised by an emphasis on negative rights, freedom from government, and individualism.
I do not think that the people of Kashmir consider liberty when they ask for freedom, but rather mean freedom in the way that the OP defines it, as only being democratic self-governance.
Interesting. In German there is no such strong distinction, so I was not aware of this distinction in English.
E.g. the word "Vogelfrei" refers to somebody who is free but excluded from society, an outcast. So definitely not a tiny bit of positive freedom there.
> But it is just insufficiently sophisticated people that would conclude from that [getting shot for the crime of border crossing] they were lacking freedom.
Translation: East germans getting shot at the border were just too dumb to realise that they were free...
> Surely it is just to shoot somebody for such an egregious violation of other people's freedom
Translation: Refusing to have their labor wasted on a defunct system, thereby depriving others of its non-existent fruits, soundly earned one's capital punishment, to be carried out on the spot. It was "Notwendig".
> They did have freedom, but just had a different definition for it.
And surly they did have less radiation poisoning due to a different definition of what it means to be "poisoned".
EDIT: How could I miss this misanthropic gem:
> some stupid redneck
Translation: I know only cliches about the discarded working class trapped in the American rust belt, but treating them with contempt seems fun and acceptable, so I'll join.
Sorry that this was not clear, but my comment was deeply sarcastic. I thought the "Rant over" was sufficient as a sarcasm marker.
I think the "stupid redneck" definition of freedom, which I share, is way better than the "sophisticated philosopher" definition I mentioned.
I see a very worrying tendency, in the context of Covid, to re-establish the absurd GDR/Hegel definition of freedom in German state tv and other media. People seem unaware what a fundamental change that is.
"To Hegel, the state was the culmination of moral action, where freedom of choice had led to the unity of the rational will, and all parts of society were nourished within the health of the whole."
Love Nietsche. This is also good, on the subject of government:
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
Thank you that was an interesting and insightful read. I also like that they discussed this in terms of every human institution, not just governments, because I see the same idea applying to corporations as well.
Democracy is a tool, but doesn't reliably produce freedom or any other good outcome by itself. Individual rights and federalism go a long way to protecting freedom in the long term.
Democracy works best when dealing with details, where there is already basic agreement on where the country should go. In that case, you just want a basically fair process to get a decision made, and you can adapt later.
But when there's a fundamental split in the electorate, democracy just means tyranny of the 55%.
Or in some cases the ~40%. Democracies often have rules in place to prevent that "tyranny of the 55%", but those rules can be leveraged to let certain minorities dominate.
For example, democracy is often tilted towards inaction. That sounds like a good thing, until a majority loses its advantage. Then the rules that they put into place become permanent, and can't be changed even by largish majorities.
It's still generally better than the others that have been tried from time to time, but it's far less fair than its high-minded abstractions make it sound.
32 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom#Personal_and_social
This is complicated because not everyone makes this distinction consistently, and many languages use the same term for both concepts most of the time.
Apparently the Ben Franklin line about "essential liberty" is also originally kind of collectivist in meaning:
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
Subtle concepts!
I don’t see how getting a fractional vote in choosing your oppressor can be equated with “freedom” by any means, just by the meaning of the word alone. This seems wholly absurd.
The near death of popular politics in America and its replacement with TV spectacle obscures this. Basically, your complaint is that your vote doesn't matter and that's a function of how deteriorated American democracy is, now best characterized as a plutocracy, that people think this way.
Of course, de Dijn's words can be interpreted on their own merit without regards to her bias or the bias of these publications. My opinion, however, is that her writings seem to amount to an unconvincing claim that state-imposed restrictions do not constitute a violation of freedoms, because the state is a collective representation formed via a Democratic process. Essentially, she does not place value on the notion of the individual, or on concepts like tyrannies of the majority, which an emphasis on individual freedoms protects against. This is clearest in her pro-lockdown articles (https://theconversation.com/why-lockdowns-dont-necessarily-i...), where she says "even the strictest lockdown can count on broad democratic support, and the rules remain subject to scrutiny by our representatives and the press, they do not infringe on our freedom".
