View Of Liberty Research Articles

On the liberties of the ancients: licentiousness, equal rights, and the rule of law

ABSTRACT In this article, we discuss Greek and Roman conceptions of liberty. The supposedly ‘neo-Roman’ view of liberty as non-domination is really derived from negative Greek models, we argue, while Roman authors devised an alternative understanding of liberty that rested on the equality of legal rights. In this ‘paleo-Roman’ model, as long as the law was the same for all, you were free; whether or not you participated in making the law was not a constitutive feature of liberty. In essence, this Roman theory was a theory of freedom as the rule of law and the guarantee of equal rights, especially due process rights. For this Roman concept of ‘legal liberty,’ as we call it, political participation was neither necessary nor sufficient. Theorized by Cicero and historicized by Livy, the Roman understanding of freedom flourished in early-modern times, proving important to paradigmatic republican authors such as Machiavelli and Rousseau as well as to Hobbes, whose work we discuss as a helpful point of comparison.

Attack by a Turkey: Learning to Write History from Bernard Bailyn

Attack by a Turkey: Learning to Write History from Bernard Bailyn

Liberal Solidarity: A Conversation

This conversation between Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Paolo Silvestri touches on the main themes of Hodgson’s 2021 book Liberal Solidarity: The Political Economy of Social Democratic Liberalism. In the book, Hodgson uses insights from institutional and evolutionary economics. Here he explains the differences between solidaristic liberalism and the ideas of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Mises, Ayn Rand, and others. He argues that the mainstream assumption of utility maximization can have deleterious policy consequences. With consequentialism, duty and virtue are downplayed. A developmental view of liberty is contrasted with the Hayek-Friedman definition of liberty as simply the absence of constraint. Economic inequality is identified as a major problem. The roles of markets and the state are also discussed, as well as the possibilities for democracy and the pressing problem of climate change.

Repurposing the Ladder

Repurposing the Ladder

Thomas Hobbes and ‘gently instilled’ conscience

ABSTRACT This article engages with a key interpretive puzzle in Hobbes’s political thought – his seemingly contradictory view of liberty of conscience – and argues that Hobbes theorizes civic education as a powerful tool to confront and refashion prevailing views of conscience in early modernity. While influential accounts have recovered more ‘tolerant’ arguments in Hobbes’s political thought, recent revisionist accounts have argued that Hobbes does not merely advocate for the compulsion of outward conformity but also subjects’ inward persuasion. Yet this nuanced attention to the sovereign’s role in cultivating obedient, peaceful subjects does not attend fully to his shaping of the consciences of his subjects. Situating Hobbes in the early modern discourse on casuistry, as well as political debates on educational reform, reveals that the sovereign can and should try to shape the consciences of subjects, specifically returning to a view of conscience as a kind of ‘knowing with’ others. Reframing Hobbes’s project of civic education as a strategy to ‘gently instill’ the consciences of subjects does not merely shed light on the interpretive puzzle of Hobbes’s ambivalence towards toleration but also draws attention to one of the most powerful and arguably underappreciated ways to overcome the threat of conscience to sovereignty.

Radicalism, religion and Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to challenge a prevailing assumption in accounts of Enlightenment radicalism that it was essentially secular. A major problem with such a view is that it precludes the possibility of women’s radicalism, given the importance of religion for women in this period. I challenge the disconnection between religion and radical thought by highlighting their interconnection in the case of Mary Wollstonecraft. Recent studies of Wollstonecraft’s republicanism have focused attention on her political radicalism. These studies, for the most part, suggest her sources were secular, especially her conception of liberty as freedom from arbitrary power. After discussing Wollstonecraft’s religious formation, I suggest that there are religious and ethical sources for her view of liberty which have been left out of account. Thus, religion was not just a matter of Wollstonecraft’s personal beliefs, or emotional temper, but provided an important intellectual resource for her political arguments.

The New Republicanism Without Religion?

