The rhetoric of liberty

Abstract

For a long time now, of course, intellectuals have been trying to avoid rhetoric in defense of liberty. They might as well avoid mere reasoning or mere speaking. The defenses are commonly set in the axiom-and-proof rhetoric of the line Eucid-Aquinas-Hobbes-Russell. Formality is trumps and the meaning of formality is an imitation of Euclid's certitude. Consider Alan Peacock's twopage article on Economic Freedom in The New Paigrave: A Dictionary of Economics (which with Alan Ryan's other two on Liberty in the Dictionary brings the total of modem economic reflection on liberty to four pages out of some 4000). Peacock begins by setting the question of economic freedom into the standard Samuelsonian framework of modem economics-maximization of utility under a budget constraint-with careful delineation of the subscripts, as though relevant. After two opening paragraphs of such mathpride, however, he rejects his own formal construct, pointing out that mere liberty to move within a budget constraint is not what people mean by liberty.Anything-the KGB's rules of conduct in pre-democratic Lithuania, for example-can be included in the budget constraint, making slaves by definition into men, to choose within the constraints of their shackles. Peacock argues plausibly that more than liberty to move about within a budget constraint must be required: Economic freedom requires that the various terms in the budget constraint reflect the absence of 'preference or restraint' (Adam Smith) on the (Vol. 2,33). As Herbert Spencer said, when he is under the impersonal coercion of Nature, we say that he is free (493, italics added). Peacock then tries to connect the absence of or to the market: Therefore (the prices must) ... result from the operation of competitive market forces with the individual being to choose between alternatives (italics added). The therefore fails in strict logic, though demanded by the axiom-and-proof rhetoric of his piece. The problem is that it is not obvious that an absence of preference or restraint requires competition. Peacock does