The rest of her support for her opinions about freedom seems rather arbitrary - appeals to historical authorities like selectively chosen philosophers, and vague dots connected across historical events to trivialize the value of individual freedom and place collectivist rule on a pedestal. This type of historical framing to justify or vilify a contemporary political position just feels too speculative to be helpful. I've seen this in other contexts as well, for example when people will claim that zoning laws are "racist" because they were used by racists in a discriminatory manner many decades ago - I'm simply not sure what relevance it bears on the conversation today.
In this article, the author presents de Dijn's book as a balanced and comprehensive analysis of the history of freedom. But the article's author's bias is clear in sentences like "she challenges conservatives who wrap their ideology in the glorious banner of freedom, revealing the long history of a very different vision of human liberation, one that emphasizes collective self-government over individual privilege". Individual freedom is recast as "privilege", a scary negative term to The Nation's readers, while restrictions of freedoms by the state are recast as "collective self-government" when really it should be seen more as "collectivist rule".
Ultimately, I'm not sure an academic debate on this topic is worth it. It's pretty simple - do you believe a large government should dictate how every individual, every jurisdiction, every organization within its borders should live? Or should it err on the side of being permissive and granting local and individual freedoms? It's a question of personal values, and not something that has to be justified using selectively chosen elements of Western history.
It also completely ignores that like 90% of what governments do is not to supply or withhold a right but to settle disputes between individuals when their rights are in contest.
When you clear away the rhetoric, can you think of a compelling historical example of conservatives not operating as if their personal exercise of privilege is the most complete possible definition of freedom, and the only one that matters - no matter the cost to everyone else?
If you look at other nation's, this dichotomy breaks down and you see people who would call America's left far right. So when you talk about strong bias to the left or right, know that you have your own bias you are ignoring.
This is right out of Philip Pettit. Pettit is a living philosopher of Republicanism. His argument is that we should move away from Isaiah Berlin's negative/positive freedom dichotomy toward an ideal he calls "freedom as non-domination". He argues that this was, in fact, the pre-modern version of freedom that existed in Ancient Rome and in various Italian City states.
Non-domination is a synthesis of negative and positive liberty: it is negative in that it is against something (domination), it is positive in that it allows you to set goals for your government. Freedom as non-domination states that people should be free from arbitrary interference and from the possibility of arbitrary interference (i.e. even if you are not arbitrarily interfering with me, but you have the ability to, something is wrong). "Arbitrary" here means at the pleasure of the person doing the interfering. Pettit also, sometimes, considers interference to be arbitrary if the person being interfered with has no ability to contest the interference.
Pettit is explicitly making a left-wing argument. He wants to appeal to feminists, environmentalists, and socialists. He argues that all of these perspectives can be placed under the umbrella of freedom as non-domination.
> “Ideas about freedom commonplace today…were invented not by the revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but rather by their critics.”
This is also an argument from Pettit. Pettit points to Hobbes as the progenitor of freedom-as-non-interference (negative liberty) and notes that Hobbes was a monarchist, i.e. an enemy of democracy and republicanism. Pettit then argues that Hobbes failed to convince anyone but that, later, during the American Revolution, his ideas had a resurgence among opponents of American Independence (he puts William Paley and Jeremy Bentham in this group).
I would respond to Pettit (and this article) in a few ways. First, Isaiah Berlin is a value-pluralist not a freedom-as-non-interference theorist. He says there are more values than negative and positive liberty, that all of these values are sometimes worth pursuing, and that they are often incommensurate with one another ("freedom for the pike is death for the minnows"). Berlin is explicitly telling us not to do what Pettit is doing: trying to create a single ideal and use that ideal to harmonize society. For Berlin, this is (as the article says) what happened in the Soviet Union.
