LIBERTY AND SECURITY by CONOR GEARTY
| Author | CHRISTOS BOUKALAS |
| Published date | 01 September 2014 |
| Date | 01 September 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2014.00679.x |
LIBERTY AND SECURITY by CONOR GEARTY
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013, 160 pp., £14.99)
Conor Gearty's latest offering is a concise volume with much to offer to
legal and political scholars, and to non-academic audiences. Like much of
Gearty's recent work,
1
Liberty and Security is concerned with counter-
terrorism policy. Rather than discussing his subject from the perspective of
human rights or civil liberties, Gearty takes a leap further, to address the
broader impact of counter-terrorism on democracy. In doing so, he tran-
scends the confines of legal analysis (where legal measures are typically
referred to and evaluated in relation to human rights, constitutional law, or
rule-of-law concepts and principl es), and assesses their meaning for
democratic institutions, practices, and culture. The attempt bears fruit in
the concept of neo-democracy, a notion that encapsulates the character of
contemporary government. Importantly, through neo-democracy, Gearty
partakes in a central political concern of the early twenty-first century: the
mutation of Weste rn polities into re gimes that mainta in democratic
institutional appearances, but whose logic and practice are increasingly
authoritarian.
Liberty and Security opens by establishing the importance of liberty and
security as fundamental juridico-political categories and as moral goods. It
provides a broad overview of the general meaning these two notions have
acquired historically. In the course of modernity, liberty was vested with two
main meanings: a negative one, as seclusion of the individual from
unwelcome and/or arbitrary infringements in her personal sphere by the state
or by other individuals (`freedom from'); and, later, a positive one, as the
capacity of the individual to fully participate in social and political life
(`freedom to'). Similarly, the meaning of security evolved: from referring to
the protection of the physical integrity of a population within a given realm
(`territorial security'), to the safeguarding of the conditions for personal
fulfilment and flourishing within a certain social order (`social security').
Importantly, in each pair (freedom from ± territorial security; freedom to ±
social security), liberty is the decisive notion, the superior good. Security is
essential as a condition for liberty. The two notions are complementary, and
in their tacit hierarchy, freedom ranks highest. This sets the book apart from
the currently prevalent civil-libertarian discourse of a `balance' between
liberty and security, which sets the two notions as antagonistic, and implies
the superiority of security, whose needs condition the limits of liberty.
Crucially, the shift from one meaning (freedom from ± territorial security)
to the other (freedom to ± social security) is the outcome of popular struggles
for democracy. There is broad correspondence between `freedom to',
territorial security, and exclusive/oligarchic political organization on the one
477
1 For example, C. Gearty, Can Human Rights Survive? (2006); C. Gearty, Civil
Liberties (2007).
ß2014 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2014 Cardiff University Law School
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