Liberty and the Left

“Prominent proposals by left-wing parties such as democratizing the workplace or introducing universal public healthcare (in the United States), they argue, are best framed as positions that further the cause of freedom.”

In a lengthy essay entitled “Freedom Now,” which will appear in the July of 2020 edition of Polity, professors Alex Gourevitch and Corey Robin discuss the place of freedom in left-wing politics. The essay’s central argument is straightforward: While there has been a revived interest in left-wing politics and socialism, there seems to be no specific value that functions as the unifying principle to be defended throughout left-wing policies. This unifying value, they argue, should be freedom. Prominent proposals by left-wing parties such as democratizing the workplace or introducing universal public healthcare (in the United States), they argue, are best framed as positions that further the cause of freedom. In their estimation, the two most significant threats to individual freedom come from the economic structure, not the state. These are the hierarchical structure of the workplace, in which most people spend a very significant portion of their lives, along with what they call market discipline. This last concept is the set of constraints that are imposed on us when we seek to solve political problems through economic means. The distribution of housing and healthcare, for example, are political problems, but by being left to the market, housing and healthcare are expelled from the realm of politics and reduced to economic problems. In this way, the laws of supply, demand, prices, and the like determine the outcome of many political problems. This, hence, gives rise to the phrase “market discipline.”

I largely agree with Gourevitch and Robin in the need to frame left-wing politics in the language of freedom. I would, however, go a step further and argue that it is only through the politics of the Left that liberty can be fully realized. But I want to address this issue from a more theoretical point of view. While Gourevitch and Robin’s use of grounded examples is more useful in making an expedient left-wing case for freedom under the present political circumstances, an argument like the one I am trying to make requires a more abstract point of view that is easier to generalize. Before proceeding, however, I want to add a disclaimer: My argument is not that left-wing politics is necessarily conducive to liberty—or that the politics of the Right are always opposed to it. The Stalinist and Maoist regimes of the 20th century are clear evidence that the values of the Left do not preclude extreme authoritarianism. Conversely, I do consider figures on the Right such as Friedrich Hayek to be genuine theorists of freedom. Hayek, particularly in his early writings, defends a social order based on institutions that develop organically through individual cooperation and competition with as little state intervention as possible. This is truly a free society under one conception of the word. The claim, therefore, is only that the values of the Left are a superior path towards realizing human freedom in practice.

That there are different conceptions of freedom is fairly uncontroversial. From Benjamin Constant’s The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns, to Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty,” and Quentin Skinner’s Liberty Before Liberalism, the proper application and interpretation of liberty has always been a contentious issue. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Left and the Right differ in their interpretations of the concept. Of course, it is not that they differ so much that they are mutually unintelligible. I also think it is uncontroversial to say that there is a core shared premise of what freedom ultimately amounts to: roughly, being able to carry out one’s will. Where the interpretive differences lie is in the social arrangements that best realize it.