Berlin links this tendency to try to harmonize society with the idea that you should be able to choose "what other people should rationally want". As a result of this, Berlin is sometimes seen as "being against positive liberty". But this isn't quite right. For Berlin, positive liberty is not bad, just dangerous. It is a value that we should pursue, but in a measured way. Positive freedom is associated with self-mastery and democracy.
A second objection to Pettit/de Dijn comes from Paley. Petitt is aware of it, but doesn't see it as a significant obstacle. I do. Paley argues that "freedom as non-domination" is simply impossible in a society where everyone is a citizen. The subtext here being that, in ancient Republican societies, only rich men were citizens and that their non-domination was secured by literal slavery. Freedom-as-non-interference may not be as good as...
I wonder how this compares to Arnold Kling's three-axis model.
https://www.libertarianism.org/books/three-languages-politic...
(Presumably "domination" has some conceptual overlap with Kling's progressives' "oppression" but also with his libertarians' "coercion"?)
This is probably because nature is nature - it is a fundamental fact of human existence, where as "human nature" in terms of social relations between producers and owners in society is not a fact of nature, and over the course of human history, has seen many forms. We're talking about sociology, not about biology. While biology certainly gets a look-in via, say, evopsych, that's not the main concern of the article, or the author's point. The idea that nature is itself dominating assumes a conception of nature in which nature oppresses, rather than creates us. The idea that 'nature' itself is oppressive is a Hobbesian tale that has not fared well in philosophy and the social sciences.
Hurricanes are oppressive, sure; but we can't change that fact. Maybe we should focus on what we can change, and investigating the limits of what we can change. Meteorologists and physicists have safely ruled out the idea that we can get rid of hurricanes.
But nature's oppression isn't an immutable fact. We have vaccines, GMO crops, houses, and other technology. To some degree, we are liberated from nature today. I've ignored every hurricane I've ever lived through.
Unhappily, domination (as in, arbitrary interference, not as in literal slavery) is necessary in order for us to escape from nature. In order for that to change we either have to decide we don't mind being dominated by nature (opt out, a perfectly reasonable decision, be my guest hackernews posters) or we have to invent lots of science fiction technology to do all the labor that keeps civilization running. Small countries with lots of natural resources may be able to achieve non-domination but that's only because there are big countries to buy the resources.
We already have political philosophy which takes that into account; it concerns material conditions and relations of production, and the reproduction of labour-power. Economists on all sides of the political spectrum from Austrians to classical Marxists talk about population, growth, sustainability, and the need for necessities and shelter.
Where people disagree is the subsumption of natural disaster and the basic human fact of life into a naturalistic conception of production relations. Production relations are built on top of natural requirements, but they are not the same thing, as evidenced by the wide variety of production relations which serve those natural requirements through history (whether slave societies, feudal societies, 'communal' societies, or capitalist societies). When talking in political philosophy, you abstract from raw physical facts of caloric intake to how those calories are organized and distributed in society, and to what degrees. "Domination by nature" is an irrelevant question to political philosophy, which strictly concerns matters known (natural disaster, food, shelter, sex) or hypothesized to be (transhumanism, gender relations, distribution and production of medicines, urban or rural life, the work day) in the hands of humans.
We can't "abstract" things that are immanent when we do political philosophy. If we do that we're chasing soap bubbles.
Freedom for most of history meant the degree one was free to act / work under the thumb of a capricious landowner / empowered polity (ie majority rule). There was no clearly defined line and that led to constant conflict.
Discussion of freedom prior to 18th century did not touch on the freedom of the state vs freedom of the individual precisely because it treated everyone as part of the same body of rights. There was no dividing line, and thus no freedom, as we know the term, today.
Is a benevolent dictator any different from a democracy that is unencumbered by constitutional rights ?
For example, in the German Democratic Republic, you were shot when you wanted to leave. But it is just insufficiently sophisticated people that would conclude from that that they were lacking freedom.
They did have freedom, but just had a different definition for it.
