When We Redefined Freedom
Quentin Skinner's Liberty as Independence
Post 15: 15 April 2025
Thoughts upon reading Quentin Skinner, Liberty as Independence (Cambridge, 2025).
The Problem Today
Establishing the social rights of citizenship—public guarantees to things like an adequate education, healthcare, housing, and income—requires restoring a shared understanding of what it means to be free.1 In modern times, we have come to think of freedom as the absence of governmental restraint. We are free so long as no one interferes with our legitimate private choices. This is an incomplete definition, and its incompleteness does real harm. A more robust view, and the much more ancient one, understands that being free requires having a certain degree of personal economic and political independence. Freedom means not being dependent on the arbitrary will of another. That means not just being permitted to choose, but that we are capable of choice and that our power to choose is secure.
Freedom is a permanent status in society, not just a possession we enjoy at the moment. This is the status of a free citizen, of an equal and fully participating member of society. Social rights define the public’s duty to provide the means to achieve and protect this status. They provide the tools we need to be free. That’s the first reason why the definition of freedom matters so much: it provides a principle to guide public action. Indeed, if you believe as I do that the primary purpose of government ought to be to foster freedom, properly understood, then this is the only principle we need.
The reverse set of implications hold as well. If freedom consists only in noninterference, the only way to expand the domain of freedom is to limit the scope of government. Governmental action is coercive by definition, so freedom exists in that space where the laws are silent. This conclusion, the hallmark of what I have labeled traditional liberalism,2 provides the justification for laissez faire economic regulation and explains the limited reach of American social protections. It provides the principled basis for opposing reforms like universal health care. These advances are threats to freedom, the logic goes—individual choice must be protected from government interference in “free” markets.
If we adopted the more complete, more correct, definition of liberty, we would be better off. But making this shift requires understanding how and why the definition changed in the first place. I have my own thoughts about this, some of which I have shared in my book, The Tools to be Free,3 and some of which appear in this space from time to time. Recently, Quentin Skinner, the extraordinary intellectual historian, weighed in on this question. I use the rest of my space today to sketch his comprehensive, compelling, and at times surprising analysis. Since he focuses on Great Britain, I found myself left with some American questions at the end. These may lead to additional posts in the future.
Quentin Skinner’s Thesis
Skinner’s thesis is that the generally accepted definition of freedom in Britain shifted very rapidly in response to the rhetorical threat posed by the American Revolution. The new definition of liberty, he writes, was “a means of discrediting this demand for a more democratic form of state” (176). More succinctly, it was caused by “panic about democracy” (2). This wasn’t about the Americans, per se, the problem was that the core issues they raised threatened British institutions directly. The central rallying cry of revolution, no taxation without representation, exposed the deep flaws in the British Parliament, with its “rotten boroughs” and very low levels of enfranchisement.4 What’s worse, the logic of defining freedom as independence from arbitrary rule ultimately meant that the institution of monarchy was too dangerous to liberty. That was Tom Paine’s conclusion, and Paine was widely read in England, along with his English counterpart, the Presbyterian minister Richard Price.
The threat embedded in these ideas required challenging the basic claim that the Americans, and now by extension the British, were not free. The “new” view of liberty that defenders of the Crown offered was not new, but neither was it ancient. The noninterference definition was first crafted by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), where he writes that freedom is nothing more than the absence of “impediments”; one is free when he “is not hindered to do what he has will to do” [XXI]. This argument, also made to defend the existence of monarchical power, became influential in legal circles, Skinner reports. It was popularized by Samuel Pufendorf [Law of Nature and Nations, 1672] and became a law school staple, eventually reflected in William Blackstone’s Commentaries (published between 1765 and 1769), a standard lawyer’s text. This resource gave the anti-revolutionary polemicists an off-the-shelf set of arguments to use in 1776 against Paine and Price. These public arguments gained legitimacy when they were brought into academia, most notably by William Paley [Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, 1785].
