What type of state – if any – is a precondition for true liberty?
Alex Gerasimchuk
An anecdote is frequently told in Greece: a Greek is a socialist when he is a student and needs a hospital; an existentialist when he wishes to avoid the army; a libertarian when he earns a million; a fascist when Turkey attacks and a conservative when his daughter starts dating. The point of this story is to say that the ends of life and the state shift depending on circumstance; they also shift depending on age, class and social position. Therefore the type of state which is required for true liberty shifts together with those ends. It depends on the episteme (the ways of thinking about the world) which we happen to occupy at the particular moment in time. Epistemes overlap within each government structure: what teenagers consider freedom is different to what adults consider freedom; a state which enables freedom for those with country estates looks quite different to a state which safeguards freedom to those on council estates; for each different class and for each profession the state which arranges true liberty is different. None of the states is necessarily better because it is willed by someone more rational or educated; the state which arranges true liberty is one which allows this liberty of opinion as to what liberty looks like while safeguarding a liberty to life held by those without such opinions. The question is above all anthropological: what is it that humans really want from life? The answer shifts both with age and social position. I contend that through the course of our lives we are Hobbesians as children; existentialists as teenagers; liberals or perhaps even libertarians as high achievers and Hobbesians once more once we have things to protect. In social classes, we are Hobbesians on council estates, Rousseau supporters in universities, Isiah Berlin supporters in the city and in large houses and indeed Hobbesians once more in our day-to- day lives. The ‘good state’ therefore is one which allows for all those different kinds of people and is epistemically sensitive without asserting that one of those epistemes, typically the negative liberty of Isaiah Berlin, is somehow morally superior. Let us first examine the Hobbesian episteme and the ‘nanny state’ which it produces when writ large. Hobbes declares that the ‘end of obedience is safety’, the fundamental desire is a freedom from violent death. The type of fear which Hobbes has is the fear of spontaneous attack by your neighbour. The way to safeguard that fear is to create an ‘artificial man’ who , wielding a sword, will give you the freedom to live. This is the type of freedom which most people in the world desperately need. In the developing world, the miners of the Central African Republic want to be free from the spontaneous violence visited upon them by warlords. In the UK, walking down a dark street, we want to be free from a spontaneous mugging. Violent death is a summum malum – a total bad – and only Leviathan can provide freedom from it. The way in which it safeguards against this bad necessarily curtails positive freedom, a freedom to be free from a systematic limitation, a freedom to be free from degrading practices like facial recognition or stop and search. Liberals like Isaiah berlin do not fear their neighbour – his neighbour was the Magdalen deer park – , they fear systematic oppression by the state. But most people don’t. A survey of a council estate in north London found that over 70% of people supported stop and search policies and facial recognition – black mothers prefer a freedom from fear of getting stabbed or, even more impactfully, a freedom from a total and overwhelming anxiety that their son is getting stabbed because Leviathan is too concerned with respecting the freedom to bodily autonomy. The group which
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