Pieter Geyl, "The Idea of Liberty in History," in his Encounters in History (New York: Meridian, 1961), pp. 245-262
The Idea of Liberty in History
The idea of liberty can assume widely different forms as it is applied to different domains of life. I shall confine myself to the domain of history, that is, of the aspirations, the fates, the struggles, of men living in community.
Just by way of contrast, not in order to embark upon theology I begin by noting what liberty meant in the Bible, especially in the New Testament. Evangelists and apostles all use the word in the same sense. "The truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). "The Son shall make you free" (John 8:36). To be free means: "Free from the law of sin and death" (Roman 8:2). "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty" (II Cor. 3:17). "As free, and not using your liberty as a cloak from maliciousness, but as the servants of God" (I Pet. 2:16).
The liberty that is here meant is a moral, a spiritual conception; it is a psychic state. In history, on the other hand, the idea of liberty refers primarily to man's relations with other human beings or to the community; it is a political conception.
The first Christians indeed honored authority and the State, but they did so as outsiders: political intentions did not enter their heads. Later, when the State became theirs, and, later still, when Christian states took shape, this mentality could not remain dominant. Yet it continued to exist, and, fundamentally unpolitical as it was, politics were sometimes measured by it, with unfortunate or paradoxical consequences.
I am thinking of St. Augustine and his doctrine of the civitates, one of the faithful, the other of those who live after the flesh. This, latter he seems to identify with the State, whose rulers, proud and divided by quarrels, strive after greater power by conquest, using God at best as a device to enjoy the world; while the faithful live in love and use the world to enjoy God. The civitas terrena will perish; the civitas caelestis will inherit eternity. Augustine's vision marked as it may be with spiritual conceit, has grandeur. And as regards the political consequences to which I alluded, inherent in this doctrine is the danger that it will divert its followers' attention from politics, that they will look down upon earthly turmoil with self-satisfied contempt.
This consequence may be found unmistakably in Luther. More than a thousand years later, his Liberty of a Christian Man, that famous treatise of 1520, a powerful testimony of faith, seeks freedom in surrender to Christ and nowhere else. The Christian does not need the State. The State, on its part, must not meddle with men's souls. Apart from that, its power is unlimited; and again, apart from one reservation, the Christian, too, must submit to authority. The rulers are God's jailers and executioners. "God is a great lord, that is why he must have such noble, highborn, and wealthy executioners and executioners' servants, and it is his gracious pleasure that we shall call them gracious lords, throw ourselves at their feet, and be submissive to them in all humility."
The Christian's withdrawal into his spiritual life, quietly leaving the authorities to their task, which consists of nothing but the authorities to their task, which consists of nothing but the disciplining and chastisement of the wicked, represents an attitude of mind by which Lutheranism has certainly inhibited, not promoted, the cause of secular, or political, liberty.
But the European world took its traditions not only from the Bible, and Christianity itself could not stay within the narrow confines of this conception of the State. Side by side with the line that I have indicated, there is one that has its origin in the pre-Christian civilization of Greece, one, moreover, to which the Church had adapted its theory of the State long before Luther's time. I am not thinking of Plato, whose system, it is true, centered on an idealized state on earth, conceived, however, in no less arrogantly absolutist a sense than was Augustine's kingdom of the elect, and claiming liberty as its own monopolist prerogative. I am thinking of Aristotle's Politics, in which he proceeds from the simple observation that man is a social being. This view was adopted by Thomas Aquinas, the great 13th-century philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church. And it was enough to prevent the self-righteous isolation of the faithful and their indifference toward the State from becoming a current proposition in general Christian ethics.
The implications were of immeasurable importance. As soon as the State was accepted as an institution naturally appertaining to man, interest in its organization was bound to be aroused. Thomas follows Aristotle also where the ancient philosopher distinguishes three forms of political constitution; monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Discussing the merits of each he concludes in favor of monarchy. Monarchy become despotism is, he admits, the worst policy imaginable; but the advantage of one-man rule, if the king sincerely tries to promote the common weal, is that it engenders harmony and through harmony that order, or quiet, which is the State's highest aim. A much more positive definition, this, than was Luther's chastisement of the wicked!
The word "liberty" is not used with any emphasis by Thomas. It was by Aristotle. Liberty, so he wrote, appears to flourish particularly in democracies. Too often, however, it is the liberty to act as you please. And it is an error to think that to live in accordance with one of the other possible constitutions is to be considered slavery. Order, whatever the polity, means the security of the individual.