ABSTRACTThe past decades have witnessed a harvest of new books and articles exploring the modern republican tradition and its relevance for contemporary political theory. Members of this movement present the tradition as an alternative to both political liberalism and communitarianism and offer its unique conception of liberty (“freedom from domination”) as a distinct third option beyond the “positive” and “negative” varieties famously identified by Isaiah Berlin. Yet in recovering this view of liberty, civic republicans have neglected the essential role that religion plays in the modern republican tradition. This omission represents not only a serious deviation from the tradition, but, what is more, it fundamentally weakens civic republicanism’s capacity for theorizing and achieving political liberty at the level of institutional life. In the modern republican tradition, religion has been understood to undergird republican liberty both in terms of shaping the morals, customs, and habits of citizens and in providing normative authority for the value of liberty over domination. In this essay, I offer a counter-narration of the modern republican tradition that gives religion its due and challenges civic republicans to recognize the central role that religion has played, and should continue to play, in theorizing and promoting republican liberty.

Problems of Competitive Bidding from the point of view of Liberty to Contract - Focus on the Construction Contract -

Problems of Competitive Bidding from the point of view of Liberty to Contract - Focus on the Construction Contract -

Judging the Constitutionality of Social Cost

The tiers of judicial scrutiny represent the Supreme Court’s attempts to balance three important concerns–individual liberty, collective safety, and social cost. The relationship between liberty and safety has been ably explored; however, considerations of social cost — a factor that has been integral in the Supreme Court’s balancing of liberty and security — has been neglected. Understanding the interaction between liberty, safety, and social costs, reveals insight into how the Supreme Court has fashioned the tiers of scrutiny, and judicial review more broadly.The Supreme Court has recognized two types of social cost, that I have labeled liberty costs and security costs. First, liberty costs, refer to the risk of negative externalities to society as a whole that can result from individuals exercising liberty. Second, safety costs, refer to the risk of negative externalities to individual liberty that can result from the state providing for collective safety. The Supreme Court employs the tiers of scrutiny when the liberty interests of an individual (or group of individuals) are weighed against the interests of the state to provide for collective safety (defined broadly as the police powers — health, safety, and morals). Scrutiny is effectively a question of burdens — which party’s interests receive judicial deference, and which party’s interests are met with judicial skepticism. Or, to state it differently, which party bears the burden of justifying its high social costs. These relationships are plotted on a graph I labeled the Social Cost Frontier. The frontier depicts judicial review and the relationship between the tiers of scrutiny and social cost, with respect to Miranda, the exclusionary rule, the overbreadth doctrine, unprotected speech, and commercial speech.Social cost further explains how the court shifts between the counter-majoritarian difficulty and representation reinforcement. Which branch of government is in the better position to assess social costs — the legislature, or the courts? Or more precisely, should the court defer to the state’s assessment of social cost, or defer to the individual’s assessment, or engage in an independent inquiry. Ultimately, this determination is largely informed by a given Justice’s view of liberty and safety costs with respect to Footnote Four of United States v. Carolene Products, and Professor John Hart Ely’s “representation reinforcement” theory of the Constitution. Even with the judiciary’s assumption of this role, certain cognitive and confirmation biases dictate that, in the words of Frederic Bastiat, there are seen, and unseen costs by the Justices. The costs that are unseen, are often the costs that the Justice is inclined to disregard. How a Justice choose to see, and not see, certain social costs — rather than abstract terms like tiers of scrutiny, or equal protection, or due process — explains how some of the most important constitutional issues of our time can be so divisive.The Supreme Court’s reliance on social cost, without ever fully defining it, illustrates the normative appeal of this rubric. No one likes costs, they’re bad. Identifying costs, and using them as a rationale for a judicial decision is quite attract. Yet, by failing to define these costs — and what considerations go into calculating them — the Court, and the academy, has unfortunately elided over an important jurisprudential step in numerous cases involving the Constitution. Further, by assuming the role of assessing social cost, and either grating the costs deference or skepticism, the Court has succeeded at its institutional aim at minimizing social cost in the absence of judicial intervention. For when either cost grows too large, the role — and need — of courts disappears. In their efforts to keep this balance in check, courts aim to maintain their legitimacy, and indeed relatedly, their need for existence. If courts step too far in either direction, their legitimacy, and place in society decreases

