The state and liberty
wants this safety is very large: it is children which cannot stand up for themselves; it is the majority of the developing world who live in fear of spontaneous violence and long for a predictable safety; it is the people who walk on dark streets in south London; it is the people on council estates where they fear gangs and it is to some extent all of us who do not live a cloistered life. This group do indeed believe in a freedom from the summum malum above all. For that episteme true freedom is thus a freedom from fear rather than a freedom to total bodily integrity from the state or total self-determination. The Hobbesian argument – a state which only provides a freedom from fear – can be extended to a ‘nanny state’ which provides you a freedom f rom other bad things. This starts off as a negative conception – a freedom from want; squalor; ignorance – but quickly turns into a positive conception. This is a freedom to a certain kind of life filled with moral content – a freedom to an educated society; political participation; a freedom to fraternity and democracy. This is a paraphrasing of Rou sseau’s general will. The argument, grounded in the fact that we are rational, the universe is rational and therefore we have the same rational ends, results in a belief in a civic religion: ‘in giving myself to all, I give myself to none’. That is to say I achieve a total freedom to pursue the things that my ‘eternal rational self’ wishes to pursue : the ideal state in that conception is a ‘nanny’ which does things which are good for me, thus giving a liberty to self-actualize and be happy. In my view, this is a Hobbesian view writ large, as while it professes a summum bonum which Hobbes does not, it still caters to the same freedom from fear and anxiety just to a greater extent: you don’t have to be anxious about things like jealousy or want or greed; instead the state is there to give you a freedom to live your life. In the words of Isaiah Berlin, due to this rationality of the general will, you are ‘from hope and fear set free’. If we substitute rationality for fraternity (the founding principle of communism) we get a Soviet Union. There is a plausible argument that during the ‘thawing period’ of the late 70s and 80s people there thought themselves genuinely free. Once the economic system started to provide more effectively, you were free from the anxiety of losing your job; from squalor; from jealousy: your life was perfectly mundane and safe all the way from the standard issue kettle in your kitchen to the standard annual camping trip to Sochi on the Black Sea. In that period there was only a very small number who were systematically oppressed: those who sought to subvert the state by political or intellectual action. A freedom to think, to be better or to be a vanguard of change in the Soviet Union was not allowed because it would threaten the freedom from jealousy, greed or general anxiety of everybody else: it was, some might say, a utilitarian programme. I thus believe a lineage can be traced from Hobbes to Rousseau to Brezhnev’s USSR: they started with a liberty from fear and then expanded it into a liberty from social, economic and political fear rather than merely a liberty from physical fear. One could say they interpreted the Latin etymology of security to a high degree: se – without; curitas – worries or burdens. It seems to me indeed that most Soviet citizens were unburdened and described themselves as free. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World illustrates the tension between a freedom from anxiety embodied by the nanny state and the freedom to be better, think or be a rebel which liberals like Isaiah Berlin and Robert Nozick profess. In Brave New World , no matter your caste, you were never hungry, jealous or sad. You had access to entertainment, sex and soma. Owning to your conditioning, your pleasant life and the fact that the summum bonum of unfettered hedonism was shared, you even had a freedom from thought and thus a total freedom from anxiety. When people who thought and thus threatened an epistemic break, such as the ‘Savage’ who was exposed to ideas of thought and family and loyalty and bodily integrity, they had two choices for the preservation of society: send them away to an island to
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