Freedom and Social Citizenship
Governments must foster freedom, not just protect it.
Post 5: 4 February 2025
Governments must foster freedom, not just protect it.
Last week’s post argued that the classical “civic republican” way of thinking about freedom was better than the more modern “traditional liberal” one. It was a pretty technical discussion, contrasting liberal noninterference with republican nondomination. So today, I want to recap and present my own, more concrete way of thinking about freedom.
This is the simplest way I can restate the discussion from last week: Liberalism seeks to protect legitimate personal choices from governmental interference. Civic republicanism understands freedom as the ability to make these choices.
Liberal freedom is a natural characteristic of the human personality. The state itself is the main threat to this liberty, so the state protects freedom (domestically) mainly by staying out of the way. Republican freedom, in contrast, is defined in the real world of social relationships. Free persons can act independently of others; they aren’t dominated by someone else, including private actors. This independence takes resources (money, mostly) and personal capabilities (education). The state can protect people from private domination by ensuring that they have the personal resources they need to make free choices. The liberal concern about domination by an overbearing state is still valid, but any state action that fosters freedom is justified and ought to pass liberal tests of legitimacy. Because we want a society in which each person is equally valued as a fully participating member, governments have a duty to guarantee the necessary resources; this is what social rights are.
We are deeply inculcated into thinking of freedom as governmental noninterference, so it may be hard for readers to accept my reframing. Let me recast the whole argument in the social citizenship terms that I have used in earlier posts.
Freedom is about choices. Free people have life choices that are similar to others in their society and the ability to choose among them. That’s the practical meaning of the thing. It is also how I described “full membership” in Post 2, reflecting the close tie between freedom, understood as a political concept,1 and membership. That makes it seem simple, but it’s not. It is actually difficult to know if you are free. I’ll step through the three key elements of my definition in turn.
First, freedom is about life choices. We can only understand our freedom over the course of a complete life. As adults, we make commitments that restrict our day-to-day range of choices—we make promises, sign contracts, have children. Mostly, we do not understand these constraints as diminishing our status as free persons. This can get complicated, since we might not feel we chose all the commitments that bind us. Right now, to keep it as clear as possible, I want to think about the set of life choices facing an emerging adult. This clears away as much of the tangled brush of these commitments as possible. I will sometimes refer to this new adult as the next person.
Second, these life choices are contextual. They have to have meaning given the current state of economic and social development. This point is mostly obvious, like only being able to choose an occupation that actually exists. More importantly, the set of choices I should have reflects a social expectation of what is possible based on the set of choices relatively common in my society at the moment. Ideally, these expectations expand over time as the level of technology rises and the wealth of the community grows. It is possible, however, that the set of individual choices narrows because of a crisis (war, for example). Given this social context, everyone ought to have a similar set of life choices. This does not guarantee success. Many of these choices will be constrained by congestion—we need only so many astronauts—but everyone ought to be able to engage in a fair competition for every position.
In reality, we know that everyone does not have a similar set of life choices and cannot compete on fair terms for every position in our society. We almost never admit that this means that some of us are less free than others. But that is exactly what it means. Our political goal must be, to the extent practicable, to make everyone as free as everyone else, starting with the next person.
Third, for choice to be meaningful, we must have the ability to choose. At the most rudimentary level, this means having the individual capacity to choose—the ability to reason effectively, access information, apply other personal skills. We build these intrinsic capabilities mainly through education, which is why education is the most fundamental social right. But our ability to choose may also be constrained by other resource deficits. Economic insecurity may make it impossible for us to leave an exploitative job or to risk joining a union. Housing insecurity may make it difficult to respond to personal opportunities. High medical costs might lock us into a job only for its insurance benefit. This idea is intuitive. Most of us either know (or are) someone who made a major life choice, or more likely failed to make a major life choice, because of constraints like these. Again, however, we do not usually recognize that these constraints make us less free. They do.
Context is critical here too. Resource constraints always limit choice. If not, we would all live in mansions or luxury condos. The social rights to adequate housing, medical care, and basic income ensure only that deficits in these basic goods do not act as the critical constraint on other major life choices, such as career choice, decisions about marriage and family formation, or, broadly, where to live. The scope of these guarantees ultimately depends on social expectations, ultimately effected through democratic processes, about what resource levels ought to be the universal floors for these sorts of basic goods and services. For things like medical care, the universal floor and the luxury standard ought to be very similar (the rich will get their nips and tucks, of course). In contrast, it is pretty unlikely that the middle or upper classes would have much interest in merely “adequate” housing.
I hope it is already clear that social citizenship, as I have been describing it, is consistent with civic republicanism, again as I describe it.2 As a fully articulated theory of the state, civic republicanism covers a great deal more than social rights, of course. The latter concern only what social minima are guaranteed to all members of society, but this forms the core republican protection against private domination. Social rights guarantees provide individuals with the resources they need to confront, resist, protest, or exit private relations of domination.3 This is not a theoretical abstraction: it is about individuals’ real ability to quit a job, join a strike, negotiate effectively with a landlord or employer, take part in a lawsuit, engage in public protest, campaign, vote, and so on. Our ability to engage in all of these ordinary acts can be restricted by our own personal (educational) and financial limitations and by the power others hold over us as landlords and employers. Governments may also need to check the power of the economically powerful, but simply limiting the number of people who are in a position to be dominated is almost certainly the most impactful way we can limit the damage done by economic inequality. In any case, it is where we should start: increasing the power of ordinary people to make their own choices does nothing to limit the freedom of the advantaged few, only their ability to exploit others.
I hope this makes the idea of freedom more concrete. It is still pretty general. I have not been specific at all yet about what sorts of life choices ought to be in everyone’s set of possibilities and, given that, what types and levels of resources are required to ensure equality of opportunity so defined. Are we talking about all types of education? Every occupation? How do we apply this idea at an individual level, knowing that individuals have different natural talents and abilities? These kinds of questions form the political and practical tasks associated with social citizenship.
Next post: LBJ’s Forgotten Message on Freedom (11 February 2025)
<All entries in On Social Citizenship connect. I encourage readers to go back and read the first post in this series.>
Notes
Photo: https://www.massmoments.org/moment-details/bread-and-roses-strike-begins.html. Immigrant City Archives, Lawrence.
1. I say, “understood as a political concept” because a fair bit of philosophical and scientific study gets tied up in the question of whether we can know our own will and whether our personal actions actually reflect our “free will.” Other than the fact that a proper education, ceteris paribus, will increase our ability to know that our life choices are properly our own, these sorts of questions are mostly moot here. Individuals can become more free through self-discovery—more power to them—but my concern is that all of us, taken as a community all together, live in a political/policy context that maximizes our ability to be, to the extent practicable in our time and place, the authors of our own lives (this phrase comes from Joseph Raz). This is why I refer to it as a “political concept.”
2. As noted in the last post, I try to model my civic republicanism after Philip Pettit, especially On the People’s Terms (Cambridge, 2012).
3. I quote my own book here. Stephen Minicucci, The Tools to be Free: Social Citizenship, Education, and Service in the 21st Century (Lexington Books, 2024), 37. Available from the publisher ( https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666960136/The-Tools-to-Be-Free-Social-Citizenship-Education-and-Service-in-the-Twenty-First-Century ). Use discount code LXFANDF30.