Freedom as a Fact
| Date | 01 November 1993 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1993.tb01916.x |
| Published date | 01 November 1993 |
| Author | Pavlos Eleftheriadis |
REVIEW ARTICLE
Freedom
as
a
Fact
Pavlos Elefthenadis
*
Orlando Patterson,
Freedom, Volume One: Freedom in the Making
of
Western
Culture,
New York: Basic Books, 1991, xviii
+
487 pp, hb
$30.00,
pb
$15.00;
and London: Tauris
&
Co,
1991, xviii
+
487 pp, hb 218.95.
Institutions of private law are often justified on the grounds that they allow the
widest possible scope for individual freedom. Similarly, constitutional principles
organising and restricting the power of the state are thought to protect freedom of
individuals from state coercion. These are only two examples of the many ways in
which the protection of freedom provides a justification for institutional
arrangements of political power and social interaction. The distinction between
private rights and public powers, which runs through the structures of the liberal
state, is itself based on the imperative to preserve freedom for individuals. It is
often suggested by critics, however, that this justification of liberal institutions is
not as convincing as its common use suggests. This is because the liberal account
of freedom presupposes a controversial, or at least contestable, account of the
constitution of the self and its relation to social structures. These criticisms suggest
that any theory of freedom will have to be grounded on a more fundamental set of
assumptions about the exercise of free will, the nature of individual identity and the
importance of social contexts.' Within the framework of this debate, liberals and
critics agree that an undertaking of other fundamental philosophical tasks is closely
related to the discussion of any political theory advocating the protection of
freedom.
In his award-winning book,
Freedom, Volume One: Freedom
in
the Making
of
Western Culture,2
the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson presents a radically
different discussion of freedom. He suggests that a theory of freedom requires a
historical understanding of its development. To comprehend what freedom is and,
as a consequence, to be able to ask if it can serve as our most fundamental political
value, we have to trace the historical processes that shaped freedom. For
Patterson, this is not one task among others, but the only worthwhile inquiry
concerning the concept of freedom. In his view, nothing is to be gained from
abstract philosophical reflection. Instead, theorists of freedom should ground their
thinking on an historical study of the particular facts of freedom. Both critics and
advocates of freedom are mistaken if they think that their debate turns on more
fundamental philosophical positions. Patterson sets out to show that the historical
reconstruction of freedom provides a definitive answer to the old question. It
*Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
I
am grateful to Duncan Kennedy, Matt Kramer and Ingrid Scheibler for their comments on earlier drafts.
Mistakes are mine alone.
1
For a recent restatement of the terms of this debate, see Jack Krittenden,
Beyond
Individualism:
Reconstituting the Liberal Self
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
2
Winner
of
the 1991 National Book Award for Non-Fiction in the United States. Henceforth, numbers
in brackets in the text refer to pages of this book.
0
The Modern Law Review Limited 1993 (MLR
566,
November). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108
Cowley Road,
Oxford
OX4
1JF
and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA
02142,
USA.
897
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