A contrast is making its appearance: liberty, order. Indeed, much controversy had raged about this contrast in ancient history, and in the later Middle Ages, too, it dominated the political struggles of the Western world. Thomas, so much is plain, has chosen order. The same can be said of Erasmus, in whom I see the line of Aristotle and Thomas continued. There is no trace in Erasmus of that Augustinian contempt for the world and its Potentates. Far from indulging in the cynicism of Luther, who in his personal assurance of grace took pleasure in seeing rulers play the executioners to the wicked and honored them for it as the performers of God's awful judgment. Erasmus lovingly sketches the portrait of the Christian ruler. He must be like a benevolent father; he must not only punish, but admonish and teach. He must not act arbitrarily, but be the embodiment of the law. More, Erasmus would like to see monarchy softened with a certain admixture of aristocracy and of democracy; sic volo sic jubeo he abhors.
The word "liberty" does not occupy a central place with Erasmus either. He was a monarchy man, as indeed were, then and for generations to come, most intellectuals. They distrusted the unreasoning multitude and feared that popular liberty would interfere with theirs. But a liberty of a different kind than that of pure democracy had been inherited from the political arrangements of the middle Ages, and by and large it was this that the monarchy in its striving after expansion of power found in its path--I mean the liberty of privilege, the particular liberty, the liberties (for here one should really use the plural) of groups, of corporations, of towns and provinces. When from the theories expounded by Luther and Erasmus, mutually so widely differing, one comes to the reality of their day, it must be noted that it was this conception of liberty that was the issue of much contest. Traces of it are indeed to be found in Erasmus' treaties, where we saw him attempt to make the monarchy come to terms with it. the combination, or mingling, of the two which he recommended still actually existed. Although not always leading to harmony.
In the centuries after the great migrations, serfdom had formed the sharpest contrast to personal freedom in the areas of Germanic settlement. The serfs had for the most part won their freedom, but the free had forfeited a good deal of their liberty. The feudal system as it came to cover the entire empire over which Charlemagne had reigned may be linked to a pyramid of subordination. Personal loyalty in exchange for protection was its leading principle. But it did not for long retain the simplicity suggested by my parallel. Great ones made themselves practically independent. Other relations of dependence crossed the original ones. And gradually, exceptions, or exemptions, were conceded. The towns, the monasteries, broke loose from feudal cohesion and obtained their own charters, their privileges, their "liberties"; privileges became the prized possessions of many groups.
To those exceptional positions, to these particular distinctions, the conception of liberty became almost exclusively attached. For the state, or states, that had originally continued the tradition of the Roman Empire, this process of feudalization, subsequently complicated by the privileges, meant little less than dissolution. But in the late middle Ages a movement in the opposite direction set in. Rulers, influential over wide areas, like France, or over parts of a wide area, like the German Empire, were trying to restore princely power and began building up the centralized and bureaucratic states from which the modern states were to spring. And this led to that struggle between liberty and order which I mentioned before.
The liberty of privileged groups, corporations, or districts, should not be disposed of as a mere egoism, disorder, or caricature of liberty. It meant something real. A striking token of this is the vigorous life springing up under these auspices in the towns. Yet the falling apart into separate areas, into more or less independent parts, the inequality of groups, each with its particular status and rights, constituted a hindrance for the development of Western society. In the struggle between liberty, as represented by feudalism or privilege, and order, as represented by the rulers, a struggle that was carried on for many generations and with varying success in the whole of western Europe, the modern observer will not find our conception of liberty a ready criterion by which to determine his preference. Each side made its contribution to the future as we know it.
Take Netherlands history. The Act of Abjuration, by which in 1581 Philip II was deposed as sovereign of the Netherlands provinces is still so largely ruled by the idea of the privileges that it appeals less immediately to us than does the American Declaration of Independence two centuries later, in which liberty is proclaimed in more general terms. Yet in the older document, too, the love of liberty in general speaks with unmistakable accents. This document has its honorable place in the European history of liberty.
The subjects [so it was said in the famous preamble] were not created by God for the sake of the Prince, to be subject to him in all that he may ordain, whether it be godly or ungodly, right or wrong, and to serve him like slaves; but the Prince (was created) for the subjects' sake, to rule over them after right and reason and to protect them, like a father does his children and a shepherd his sheep.
And he does not do so, but instead of protecting his subject tries to oppress and overcharge them, to rob them of their old liberty [mark the singular], privileges, and inherited customs, and to treat them like slaves, in that case he must be considered, not as Prince but as a tyrant and may, particularly by the country's States assembly, be deposed and replaced by another.
