Anantonese Journal of Economics and Theory

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Liberty without Liberalism
Negative Freedom is meaningless without Positive Freedom

Margaret Carolina Ananto-DeLaurentis
Junior, Kaliburg-Wilson Public Secondary School

June 5630

Editor's Note:  The following essay was submitted by High School Junior Margaret Ananto.  The readers will certainly recognize the name as the daughter of His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Fredrick III Ananto.  Her essay was selected as one of five winners of the May 5630 Excellence in Undergraduate Writing Contest sponsored by Kaliburg Imperial University and the Editorial Staff of the Anantonese Journal of Economics and Theory.  The Contest was open to all students at the secondary and post secondary level who were not involved in a graduate or research program at a major Kalistani University.  98% of all entries were from college undergraduates.  The winners were selected in a double-blind review process commonly known as "peer review" and was one of 45 finalists.  The author of the paper was not known until the paper was selected by the panel and the authors were notified.  -Ed

Kalistan as a society of Liberty without Liberalism
Kalistan has the interesting distinction of being an explicitly anti-liberal country that also happens to support a wide array of individual and social liberties.  One can go through the Kalistani Code of Laws and realize that there are whole sections and dozens of laws enshrining liberties for the people of Kalistan, both as individuals and as groups.  We have freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and petition, freedom of conscience and religion.  People are free to start businesses and own property.  We have freedom from oppressive police force, freedom of contract, freedom of juries and procedural justice.  Kalistan has more of the trappings of what people would call "a liberal society."

And yet, Kalistan also prides itself on not being liberal.  It is famously, or notoriously--depending on who you ask--illiberal.  We do not allow property owners to exploit their labor or dispose of property freely.  We prevent individuals from owning huge tracts of land and break up farms.  We use state power to promote state run monopolies and disallow private firms from even attempting to compete with some of the most protected industries.  We have outlawed political competition, and the only reason that the Institutional Party exists is to organize the government for support of the Emperor.  There are many other points on which Kalistan can be considered one of the most illiberal nations in Terra that is not a brutal dictatorship.

How can these two facts co-exist within the same nation?  How can Kalistan have liberty without liberalism?  Isn't the later necessary for the former?  Doesn't the former tend to encourage the latter?  The answer to the question here has to do with the two conceptions of liberty and freedom:  One, the one preferred by liberals, is the negative conception of freedom, or "freedom from", while the other, employed by the Imperial Government, is the positive form, or "freedom to."  Not only does Kalistan favor the positive sense of Liberty over the negative, but negative liberty does not even make sense without positive liberty.  We have an abundance of positive liberty, but we are not fixated on negative liberty, and therefore, it is possible to have liberty without liberalism.

The Two Concepts of Liberty
Examining these concepts of liberty, I can use a basic analogy.  In the negative sense of liberty, I can say there is technically no law that prevents me from levitating.  If it was physically possible to do it, and I think some would say it is, there is nothing preventing me from learning to do that, and then disciplining my mind and body and doing that.  Its not against any laws, and therefore it could be said that I am at complete liberty to try.  In fact, it would be a little silly for the state to pass a law preventing me from levitating:  Most people would consider it amazing if I simply lifted off in front of them.  You could say, I am at maximum (negative) liberty.

But that negative liberty is utterly meaningless without the ability to actually do it.  Leaving aside the fact that defying the laws of gravity with the power of thinking is not possible, I literally cannot do it.  No matter how much I train, no matter how free I am to try, I simply cannot do something that is not possible.  My maximum negative liberty is meaningless without the ability to actually do anything with it.  In the case of levitation, minimum positive liberty, or the freedom to actually levitate, negates the value of maximum negative liberty and has the same effect of if I had minimum negative liberty and there was an oppressive state preventing me from levitating.  In other words, what difference does it make if I have freedom from someone stopping me from doing something I can't actually do?  In this sense, if I am oppressed completely or not oppressed at all, the result is still the same.

In the case of civil liberties, you could say the same thing:  What difference does freedom from oppressive state power make if you don't have the right to act out in society?  Or put another way, what good is individual liberty without social liberty?  Freedom from oppressive state power means nothing if you can't actually do things in the society.  Without positive freedom, negative freedom is utterly meaningless.

Liberals prefer Negative Liberty, and consider liberty a zero-sum
We can take this a step further as well.  Negative freedom talks about external constraints on an individual--who can stop you from doing the things you want.  It says nothing about whether you can actually do it.  Positive liberty talks about the internal motivations of individuals.  On the one hand, there is the clearing of obstacles out from in front of person that would stop a person from moving forward.  On the other hand, there is the motivation and ability to actually move forward.

Liberals tend to focus on the negative to the exclusion of the positive.  They talk about removing barriers to people without giving them any abilities to move forward.  For a liberal, you can't actually do both at the same time.  You can't have a limited role for the State, which protects unlimited individual liberty, while also having strong state able to provide supports for the people so they can make the most of that individual liberty.  For the liberal, the two are mutually exclusive, and in fact, it becomes a zero sum:  Any state role is considered anathema, but liberals are willing to concede a bare minimum role for the state, to protect property, enforce contracts, and serve as neutral judges, because the goal is maximization of individual, negative liberty.

To a liberal, they believe liberty only exists if people are unshackled from external constraints.  But if people don't do anything with that negative liberty, if they remain stationary or inert, that is completely their own doing.  They do not want to get into why someone might not be able to fully utilize their negative liberty--that, like everything, is an individual matter, and whether the individual succeeds or fails is their own concern.  To suggest that the state has a role in promotion of individual self realization is to suggest that the state should have a role larger than the tiny role liberals have prescribed for it.

