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Whatsapp Recovering an ancient freedom to navigate an ocean of moral complexity

Renowned political philosopher Philip Pettit says that freedom means more than a lack of government interference in our lives. He tells Joe Gelonesi that the freedom we believe in today falls well short of the ideal and ancient ideas could hold clues to a freer future.

There is no doubt about it, we live in challenging times. What were previously held as widely accepted norms and standards are rapidly changing. Solid, once beloved institutions are under fire, and the authority they once held is sinking in the clamour and complexity of modern life. For Philip Pettit, much-respected political philosopher at Princeton and ANU, there is no other way out: we need to find a modern-day moral GPS. The old one is faltering.

‘Times are more uncertain that we have ever faced,’ says Pettit. ‘What I mean simply is that our climate is transforming at an enormous rate, our population is growing, our institutions are old. It’s not absolutely clear how things will survive together.’

You’ve got a big choice: do you think it should be everyone for themselves, a laissez faire, rip it up society? If this is what freedom means for you then you’re looking a free-for-all, with huge inequalities and lots of dependencies, a chaotic place.

His aim is to identify a goal we can all commit to, a benchmark we can agree on that can form a solid foundation for a new civilised polity, able to wrestle with the modern condition. That benchmark, he feels, is a timeless human ideal: freedom.

‘There are different philosophies about what our ultimate goal is. It seems to me that freedom can provide a touchstone for where we ought to be going. It’s something agreed to by all sides of politics.’

It’s true that as a general goal, freedom is widely accepted and endorsed. Some would say that the individual freedoms we are now enjoying are of a new and exciting magnitude not known in previous times, and that we should hold on to all that we have achieved. For others, though, the rise of the individual is not so sanguine a moment.

This is where the usually mild mannered, softly spoken Pettit wants to, in his own words, ‘thump the table’.

‘You’ve got a big choice: do you think it should be everyone for themselves, a laissez faire, rip it up society? If this is what freedom means for you then you’re looking a free-for-all, with huge inequalities and lots of dependencies, a chaotic place.’

For Pettit, this is the unavoidable tendency of a model of freedom which sees non-interference as the core concept: the idea that you are best left to your own devices with minimum intervention from others, including from the state.

This, of course, is the classical model of liberty that John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, among other giants of modern political philosophy, gave their intellectual support to. But they could have just as easily rescued an older form of freedom according to Pettit, a freedom based on the ancient Roman Republic

‘The republican picture of government emerges about 100 years before the end of the Republic,’ he says. ‘It is mostly the work of the Greek slave Polybius. When freed he remained in Rome and wrote a history which emphasised the republican features of freedom.’

Of course, that picture of freedom would have only included the male citizens of Rome, though Pettit contends that it did include males without property and was surprisingly more expansive than we might imagine.

So, what’s so different about this ancient model of freedom? In a compound word—non domination.

The idea goes beyond just not being interfered with. It takes on a stronger notion, whereby the individual is empowered to look others straight in the eye without fear or deference; what Pettit calls the eyeball test.

‘Polybius describes the liber —the free person—as having no dominus, a commander or master. You have a range of choices on your own terms. Just as there is no master, there is no public domination either and that space is created by common law; a law that all share in the making of.’

This model remarkably survived two collapses: Republic and Empire.

‘When the Republic fell many of these ideas of freedom became formal parts of the tradition. Then at end of imperial Rome, Justinian in the eastern Roman Empire had the Republic’s laws codified.’

A number of centuries passed before this stronger version was revived, this time further north on the Italian peninsula. The small states of Florence and Venice were rich, powerful, and determined to repel foreign monarchies and the papal state. To this end, these powerhouses of medieval life sought an older mythology to inoculate themselves from outsiders.

England in the 17th century almost got there, as did the newly established United States of America. But the great classical turn in liberalism in the hands of Mill and Bentham, among others, saw the non- interference version of liberty win the day.

‘After the 1800s our common way of thinking about freedom arises where people say that as far as you’re not interfered with then you are free. But in the older way of thinking about it you are not free if others have the power of interfering with you.’

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Pettit has written at length on the merits of republican freedom and is well rehearsed in its long history. Though, to make his point stick about the subtle but imposing effect of domination, he reaches for a literary classic.

‘In Ibsen’s Doll’s House, Torvald is devoted to his wife Nora,’ he says. ‘He gives her most things ... Norah is not interfered with in her range of choices for a 19th century women. But Torvald holds all the cards: he’s got legal, financial, and cultural power. He can dictate who she associates with, where she goes, how she dresses, what she has to eat. Do we think of Norah as being free? She certainly has free rein so to speak. But most would say she is not free, and that picks up this republican way of thinking.’

This quarrel between the weak and strong notions of freedom can be characterised in the terms of another dispute that Isaiah Berlin identified in his classic Two Concepts of Liberty: negative versus positive freedom.

Although Pettit doesn’t like his argument being thought of as positive versus negative liberty, he can see the parallel, especially in the regard to state intervention to create a fair and just playing field on which freedom can flourish.

‘If you recognise that freedom requires that you’re not at the beck and call of another person, hanging on their good will, then you have to have a legally established framework that gives people their own areas of sovereign choice,’ he says. ‘That society is wholly consistent with there being a market, but it says that law and the market are two sides of the same coin, equally essential in establishing a society that makes freedom its be all and end all.’

The contemporary world seems comfortable with the minimalist version of freedom, and the market smothers alternatives, especially those which give faint memory of authoritarian systems. But one recent furtive attempt called for Pettit’s scrutiny.

Freedom, old and new Freedom isn't what it used to be. Listen to Phillip Petit on the Philosopher's Zone on what can ancient Rome teach us.

President Zapatero of Spain came across Pettit’s earlier work on republicanism, and as a result attempted to put some primary principles into action. In 2004, out of the blue, he approached Pettit to run the tape measure.

‘Well, the media insist on asking the score,’ says Pettit. ‘I actually think he did really well in his time. He introduced gay marriage, one of the first legislatures in the world to pass it, on the grounds that people couldn’t pass the eyeball test.

‘How can you look at a homosexual person in the eye and say we deny you the right for your relationship to be recognised in the same way as our heterosexual relationships are recognised? He introduced legislation for increased equality and protection of women, and regularised the position of 750,000 illegal immigrants.’

Zapatero’s government eventually faltered on the back of the GFC, but many of what Pettit indentifies as republican freedoms remain.

He is, however, a realist. He cautions that it’s easy to become dewy eyed. His reading of republican freedom necessarily relies on redistribution, and the law to restrict the latent dominus lurking in every society. And there’s the rub, the dominus doesn’t relent to the leash.

‘The truth is that there are powerful avenues of interest over governments which go via the back door,’ he says. ‘ You have lobby groups which contribute money to government. That’s buying influence you can be sure. In America today it’s hard not to despair on what’s happening.’

If Pettit is worried about the USA, he would be well advised not to pay too close attention to our local headlines at present. The echoes are deafening.

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