Leviathan, Lucca and Libertas! :)

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 service of the commonwealth, there than in Constantinople. Not my words but those of Thomas Hobbes in chapter 21 of his Leviathan. It is, so the story goes, one of the greatest ironies of political philosophy that the arch defender of absolute sovereign power, who went so far as to say that by definition the sovereign can never act unjustly, was also in possession of an extremely advanced theory of liberty. Although of course it's not ironic at all, it's perfectly logical, because thinkers like Hobbes don't contradict themselves lightly - and a contradiction is not how he saw it.

The reason that I bring it up is that the point he was making about Lucca and Constantinople is the bit that we miss out far too easily today from our ideas of freedom. Hobbes was a proponent of what Isaiah Berlin would later call negative freedom, defined as the absence of external constraints, and we would all recognise (wouldn't we?) the value of this aspect of freedom. But our intuition about how this liberty is attained is completely wrong, just as it was when Hobbes wrote, because we have conflated it with something else.

In short we have taken our ownership and participation in the government as a guarantor of liberty, and conversely the lack of ownership and participation in other regimes as a sign of oppression, when in fact there is no necessary connexion. Consequently when we look to a regime, say modern day china, where government is not established by the choice of the people we necessarily deem them less free. What we are assuming is that a say in our collective government makes any essential difference to the liberty that we as individuals are allotted at any one time. If in Britain a democratic government instituted national service, with the blessing of a majority, and in China the State Council simultaneously abolished it for it's citizens? Who then, treated at the individual level, is more free, those living in a democracy or a dictatorship?

We have also made the mistake, which again Hobbes pointed out to the proponents of popular sovereignty in his day, of counting up all of the things that we could do and calling that our liberty, in contrast to a smaller variety elsewhere. But how are we constrained by laws that we would never want to contest? The government has no law against rotating clockwise on every full moon, or any number of pointless and (as of yet) unfavoured activities - but we are unused to calling this our liberty. So in what sense can we say that all the people of the PRC (to pick on China again) are 'not free' if most simply do not ask for what they are not allowed.

I'm not apologist for the Chinese government, I'm fairly reluctant to grant to them even the virtues that are probably due, nor am I saying that democratic states do not have a greater call on their citizen's time and effort. But I do think, much as Isaiah Berlin did, a more nuanced view of freedom would do us good, if only as a way of understanding the way we are living our lives - never mind changing them (that's another story).