Their "old liberty"--but immediately after that their "privileges, and inherited customs." The Netherlands revolution of the 16th century was not, indeed, one inspired by a general or abstract ideal (I leave aside the religious motive, which in the early stage of the crisis was of secondary importance); it was not intended to found a State in which liberty was to be carried through to its logical conclusion. It was intended to safeguard what was prized as an old possession.
The Act of Abjuration has been explained as proceeding from Calvin’s constitutional doctrine set forth in his Institutes. And indeed, although expressly rejecting a change on the ground of the theoretical preference of purely rational argument, Calvin approves of resistance under the conduct of inferior historic magistrates when existing rights are being violated. But the drafters of the Act were not so Calvinistic. I should rather say that both they and he proceeded from the same medieval tradition of liberty, one that was firmly rooted in the Netherlands, both North and South. It was even the 14th century Charter of Brabant, the Joyous Entry, that supplied a particular inspiration for the Act of Abjuration (both Flanders and Brabant were still represented in the States-General that passed the impressive decree).
At the same time it is worth noting that Calvin, in marked contrast to Luther, did accept the State as a domain belonging to God's positive order and in which the Christian therefore had a task to fulfill. This alone is enough to explain how the Calvinists, so much more that the Lutherans, have been able at times to do something for the cause of liberty.
The Netherlands revolt, at any rate, was not one that in principle aimed at a renovation; it was a defensive revolution. Consequently, the Republic to which it gave birth north of the rivers can, considered purely in its constitutional appearance, be called a medieval survival. Provinces and towns, each equipped with its particular liberty; the rights of the citizens guaranteed by old privileges and supposed to be protected by authorities themselves deriving their power from old privileges and in whose election the townsfolk had no say: our conception of liberty is not satisfied by this oligarchic constitution of the old Republic. And yet it must not be overlooked that in the struggle against Phillip II's despotism, the general idea of liberty had obtained a strong sway over Netherlands political thought.
But whose liberty? Liberty to do what? These are the questions that must always be asked, and the replies could not always be edifying. The cynical but sharp-witted mid-17th century chronicler Aitzema taunted the Frisians, whose province was always backward in contributing to federal expenditure, with their habit not only of exclaiming indignantly at every attempt to make them pay more, but of accompanying their resistance with grandiloquent boasts of their famed liberty: "Libertas, et speciosa nomina," he comments (Liberty, and more such specious terms).
In France Louis XIV gave expression to similar sentiments with regard to the current conception of liberty. In his Memoires, written for the benefit of the Dauphin, he explained that to promote the well-being of the people at large , to protect the little man's interests against the nobility or the urban magistrates and their egoistic use of privileges, one single authority is needed, raised above all and shared with no one, inviolable; only thus can the absolute king carry out his noble task. Many intellectuals were inclined to agree, some on the same high idealistic grounds, the majority, however, rather because they feared a democratic liberty that seemed to them tantamount to the worst possible tyranny.
We are now in the presence of a widespread state of mind. I hinted at this when discussing Erasmus. Shakespeare thought likewise. Even an early 17th-century Dutch patrician like Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, the great poet and historian, looked with some regret upon the beneficent monarchy in France. And much later still, Voltaire expected everything from that monarchy, on condition, of course, that it would be "enlightened," and he kept hoping against hope that it would prove so. Those to whom culture was the highest good expected the absolute monarch to protect them against the mob, the populace, which might break loose and destroy everything. It was in particular the susceptibility of the masses to religious fanaticism which roused the intellectuals' feelings of contempt as well as of fear.
The classical example is the English philosopher Hobbes, who, shocked by the spectacle of the civil war in the 1640's, developed a theory of the state which was to exercise an immense influence.
What was the object, Hobbes asks himself, for which men in the condition of nature concluded the State contract? (For he makes use, like most of the 17th-century theoreticians, of the fiction that the State was created by a deliberate agreement.) What was their object? To escape into security from the misery of "the war of all against all" (the condition of nature was, according to him, nothing better). Given man's unruly nature, power is required for that purpose, and in order to effective that power must be unassailable, raised above all discussion. By that (imaginary) treaty, therefore, men completely and irrevocably transmitted their rights to the State. To the State they have since owed their security, their life, their society, their civilization, their law. Good and evil, unknown in the condition of nature, exist only thanks to the State. The State decides what is good and what is evil, what true and what untrue. Errors containing the germs of revolt must be suppressed; the State will see to it that the universities teach only the true doctrine.