The redefinition of liberty reflected deep philosophical differences, but these could be virtually invisible as a practical matter. At the deepest level, core tenets of Lockean orthodoxy were rejected by the new paradigm: natural rights were not inalienable; sovereignty was transferred to the state, not retained by the people. Far from being a limited contract, government was “an unavoidable necessity” (212)—a fact, not a choice. These are huge differences, but they are not usually apparent. Every act of the absolutely sovereign state limits liberty, but the fact is that the law “does not normally impinge on our everyday lives.” It doesn’t restrain us, and that “is precisely what it means to be in full possession of our liberty” (214). So much of the American argument focused on threats to liberty, the critics argued, not with whether we are free now. They focused on the “prospects of future grievances.” “We are not talking about what may be, but what is” (207, quoting Paley). Skinner does not use the term (it would be anachronistic), but the American position always has a tinge of paranoia about it. The nearly universal tendency to contrast the status of being free (independence) with “slavery” adds to this problem. It exposes advocates of the traditional view to charges of hypocrisy—since so many owned actual slaves.5 That’s a rhetorical disaster, but the metaphor (if it is a metaphor) also casts political arrangements into impossible black-and-white terms. No one is “free” under this definition. The absoluteness of liberty-as-independence is the root of the original legal critique of it—Skinner himself characterizes it as an ideal. A more critical term is “fantasy” (189). From a practical point of view, limiting restraint is the only liberty available to us.6
An entire theory of government rests on the new definition of liberty. If “liberty and restraint are opposed” (205, quoting Gisborne), then “liberty depends on the silence of the law” (214). Thus, we can only protect and advance liberty by doing what we can to minimize the constraints that law places on us. Now,
the political question that arises about individual liberty is consequently about the extent of the ‘just restraint’ that can be placed on its exercise (205)
“Liberty and government”, Jeremy Bentham wrote in 1776, were “jealous antagonists” (quoted 225). Bentham is a key figure in this emerging understanding of the state, not just in Skinner’s real-time narration, but in the centuries since. The widespread acceptance of his analyses helped lock the Whig schism between the Lockean and utilitarian mindsets into place. Both of these positions are recognizably “liberal” in the weak sense that they value individual liberty.7 The new definition leads to the characteristic laissez faire approach to policy:
speaking in the name of liberty for a programme of piecemeal social reform designed to remove unnecessary restraints and free the people to pursue their happiness in their own way (259).
Explaining Paradigm Change
At this point in the story, these are still current political arguments, about as permanent as an unprotected watercolor painting in the sun. Each round of pamphlets, sermons, and speeches on one side met with a response from the other. But this cycle, Skinner reports, ended abruptly. After the absence-of-restraint position was rearticulated following the French revolution, “there was no comparable response” (271). Why did liberty-as-independence fade away so quickly?
Skinner does not spend enough time on this question, but he does identify a very strong political candidate: socialism. The arguments about the American revolution had focused almost entirely on the abuses, or potential for abuses, of public power. This reached a tipping point, in his narrative, when the monarchy was threatened. The new socialist critique, engendered by the French Revolution, focused almost entirely on the economic sphere, on material inequality and on the private abuses of power. They questioned the institution of private property. For both sides of the Whig schism, this was off limits:
the immediate effect of their call for a fully egalitarian society was to confine the discussion of liberty as independence to the radical margins of political debate (272)
This is a very promising line of inquiry, but it comes at the end of Skinner’s historical narrative. I definitely wanted more. In particular, I would like to know how this observation about socialist ideas interacts with what he takes to be the main rival hypothesis for the change in the definition of liberty: the expansion of commercial society (175, see especially note 11). Both the timing and the expressly constitutional content of the arguments he traces strongly support his position that the definition of liberty shifted as a result of the debate about public power. But this does not resolve the question about how the new view became so permanent. In particular, my main issue with his explanation is this: if this was all about protecting the monarchy, why did the new view of liberty also become entrenched in the United States? If this was all about avoiding the republican form, why was liberty as the absence of restraint embraced so thoroughly in the American republic? This is, I suspect, why much of the literature on the early American republic, following Gordon Wood, characterizes the conflicts of the era as a slow, but ultimately decisive, contestation between “classical” and “commercial” understandings of society.8
The resolution of this dilemma, if there is one, probably lies in the very slow shift in the focus of these public conversations from one almost exclusively focused on how we interact with the state as public actors to how the state affects us in our private lives. As Skinner traces the dynamics of the constitutional political argument, he also traces a slow shift towards a greater and greater focus on private aspects of our collective lives. The emergence of socialist ideas, which react almost exclusively to private patterns of inequality, is one logical endpoint of this progression. But so is Bentham’s epoch-defining articulation of utilitarian principles; it takes the private pursuit of happiness as the surest guide.
