LITMIR.BIZ

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sense that we are vulnerable to the will of another. And it is still true that men who ‘slide into a blind dependence upon one who has wealth and power’ eventually ‘care not what injustice they do, if they may be rewarded’.17 An energetic and ambitious minority will plunge into an ever more abject submission to the institutional logic in which they find themselves, profiting from an illegitimate power to the extent that they come to embody it.

      For at present such power and prestige as we enjoy usually depends on our, permanently insecure, footing in some bureaucratic, often corporate, hierarchy. As C. Wright Mills noted in the 1950s, ‘to be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions, for the institutional positions men occupy determine in large part their chance to have and to hold these valued experiences’.18 When large, hierarchical institutions all but monopolize access to the goods we value and distribute them very unevenly they are apt to breed the vices of the court.

      The republican model of government presents another reason for contemporary disquiet. In establishing the conditions of independence Harrington focused on the need for material subsistence, but in a vastly larger and more complex industrial society accurate information has become ever more crucial to those who aspire to public status. Where day-to-day experience and conversation once furnished men with the knowledge required for them to understand the world, we now rely on an extended infrastructure of reporting and research to remain in touch with the ever more remote world of effective decision-making. Yet we do not together monitor, let alone control, the means by which we become informed about matters beyond our immediate experience; nor is the network of descriptions on which we rely open to critical challenge from an engaged public. The media constantly tell us that we are individually autonomous and collectively sovereign. The same media have the power to ensure that we are neither. We depend on institutions we do not govern or understand in our efforts to understand and govern the wider world.

      From the outset soothing voices could be heard, insisting that the notion of the Republic was impractical, excessive and unrealistic. William Paley, for example, assured his readers that ‘those definitions ought to be rejected, which by making that essential to civil freedom which is unattainable in experience, inflame expectations that can never be gratified, and disturb the public content with complaints’.19 The bleak theorist of the omnipotent state, Thomas Hobbes, also scorned the idea of the Republic and the world of Roman virtue it both promised and demanded. As far as Hobbes was concerned the state could take whatever form it liked. It could call itself a civic Republic or a despotism on the Turkish model. The state was not constituted by an individual chosen by God or by natural persons arranged as a public. The state was an artificial animal, entirely self-sufficient and self-justifying. And the substance of the state was everywhere the same, it was absolute power, a permanent capacity to daunt all rivals, a frozen violence holding all subordinate powers in a condition of enforced peace. The state was the sole public institution but it did not rely on the consent of any existing public for its legitimacy. Necessity provided all the legitimacy needed since without states man would find himself in the chaos of war that was his natural condition.

      According to Hobbes this was the reality that the republicans, drunk on classical learning, failed to grasp. Individual freedom amounted to no more than being left alone to pursue one’s own lawful projects under the state’s watchful eye. Any other concept of freedom was wishful thinking. In a much-quoted passage Hobbes mocks the citizens of Lucca and their republican pretensions:

      The Athenians, and Romans were free; that is, free commonwealths: not that any particular men had the liberty to resist their own representative; but that their representative had the liberty to resist, or invade other people. There is written on the turrets of the city of Lucca in great characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS; yet no man can thence infer, that a particular man has more liberty, or immunity from the service of the commonwealth there, than in Constantinople. Whether a commonwealth be monarchical, or popular, the freedom is still the same.20

      Harrington returns this contempt for the free state with interest. Commenting on Hobbes’s view that the liberty of a commonwealth is not the liberty of particular men within it, Harrington retorts that

      he might as well have said that the estates of particular men in a commonwealth are not the riches of particular men, but the riches of the commonwealth; for equality of estates causes equality of power, and equality of power is the liberty, not only of the commonwealth, but of every man.21

      Furthermore, insists Harrington, it is one thing to claim that a citizen of Lucca has no more liberty from the law than a Turk and quite another to claim that he has no more liberty by the law:

      The first may be said of all governments alike; the second scarce of any two; much less of these, seeing it is known that, whereas the greatest Bashaw is a tenant, as well of his head as of his estate, at the will of his lord, the meanest Lucchese that has land is a freeholder of both, and not to be controlled but by the law, and that framed by every private man to no other end (or they may thank themselves) than to protect the liberty of every private man, which by that means comes to be the liberty of the commonwealth.22

      In the twentieth century Isaiah Berlin influentially restated Hobbes’ rejection of the idea that true liberty was only to be found where citizens organized as a public controlled the state. In Two Concepts of Liberty Berlin described positive and negative liberty in terms that decisively favoured what Noel Annan called, in a revealing moment of amnesia, ‘the classic English interpretation of liberty’ – that to be free is to be left unmolested by arbitrary power. This is ‘the classic English interpretation of liberty’ only in the sense that it is what remains once the many advocates of an English Republic are removed from view.

      Berlin describes negative freedom in ways that would be familiar to Hobbes, indeed he quotes Hobbes in a footnote: ‘A free man . . . is he that . . . is not hindered to do what he has a will to.’ It follows for Berlin that ‘a frontier must be drawn between the area of private life and that of public authority’.23 Freedom is something that is enjoyed in private, not something that is exercised in public. Berlin, like Hobbes, deals with the republican conception of virtue by ignoring its key arguments. Individuals are free when they are unmolested by the state. When they are dependent on others for survival Berlin cannot see that they are unfree, since they are free to defy their betters and starve.

      Berlin’s elaborates his case against positive liberty in a way that is, at best, eccentric. He begins sensibly enough:

      The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object. . .24

      He goes on to point out that positive liberty of this self-actualizing kind has sometimes turned into a blind faith in some abstract entity that realizes the true perfection of the imperfect human individual – the State, the Party, Reason, History, Human Nature. In the name of this abstraction the advocates of positive freedom can then coerce their fellows, secure in the knowledge that they are helping them to become truly free. Hence the Bolsheviks developed their enthusiasm for education and, especially, re-education and accepted the need to exterminate those social elements that incorrigibly stood in the way of the general freedom. Having discovered the nature of true freedom, Soviet communists were confident that they were justified in coercing those who opposed them.

      But Berlin disastrously confuses the drive for effective autonomy with the desire to dominate others by allowing one possible development – or more accurately, one perversion – of positive liberty to stand for the concept as a whole. Berlin is thus able to conclude that those who seek to defend the freedom of the individual from external compulsion are ‘almost at the opposite pole’ from those who believe in positive liberty: ‘The former want to limit authority as such. The latter want it placed in their own hands.’25 This is suavely effective rhetoric but it allows Berlin to ignore centuries of republican practice as well as the substance of republican theory in the English tradition. The point for republicans is that ‘authority as such’ can only be limited effectively when a public of citizens is its sole source.

      Berlin argued, for reasons

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