Liberty before Liberalism by Quentin Skinner

Author:Quentin Skinner
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

II

Hobbes’s incapacity (or perhaps refusal) to see any connection between public and private liberty was undoubtedly influential, but most critics of the neo-roman writers acknowledged that the desire to establish such a connection lay at the heart of their argument. Among these critics, however, two further objections were commonly raised against what we can now see to be the most basic contention of the ideology I have been examining, namely that it is only possible to escape from personal servitude if you live as an active citizen under a representative form of government.

A number of critics argued that, even if this contention is not actually incoherent, the suggestion that an equal right to participate in government is indispensable to the maintenance of civil liberty is so utopian as to make it irrelevant to the political world in which we live. This objection was widely canvassed at the time of the American and French revolutions, with William Paley coming forward in his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy in 1785 as perhaps the most influential spokesman for what became the classical liberal case.43 As Paley urges in minatory tones, ‘those definitions of liberty ought to be rejected, which by making that essential to civil freedom which is unattainable in experience, inflame expectations that can never be gratified, and disturb the public content with complaints’.44 Paley’s warning takes on an added significance in the light of the fact that his Principles became a leading text-book for the teaching of political theory throughout the nineteenth century.45

I shall not attempt to counter Paley’s criticism,46 save by observing that I have never understood why the charge of utopianism is necessarily thought to be an objection to a theory of politics. One legitimate aspiration of moral and political theory is surely to show us what lines of action we are committed to undertaking by the values we profess to accept.47 It may well be massively inconvenient to suggest that, if we truly value individual freedom, this commits us to establishing political equality as a substantive ideal. If this is true, however, what this insight offers us is not a critique of our principles as unduly demanding in practice; rather it offers us a critique of our practice as insufficiently attentive to our principles.

I want to concentrate, however, on the other and more knock-down objection commonly levelled against the theory I have been laying out. According to a number of eminent critics, the analysis of the concept of liberty underlying the claim that it is only possible to live freely in a free state is itself misleading and confused. Those who have raised this objection commonly mount their attack in two waves. First they reaffirm the Hobbesian principle that the extent of your individual liberty depends on the extent to which the performance of actions within your powers is or is not physically or legally constrained. As Paley, for example, puts it, ‘the degree of actual liberty’ will always bear ‘a reversed proportion to the number and severity of the restrictions’ placed on your ability to pursue your chosen ends.

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