Their definition of freedom was "understanding of the necessity" / "Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit". The definition comes from the famous German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, so surely it is more valid that the thought of some stupid redneck that thinks freedom means not being shot when you want to leave the country.
Being shot when leaving is consistent with this definition of freedom. It is not a shallow western individualist definition, with negative freedoms (freedom from...), but a collectivist definition. If you leave, you deprive the collective of your work, thereby reducing their positive freedoms. Surely it is just to shoot somebody for such an egregious violation of other people's freedom.
Rant over.
I am really sick of people trying to twist the meaning of terms to suit their own political agenda. If you want to argue that other things are more important than freedom, fine. But at least make up your own terms.
Your "stupid redneck" is right if by 'freedom' he really means 'liberty', and to most people these two terms are completely interchangeable.
Far from being the same thing, these two ideals are actually contradictory. As you touch on, negative rights must be violated in order to secure positive rights.
Now, If you want to claim one is more legitimate than the other, I have a John Locke to match your Friedrich Hegels.
You go ask the Kashmir people what they think liberty and freedom are, and I bet they will define it in terms of Islam and Hinduism.
Those particular definitions that you take for granted are a product of America being an immigrant nation populated by people who had at the time, little shared identity.
Now to your credit I will say, the Americans are probably the most far ahead in this domain. Most of the rest of the world are still stuck with a freedom-with-exceptions mentality.
Every people on Earth strives for freedom, but the form of this freedom may be different in every cultural context. In the Western tradition, as developed by John Stuart Mill, Frederick Bastiat, Thomas Paine and John Locke, etc., this means liberty which is characterised by an emphasis on negative rights, freedom from government, and individualism.
I do not think that the people of Kashmir consider liberty when they ask for freedom, but rather mean freedom in the way that the OP defines it, as only being democratic self-governance.
E.g. the word "Vogelfrei" refers to somebody who is free but excluded from society, an outcast. So definitely not a tiny bit of positive freedom there.
Translation: East germans getting shot at the border were just too dumb to realise that they were free...
> Surely it is just to shoot somebody for such an egregious violation of other people's freedom
Translation: Refusing to have their labor wasted on a defunct system, thereby depriving others of its non-existent fruits, soundly earned one's capital punishment, to be carried out on the spot. It was "Notwendig".
> They did have freedom, but just had a different definition for it.
And surly they did have less radiation poisoning due to a different definition of what it means to be "poisoned".
EDIT: How could I miss this misanthropic gem:
> some stupid redneck
Translation: I know only cliches about the discarded working class trapped in the American rust belt, but treating them with contempt seems fun and acceptable, so I'll join.
I think the "stupid redneck" definition of freedom, which I share, is way better than the "sophisticated philosopher" definition I mentioned.
I see a very worrying tendency, in the context of Covid, to re-establish the absurd GDR/Hegel definition of freedom in German state tv and other media. People seem unaware what a fundamental change that is.
E.g. https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/panorama/hegel-geburtstag-fre... https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/mit-hegel-durch-die-cor...
Regarding Hegel's definition of freedom:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-sovereign-political-e...
"To Hegel, the state was the culmination of moral action, where freedom of choice had led to the unity of the rational will, and all parts of society were nourished within the health of the whole."
To me, this is hell...
>>A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people."<<
Or like this:
>>Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.<<
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Who’s they? The communist rulers had own definition of freedom that applied to caprice others?
That freedom reminds me of the freedom concentration camp prisoners had in WW II. You’re free, but don’t try to escape.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110822151104/http://irl.cs.ucl...
Democracy works best when dealing with details, where there is already basic agreement on where the country should go. In that case, you just want a basically fair process to get a decision made, and you can adapt later.
But when there's a fundamental split in the electorate, democracy just means tyranny of the 55%.
For example, democracy is often tilted towards inaction. That sounds like a good thing, until a majority loses its advantage. Then the rules that they put into place become permanent, and can't be changed even by largish majorities.
It's still generally better than the others that have been tried from time to time, but it's far less fair than its high-minded abstractions make it sound.