Seal of Good Local Governance (SGLG) 2024Final.pptx
Vlad Tarko - The varieties of liberty ideals (freedom-talk.com)
1. The Varieties of Liberty Ideals
Vlad Tarko
George Mason University
Economics Department, Mercatus Center
Institute for Humane Studies
Symposium on Scholarship & a Free Society, 2013
2. Outline
• History of the project
• Philosophical foundation: 7 concepts of freedom, 21
trade-offs
• Understanding political debates:
– Common good debate: individualism vs. communitarianism
– The social justice debate: procedures vs. outcomes
– The meaning of individualism: libertarians vs. progressives
– The left-right debate: conservatives vs. progressives
• Some empirics:
– Do conservatives, progressives and libertarians
understand freedom differently?
– What kinds of freedom are they most willing to give up?
3. History of this project
• Center for Institutional Analysis and
Development (CADI) in Bucharest
• Funded by Konrad Adenauer Foundation
• What I did:
1. Review of the political philosophy literature
on liberty -> 7 concepts taxonomy
2. Operationalizing the taxonomy -> survey
3. Testing it a draft on undergrad students
4. http://freedom-talk.com
5. Analyze the data
7. 7 concepts of freedom
• Freedom from constraints (negative)
• Freedom of choice
• Psychological autonomy
• Freedom as welfare
• Freedom under law
• Self-governance (democracy & political
independence)
• Tolerance
(positive)
8. Freedom from constraints
• Hobbes: “a freeman is he that, in those things
which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is
not hindered to do what he has a will to”
(Leviathan)
• Spencer: “Every man has freedom to do all that he
wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom
of any other man” (Social Statics)
• Milton Friedman: “Political freedom means the
absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men”
(Capitalism and Freedom)
• Rothbard: “Liberty is the absence of physically
coercive interference or invasion of an individual’s
person and property” (Ethics of Liberty)
9. Freedom of choice
• Ortega y Gasset: “Imagine two men, one of the
present day and one of the 18th Century,
possessed of equal fortunes relatively to money –
values in their respective periods –, and compare
the stock of purchasable things offered to each.
The difference is almost fabulous. The range of
possibilities opened out before the present-day
purchaser has become practically limitless. […]
Whereas the number of occupations in primitive
life can almost be counted on the fingers of one
hand – shepherd, hunter, warrior, seer – the list of
possible avocations today is immeasurably long”
(Revolt of the Masses)
10. Psychological autonomy
• Marcuse: “Liberty is self-determination, autonomy […] creating
the society in which man is no longer enslaved by institutions
which vitiate self-determination from the beginning” (Repressive
tolerance)
• Dewey: “Liberty is that secure release and fulfillment of personal
potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold
association with others: the power to be an individualized self-
making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the
fruits of association.” (The Public and Its Problems)
• Charles Taylor: “obstacles can be internal as well as external […]
capacities relevant to freedom must involve some self-awareness,
self-understanding, moral discrimination and self-control,
otherwise their exercise could not amount to freedom in the sense
of self-direction […] where, for example, we are quite self-
deceived, or utterly fail to discriminate properly the ends we seek,
or have lost self-control, we can quite easily be doing what we
want in the sense of what we can identify as our wants, without
being free; indeed, we can be further entrenching our unfreedom.”
11. Welfare: freedom from need
• Sen: “Development requires the removal of major
sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor
economic opportunities as well as systematic social
deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as
intolerance or over activity of repressive states.”
(Development as freedom)
• Barry Schwartz: “increased choice among goods and
services may contribute little or nothing to the kind of
freedom that counts […] we do ourselves no favor when
we equate liberty too directly with choice, as if we
necessarily increase freedom by increasing the number
of options available. Instead, I believe that we make the
most of our freedom by learning to make good choices
about the things that matter, while at the same time
unburdening ourselves from too much concern about
the things that don’t.” (Paradox of choice)
12. Freedom under law
• Locke: “Freedom is not, as we are told, A Liberty for every Man to
do what he lists: […] But a Liberty to dispose, and order, as he lists,
his Persons, Actions, Possessions, and his whole Property, within
the Allowance of those Laws under which he is; and therein not to
be subject to the arbitrary Will of another, but freely follow his
own.” (Second Treatise of Government)
• Hayek: “the essential point” is that “the discretion left to the
executive organs wielding coercive power should be reduced as
much as possible […] While every law restricts individual freedom
to some extent by altering the means which people may use in the
pursuit of their aims, under the Rule of Law the government is
prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action.