A careful re-articulation is in order, but it seems to me that the “commercial society” thesis hinges exactly on the long-term transition to this individualistic mindset, a cultural shift that maps to the expansion of market-based thinking and the political and economic power of the emerging capitalist classes. These trends may be interchangeable statements of the same underlying phenomenon; I really can’t say. What I do know is that these changes are very deep and affect the fabric of everyday life in ways that the intellectual political debates do not. They constitute value in our lives. I am reasonably sure, for example, that only in the era of capitalism could “selfishness” become a positive virtue.9 Stated this way, it is obvious that the expanding capitalist ethos could not explain a sudden political change like the one Skinner describes, but glacial shifts can reach tipping points that could prove decisive. In this case, my counter hypothesis would be that this intellectual shift served the interests of the rising business class well. And that was that.
Why This Matters
In his conclusion, Skinner briefly steps out of his role as intellectual historian to tell us why this all matters:
I believe that the ideal of liberty as independence has a great deal to contribute to current debates about the improvement of our moral and political world. One reason for preferring this view is that it helps us think more sympathetically about our relations with fellow members of civil society. Consider, for example, the extent to which de-unionized workforces increasingly live at the mercy of employers with power to dismiss them at will. Or consider how the widespread economic dependence of women continues to limit their freedom of choice, leaving them vulnerable to partners whom they lack the resources to escape. (277)
These are just two examples where freedom is limited by a power relation that may or may not be expressed in observable coercive acts. The case of women is especially important. In Skinner’s narrative, some of the strongest defenses for the freedom-as-independence view come from feminist writers, most notably Mary Wollstonecraft (Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792). When John Stuart Mill took up the same question in 1869 (The Subjection of Women) he also adopted the liberty-as-independence view. Skinner’s call to return to this standard is a reminder that, though eclipsed, the ideal of freedom as independence is still available to us. I will write more about that in the future.
I am, of course, ignoring the rogue elephant in the room in favor of my usual social policy focus. This reflects the mission statement I offered a few weeks ago: I think we should be trying “to re-imagine the house—to think about how we would rather live.” But the house still burns. Skinner demonstrates the value of insisting that liberty requires independence as a guide in this “constitutional moment”.10 When I revisit Liberty as Independence, I will focus on its implications for our current situation.
Next Post: TBD (22 April 2025)
<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>
Notes
A whole lot more depends on getting the definition of freedom right, but this is about social policy.
The more common term today is neoliberalism. A warning if you follow this link: Liberty as Independence is forcing me to rework some of my thinking about this. The “Whig schism” between establishment and reform Whigs in the 18th century (my term), climaxing in the American Revolution is a deeper and more difficult break than I had previously realized.
Stephen Minicucci, The Tools to be Free: Social Citizenship, Education, and Service in the 21st Century (Lexington Books, 2024). Use discount code LXFANDF30. Direct link: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666960136/The-Tools-to-Be-Free-Social-Citizenship-Education-and-Service-in-the-Twenty-First-Century
A “rotten borough” was a district with very few electors (sometimes a single family estate).
It also exposes a deep misunderstanding about the nature of slavery. The republicans saw dependency—being subject to the will of another—as the essential quality of the status of slavery, but chattel slavery rests on the deeper characteristic of alienability—of being the property of another comparable to other forms of property.
It is also fair to say that utilitarianism has thrived in a world in which most basic rights are in fact quite secure, at least for enough people to maintain the illusion of liberty. This means that the failure to place the inalienability of rights and sovereignty at the center of the philosophy is not typically an issue. Until it is.
This is the line of argument that should most concern us today. The dismissal of the freedom hardliners’ position as over-dramatic should sound familiar now, since we are presently going through exactly the same thing. Like then, most people today have not directly experienced a threat, much less a real loss, of freedom. They are more worried about personal economics. The American founders would counter that when the injury to liberty is apparent to the majority, it will be much too late to do anything about it.
For an attempt to impose some order on the family of liberal ideas, see Alan Kahan, Freedom from Fear: An Incomplete History of Liberalism (Princeton, 2023). Kahan describes utilitarianism as “thin” liberalism, which is a fair characterization. A sidenote here: Skinner points out that the traditional conservative (“high Tory”) arguments about the divine source of monarchical power and our obligation to obey, while still present in this period, were generally dismissed. This dispute is between two flavors of Whig ideology.
See, for example, Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. Norton, 1969.
Skinner reminds us about the stir caused by how Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714) celebrated private selfishness. The threat of selfishness is an ancient theme, of course, but it was rare to try to cast it as a virtue. Not unprecedented, though, in an earlier work Skinner himself pointed out a similar trend in some 15th century Italian republics. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge 1978) e.g. I.74.
This phrase is from Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Harvard University Press, 1991). We are DEFINITELY in a constitutional momemnt right now.