But liberals don't even fully believe in negative liberty
It is clear that liberals see positive liberty as an unacceptable expansion for the role of the state, or community, or society, or whatever collective organization at the expense of the individual  But it is also clear that liberals don't even fully support the notion of negative liberty.  Promotion of the negative liberty means expansion of a society that removes barriers to free action.  In doing so, though, liberals do not want to acknowledge the constraints that poverty, social injustice, inequality, and environmental destruction places on people.  To address them would require a similarly unacceptable role for the State or the society.  All of these create constraints on individuals, but all are perfectly acceptable to the most ardent liberals.

So it is clear that liberals are not really interested in removing all constraints on people.  Only the constraints which require any sort of civil responsibility of individuals.  They want to free individuals to sink or swim on their own power, but do not care to fish them out of the ocean when they fall in.  In fact:  creating a collective obligation to help all parts of society to move ahead itself places an unacceptable obligation on individuals that doesn't permit them to only look to their own interests, at the expense of all others.  Therefore, social policy such as meaningful political elections and an active role of the state in promoting more equal economic outcomes, policies that promote positive freedom, is similarly rejected.

What is clear is that liberals place limiting constraints on the way people acquire and use property, in the economic sense, as the most important liberty.  The positive role of the state around property should be in its protection.  You will see liberal states employ police forces in the protection of property:  They will vigorously prosecute individuals who relieve others of their property, and will reject any form of nationalization, even if it is for the benefit of the society, and even if the property being seized belongs to an enemy.  They oppose it out of principle and will protect the "liberty" of even malevolent foreigners before they will ever consider doing anything to better the lives of their own people.

But can you have Liberty without Liberalism?
I am sure that liberals may read this and say, "The author is making far too strong a case.  It promotes gross generalizations to make the argument.  There are plenty of liberals who also promote social welfare policies."  This is true, and I acknowledge it.  But my goal is not to make the argument for positive as opposed to negative liberty.  That would be promoting a different zero sum, and in fact, opens me to the charges liberals make against those who support positive freedom.  The argument holds that zero sum pro-positive liberty is ultimately a justification for authoritarian rule.

The argument holds that a state, in the name of promoting "freedom to" ends up promoting a state which may begin well-meaning, but to carry out its well-meaning social policy, ends up creating new constraints on people and their ability to do as they please with their property.  I can no longer use my property to make myself infinitely wealthy, if I have to actually pay my workers something that will allow them to live well.  A government so empowered takes more power and more power until they start limiting more and more freedoms, until they forget all about the well-meaningness of their initial efforts and just become tyrants.

This is a fair restatement of the liberals' argument against empowering the society or the collective or any grouping to do things.  An increase in the power of the collective necessarily comes at the expense of the individual.  Empowering people denies them the ability to motivate themselves.  But I don't necessarily think so.  If the goal truly is liberty, one should want a measure of both freedom from and freedom to.  And you can have both.

At the core of the argument, the premise of negative and positive liberty being mututally exclusive is what is wrong in the liberal argument.  In liberalism, which is the ideology of liberty, the goal is maximum individual, negative freedom.  But Kalistanis have long practiced some negative liberty, which is guaranteed by our strong commitment to positive liberty.  We do not feel that negative liberty is even possible without strong promotion of positive liberty.  But to do so requires a large state apparatus and strident promotion the collective responsibility.  And those are anathema to liberals.

Consequently, Kalistan demonstrates that you can have liberty without liberalism, and that an ideological commitment to negative liberty is not at all necessary for a free society, or a society at liberty.  There are some legitimate constraints that can be and should be placed on individuals for the benefit of society.  In Kalistan, this means primarily a limitation on property rights and unnecessary political squabbling, both of which are easily dispensed with if the goal is social harmony and political and economic stability.

Conclusion
It is acceptable to place some constraints on society for the greater good.  Liberals will define governments as tyrannical to the degree that they limit negative freedom.  In this case, even liberal governments would fit their own definitions of tyrannical-- they have laws, for example that place restraints on the actions of the people. 

But that definition is only correct if you buy negative liberty as a zero sum game.  Liberals certainly do, Kalistan certainly does not.  You can use positive liberty to enhance negative freedom, to give it meaning, and to give it value, in and of itself, entirely separate from the individual and from economic property relations.  In doing so, you can have both positive and negative freedom. 

You could even make the argument that Kalistan, in promoting measures of both positive and negative freedom is far freer than those societies who only promote negative liberty alone.  We not only limit the role of government in several very important areas, but we also work to provide the people means to achieve higher amounts of self-actualization, because we work to actively fight poverty, inequality, political turbulence, social disorder, and environmental destruction that would serve as their own brakes on human actualization.  And we unabashedly use the instruments and the institutions of the state to do so.

Our Government in its wisdom is committed to social liberty, even if it means that some people can't exploit the rest of the society for their individual benefit.  The net result is both positive, and a much higher amount of overall social well being than you will find in capitalist countries and liberal democracies where people exist as prey of capitalists and property owners, and which are plagued by internecine political infighting that wasted most of the political energy of the society in meaningless elections which only exist to legitimize elite replacement. 

In this you certainly can have liberty without liberalism, and I think as the Empire of Ananto and Kalistan demonstrates, in fact, it is preferable to do so.