Even for this horrifying system Hobbes enlists the help of the patient word, "liberty." It is a mistake, he says, to think that liberty should consist of lawlessness or should require that authority be unable to issue laws out of the fullness of its power. And in any case: "The measure of liberty must be calculated after the well-being of the citizens and of the State." A good deal of harmless to the State, will, so he reflects, remain, and he does not grudge the citizens that boon. It will even flourish the better when, thanks to the State's all-power character, penalties have been fixed for good and all, and arbitrary measures have become unnecessary.
But it is not likely that this all-powerful State should consider, occasionally, or even frequently, an arbitrary measure to be good? In that case, nothing would be left to the citizens, and to Hobbes himself, according to his theory, but to acquiesce, or rather, to agree. Leviathan is the title he gave to his book. The State that swallows all, indeed. Totalitarianism, the denial of liberty.
I spoke of the immense influence exercised by Hobbes' theory. One sees the traces of it even in a country where the tradition of the liberty of liberties was strongly embedded, as it was in the Dutch Republic. Take Spinoza.
Spinoza's philosophical conception of liberty could not but make his mind susceptible to the attraction of Hobbes, although at the same time it caused him to preserve a certain independence. "Free is, not he who acts upon his individual pleasure, but he who can wholeheartedly live in accordance with the precepts of reason." If Spinoza regarded the all-powerful State as indispensable for liberty, he therefore at the same time postulated that it should behave rationally. But to say that he postulated this is saying too much: he hoped for it. And when he, who was personally not only rational but humane, attempts to smooth out the rough edges of Hobbes' system, his treatise takes on the nature of a plea rather than a doctrinal exposition. He describes all dictation on matters of inner conviction as "violence"; he judges a government to act unjustly toward its subjects if it lays down what should be accepted as truth or be rejected as untruth. That the government is entitled to do this, however, he does not question. "We are not now speaking of its right, but of the wisdom of its actions." He seeks comfort in the thought that no government is likely to be rash enough to offend its subjects, knowing, as it must, that its right only lasts as long as does it power (this, too, is pure Hobbesian theory). And Spinoza is happy in being able to point to the example of tolerance given by the wise rulers of Amsterdam.
He did not, like Hooft, indulge in an aberration into monarchism. He reposed confidence in the actual rulers under whom he lived, the patricians (the "regents"). To them he applied this high theory of the absolute nature of authority. Nor was he the only one to do so. Even more rigidly absolute was the sovereignty claimed for the States of Holland by the lawyer Graswinckel. the brothers Jan and Pieter de la Court, in the lawyer Graswinckel. The brothers Jan and Pieter de la Court, in their remarkable pamphlets, went no less far, although they permitted themselves inconsistencies, casting glances in the direction of democracy, using the word, at least.
It is a striking fact that all these men were faithful followers of De Witt, and that the great Grand-Pensionary and his friends in these same years called their regime the regime of "True Liberty." This elicited a good many sarcasms at the time, and also from later historians. the phrase does indeed appear paradoxical when it is remembered that among the citizens there was widespread displeasure at their complete exclusion from all political control. this "True Liberty" was the liberty of the new sovereign, the States assembly. "Their Noble Great Mightinesses" wanted to be free from the supervision of a stadholder, which might easily have become princely absolutism; free, also, from the interference of the commonalty, of the stupid, shortsighted masses, which allowed themselves to be incited by the ministers of the Reformed Church.
Now, every time the people raised their own democratic demands against this oligarchic liberty--and the history of the Dutch Republic is thickly sown with disturbances of that very tendency--they recalled the theory of the Act of Abjuration. The prince for the people's sake, not the people for the prince's sake, was its great tenet, and this was now directed against the new oligarchic sovereignty claim. The patricians were reminded that they wielded power for the people, not for their own interests. And for this course, too, liberty was invoked.
All through the two centuries of the Republic, "liberty" remained a great word. It was a word to which the Dutchman liked to lay claim for himself and for his nation, and it made him look down with a feeling of superiority on the slavery of the French, the Germans, the Italians, of all peoples living under despotism. In spite of the theories put forward at the time of De Witt, people and patricians were generally one in this. The Hobbesian doctrine had no more than a passing influence. The patricians might often be presumptuous, but they did not generally forget that their rule bore a representative character. This had in fact been expressly stated, in the early phase of independence, by the States of Holland in its famous Deduction of 1587. Representative, although not elected: to us this may seem surprising, but in the Middle Ages, and in the early modern period, "representative" and "elected" were not felt to be necessarily connected.