Within the known rules of the game the individual is free to pursue
his personal ends and desires, certain that the powers of
government will not be used deliberately to frustrate his efforts.”
(Road to Serfdom)
13. Self-governance (democracy &
political independence)
• Dahl: “To govern oneself, to obey laws that one has
chosen for oneself, to be self-determining, is a
desirable end. Yet human beings cannot attain this
end by living in isolation. To enjoy satisfactory
lives, they must live in association with others. But
to live in association with others necessarily
requires that they must sometimes obey collective
decisions that are binding on all members of the
association. The problem, then, is to discover a
way by which the members of an association may
make decisions binding on all and still govern
themselves. Because democracy maximizes the
opportunities for self-determination among the
members of an association, it is the best solution.”
(Democracy and Its Critics)
14. Tolerance
• Jefferson “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom”,
Martin Luther King, “I have a dream”
• Gay Liberation Front: “Gay people are oppressed. […]
The long-term goal […] is to rid society of the gender-
role system which is at the root of our oppression. This
can only be achieved by eliminating the social
pressures on men and women to conform to narrowly
defined gender roles. [...] The starting point of our
liberation must be to rid ourselves of the oppression
which lies in the head of every one of us. This means
freeing our heads from self-oppression and male
chauvinism, and no longer organising our lives
according to the patterns with which we are
indoctrinated by straight society. It means that we
must root out the idea that homosexuality is bad, sick
or immoral, and develop a gay pride.”
15. Tolerance
• Declaration from the Autism Community that They Are a
Minority Group: “People on the autism spectrum have our
own cultural differences, unique habits, such as
stemming, and different perspectives than the norm. We
feel it is essential that this is recognised as these "traits"
are the things that some children and adults are forced to
stop by some harsh and intensive therapies. We should
have the right to be ourselves, without the pressure to
conform and change our cultural differences. We
experience discrimination in various forms, often because
of our different use of language and communication,
habitual differences such as stemming, and lack of
acknowledgment that autistic parents may have autistic
children, and differences in the children are not due to
poor parenting, but the innate differences of our minority
group.”
16. Trade-offs
• 7 concepts -> 21 possible trade-offs
• In some cases the concepts reinforce each
other, but we can find examples of each
possible trade-off.
17. E.g. negative freedom vs. democracy
• Spencer (Man Against the State) :
• “the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be
measured, not by the nature of the governmental
machinery he lives under, whether representative
or other, but by the relative paucity of the
restraints it imposes on him”
• It’s irrelevant “whether this machinery is or is not
one he shared in making”.
• What matters is whether the rules imposed by
government “increase such restraints beyond
those which are needful for preventing him from
directly or indirectly aggressing on his fellows –
needful, that is, for maintaining the liberties of his
fellows against his invasions of them”.
19. Understanding political debates
• Common good debate: Individualism vs.
communitarianism
• The social justice debate: procedures vs.
outcomes
• The meaning of individualism:
libertarians vs. progressives
• The left vs. right debate: conservative vs.
progressive
20. Common good debate
• Individual freedom:
– Negative freedom
– Freedom of choice
– Psychological autonomy
– Welfare
• Communitarian concerns:
– Self-governance
– Freedom under law
– Tolerance
21. Social justice debate
• Good procedures: i.e. non-coercive, non-
manipulative, democratic and non-
discriminatory:
– Negative freedom
– Autonomy
– Self-governance
– Freedom under law
• Good outcomes:
– Welfare
– Freedom of choice
– Tolerance
22. The meaning of individualism
• Libertarianism:
– Negative freedom
• Progressives:
– Autonomy
– Freedom of choice
– Welfare
23. Left vs. Right
• Conservatives:
– Freedom under law
– Freedom of choice
– Negative freedom
• Progressives:
– Democracy
– Welfare
– Tolerance
– Autonomy
29. -0.1
-0.06
-0.02
0.02
0.06
0.1
law democracy negative autonomy tolerance choice welfare
When do progressives, conservatives and libertarians choose
less freedom? (difference between the “common good
profile” and the “freedom profile”)
Progressive Conservative Libertarian
