Liberalism before Liberty

Abstract

To obey his just commands is perfect freedom. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy 1.5 (Walsh trans.) EGALITARIANISM AND INDIVIDUALISM We have seen that the republican conception of freedom is ambiguous with regard to the question of whether arbitrary power should be defined in procedural or substantive terms, and that it is similarly ambiguous with regard to the question of whether virtue is of intrinsic or only of instrumental value. We have given less sustained attention to a second pair of ambiguities having to do with the scope rather than the content of republican freedom. The first of these concerns the relationship between egalitarian and inegalitarian conceptions of republican citizenship. Classical republican thought, emerging as it did at a time when the existence of fundamental differences in status between women and men and between slaves and free men were taken for granted, was of course not remotely egalitarian by current standards. However, the classical republicans were committed to extending the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship to all and only those who could benefit the polity by possessing them, and this commitment was sometimes used to justify an expansion of the existing boundaries of citizenship, whether on epistemic grounds, as in Aristotle's view that the “many” have a kind of wisdom that exceeds that of even the wisest person, or on military grounds, as in Machiavelli's claim that a republic that refuses to arm the people must remain small and poor if it is to maintain its freedom.