Until at last, late in the 18th century, the tradition of the Act of Abjuration and the Deduction was merged, quite naturally, with the new formulas of the people being free only if it is consulted or elects its rulers to carry out its wishes. In the American Declaration of Independence these new ideas, of course, occupy a central place; but yet, even it can be read as a late-18th-century version of the Act of Abjuration, a modern confirmation of the old tradition of liberty originally wedded to privilege and to history. The influence of Hobbes, however, was not wiped out by this development. It even appears most strikingly in Rousseau's Contrat Social, of 1762. But before I come to that, I shall consider in its wider European aspects the countercurrent that I have just been noting in the Dutch Republic.
Two great names present themselves: Locke and Montesquieu.
Locke wrote in order to justify the Glorious Revolution of 1688. A king dethroned because he was violating the constitution. According to Locke, and this is the essential point, the subjects on entering upon the State contract had not transmitted all their rights. Men had had rights in the condition of nature already, and it was to safeguard these so much the better that they had formed a State equipped with no more power than was needed for the purpose. Life, liberties and property, these were what mattered, and if the government laid hands in these, it laid hands in the State contract to which it owed its existence and no longer was a government. Resistance consequently became lawful.
Observe that this is precisely the argument on which the Netherlands Act of Abjuration was based. Locke stands indeed squarely in the tradition of medieval liberty, but by virtue of his generalizing way of thinking and arguing, and no less because the transaction of 1688 gave rise to the durable English constitutional monarchy, he also points into the future. The modern term "liberalism" can be applied to him without seeming overly anachronistic.
This is even more true for Montesquieu. Montesquieu wrote under the impression of the derailment of absolute monarchy as he had witnessed it in Louis XIV's last years. Those fine-sounding phrases in the young King's Memoires about a task for the benefit of the people, how little did the practice of the reign agree with them! Power policy had become all, and endless wars had exhausted the countries and hindered all useful reforms. Versailles, where the court was established in 1682, had isolated the monarchy from the nation. In the view of independent-minded Frenchmen, it no longer was the ordering, and when necessary, reforming, power--although Voltaire, for one, in spite of all disappointments, clung to this view almost to the last--but was instead a despotism, enamored with its own greatness, stifling all independence, becoming more and more arbitrary.
The theory of the State, then, as Montesquieu developed it, was inspired by the wish to safeguard the nation from this despotism. Putting it positively, what he wanted was liberty, liberty for the individual--actually, he was primarily thinking of the well-to-do bourgeoisie--liberty resting on a feeling of security. The laws, and the State, should keep their hands off certain fundamental rights, freedom of thinking and speaking, freedom to do everything that is not harmful to fellow citizens or to the community. But how to obtain that the State should stay within those limits? By dividing authority and at the same time strengthening organs that might resist it.
Not for Montesquieu, then, the one, indivisible, absolute authority advocated by Hobbes and so many others. On the contrary, Montesquieu wanted to have the executive, legislative, and judicial functions established as three separate, mutually independent parts of government; trias politica. The exaltation of sovereignty, in which rulers and writers were on all sides indulging, was an abomination to him. Authority was not to be simply derived from the pretended right of sovereignty. It could not will after its pleasure. the highest resort to him, was reason, crystallized in law.
But moreover there were the historic bodies of inferior rank, to which he assigned in the life of the nation and of the State a role of essential importance. First of all the parlements, the courts of justice, manned by the noblesse de robe, to which Montesquieu himself belonged. He even went so far as to defend the vicious system under which the councillors' seats were purchased or inherited, because this engendered in the parlements and independent esprit de corps. Besides, there were the provincial States assemblies, urban magistratures, guilds, clergy--all these corps intermediaries (to use Montesquieu's own expression) were useful in that they might resist all-too-importunate intrusions of central authority.
It was a broadly devised system. Reason, as we saw, is the ultimate, the decisive criterion, but to Montesquieu reason is not necessarily opposed to history. On the contrary, he likes to call history to its support. Consequently his system is, like Locke's, related in spirit to the Netherlands Act of Abjuration. But again like Locke, Montesquieu nevertheless spoke for the future. His theories for the moment lent support to his class, the members of the parlements, in its opposition to the arbitrary actions of the monarchy under Louis XV, an opposition that a generation later was to create the situation from which the great Revolution sprang; but when I affirmed Montesquieu's significance for the future, it was not of this that I was thinking. Rather does his advocacy of the parlements reveal a reactionary trait in his thought. The parlements, which did so much to create the revolutionary situation, never for one moment dominated the Revolution, which was immediately directed against the privileged, that is to say, against them, at least as much as against the monarchy; and in fact all of those corps intermediaries, to which Montesquieu attached such importance, were brushed aside by the Revolution.