The Innovation of Milton’s Machiavellian Son

Classical republicans are on the whole wary of religion. Some, like Thomas Jefferson, are agnostics who want it rigorously segre gated from public life. Others, like Niccolo Machiavelli, are sus pected atheists who value it only as an extension of state power. Even John Milton, the rare republican to dissent from this secular perspec tive, seems unintentionally to confirm that republics cannot also be theocracies. When admirers of Milton's politics explore his theology, they prefer to focus upon Satan,1 Eve,2 and Chaos3 as reservoirs of free dom. For when scholars attend to Milton's God, the deity that they dis cover seems too rule-bound to permit the self-determination necessary for republican virtue. In Milton's Good God, Dennis Danielson describes Milton's view of liberty by arguing: given God's offer of divine grace, man is free either to reject it and use his own innate power to sin, or else to accept it and use the power received from God to refrain from sinning. . . . [S]o far as man is concerned, sin is by commission and moral virtue by omission4 Joan Bennett arrives at a similar view by aligning

Liberty: One or Two Concepts Liberty

Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “negative” and “positive” concepts of liberty has recently been defended on newand interesting grounds. Proponents of this dichotomy used to equate positive liberty with “self-mastery”—the rule of our rational nature over our passions and impulses. However, Berlin’s critics have made the case that this account does not employ a separate “ concept” of liberty: although the constraints it envisions are internal, rather than external, forces, the freedom in question remains “negative” (freedom is still seen as the absence of such impediments). Responding to this development, Berlin’s defenders have increasingly tended to identify positive liberty with “self-realization.” The argument is that such an account of freedom is genuinely “nonnegative,” in that it does not refer to the absence of constraints on action. This essay argues that the claims made on behalf of “freedom as self-realization” cannot withstand scrutiny, and that they fail to isolate a coherent viewof liberty that is distinguishable fromthe absence of constraint.

‘The Form Most Eligible’: Liberty in the Constitutional Convention

Although the framers of the U.S. Constitution agreed that the first principles stated by the Declaration of Independence were fundamental, they thought that the form which freedom should take within the Constitution could not be discovered by a resort to natural rights (and thus declined to affix a bill of rights to the Constitution). They rejected both the view that liberty is independence (whether of individuals or of states) and the view that liberty is equivalent to the rule of the people. Instead, they held a political view offreedom in which liberty is understood as the scope men have for political action. The institutions they designed direct the use of liberty to the common good. In light of this analysis, the issue of whether the Constitution's provisions concerning slavery and its treatment of women are indications of an inadequate view of liberty can be answered in the negative.

Client Self-Determination: An Almost Absolute Value in Counselling and Social Work

In her recent article in Australian Social Work, Rosemary Williams expresses reservations concerning the current status of the ethic of client self-determination among professional social workers in the state of Victoria. She argues that the latter generally endorse a ‘positive’ view of liberty which is inconsistent with the profession's central ethic. However I wish to argue that the findings of her exploratory study provide cause, not for concern, but for a modest amount of(self)-congratulation.

Philosophy in France

It need occasion no surprise that Recherche de la Liberté by Daniel Christoff (P.U.F.) 1957, 220 pp., is devoted to philosophy of value. Freedom, one wants to say in this sort of context, is the attribute or even the essence of, for example, Sartre's pour soi; but since such a description would be, in existentialist language, a contradiction in terms, freedom had better be identified with the means whereby the dynamic self escapes from its essence, as Sartre would say. Because of this dynamic role of freedom in Continental philosophy it is natural that M. Christoff should be happier talking of liberation than of liberty. The word liberation refers to the process of value-making, and perhaps it is chosen in order that such question-begging terms as “creation of values” may be avoided. Question-begging because, although M. Christoff is by no means an exponent of the “objectivist” theory of values, he does not play down the importance of the concept in the interest of what is strictly never done but always in process of being done. He denies that rational thinking is “an immobile system of concepts”, and sees an alternation (presumably “dialectical”) of conceptualization and valuation as the activity of mind. It is not only in his view of liberty as liberation that M. Christoff reminds one of Lavelle and Gabriel Marcel, but also in his particular brand of altruism. He seems to see Sartre's point of view about “others” without sharing it.