In the American Revolution, Montesquieu's influence made itself more directly felt or rather, in its sequel, the fashioning of a constitution to take the place of the Articles of Confederation. The separation of the powers, which actually came to be a feature of that constitution, was advocated Montesquieu."
But the French Revolution very soon turned away from Montesquieu and lot itself be inspired by the unhistorical, absolutist spirit of Rousseau. Montesquieu's time, however, was to come when the Bourbon restoration seemed to have written off the radical interpretation of the Revolution as a failure. It was partly to Montesquieu that nineteenth-century liberalism owed the strength of a certain tendency characteristic of it, a tendency that had been presented with great force by Burke, in his famous Reflections (1790) when the Revolution had only just begun. Liberty Yes, but Liberty as an inheritance from our ancestors, liberty in historic forms; no nicely thought-out system, no abstract (or a Burke himself put it, metaphysical) argumentation taking no account of fact or circumstances. Because of his passionate detestation of the Revolution, all this has a strongly conservative bias, as presented by Burke. That he is, nevertheless, fundamentally a liberal, becomes clear at once when one places him beside a counterrevolutionary thinker like Joseph de Maistre, who, writing in the early years of the Restoration, openly mocks at liberty; of like the great Dutch eccentric Bilderdijk, who wrote, as early as 1793:
The cheering subjects of a king,
That is where liberty flourishes.
Montesquieu and Burke stand at the beginning of the line that was to be continued by Mme de Staël, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton. Of a liberalism, in other words, that was concerned about the danger threatening liberty and civilization from the leveling effect of a new despotism, that of the masses. Not that they, as in their time Erasmus or Voltaire, looked for protection to an enlightened monarchy, but they attempted to impregnate democracy, which they accepted, with respect for law and reasonable moderation.
But was not Rousseau the greatest preacher of liberty of them all? With what vehemence, in the very opening paragraphs of his Contrat Social, does he take Grotius and Hobbes to task for having assumed men capable, by the founding contract of their State, of transmitting their liberty to a monarch or to a small number of rulers! "No!" exclaims Rousseau--for even in this succinct, almost pedantically positive, little book the new personal and emotional tone with which in his earlier works he had made so deep an impression breaks through every now and again--no! "To renounce one's liberty means to renounce one's quality as a human being, the rights of humanity, one's duty itself."
What could be more promising! But note that Rousseau goes on cold-bloodedly to assert that only one social contract is in agreement with nature, namely the contract by which each and every partner surrenders himself totally, with all his right, to the community. From that moment on, this community is the sovereign. Upon the sovereign no fundamental law can be imposed. Nor is this necessary, for since this sovereign is composed of all the individuals having made the contract, it has not, and cannot have, any interest opposed to theirs. The General Will (la volonté générale), by which the State under this contract is governed, is always right and pure. "Whoever refuses to obey the General Will, shall be compelled to do so by the whole body; and this means only that he will be compelled to be free."
This, then, is the liberty that Rousseau at the outset so strikingly proclaimed to be the distinguishing mark of human dignity! He is back with Hobbes, of whose influence he, while denouncing him, carries the indelible imprint. The General Will in the place of the monarch, but equally absolute!
And now let us try to understand what Rousseau means by this General Will. It is not necessarily the will of the majority. The majority can have been mislead. Separate groupings, parties, churches, those corps intermediaires that in Montesquieu's eye rendered such useful services in helping to protect liberty-- according to Rousseau all they can do is divide and confuse the community. The General Will, however, is the will toward the general weal; this will, Rousseau assures us, is present in all men whether they know it or not, and it can therefore be safely assumed never to err. It remains in all circumstances the sovereign expression of the community's true will; it is the community's true will.
This, too, points into the future. Toward the immediate future of the Revolution at its most violent, when Robespierre, with his small group of Jacobins, was unshakably convinced that he was the embodiment of the General Will ("inalterable et pure") and that he was by it entrusted with the task of exterminating all who seem to endanger the realization of the ideal State. But it also points into a much later future: toward all the minority dictatorships that we have seen, and are still seeing, in action.
Not long ago a French Socialist had a conversation with a member of the Central Committee at Moscow. "You tell me," so the Russian countered his arguments, "that only where the individual has a right to give utterance to opinions opposed to those of the government can liberty be said to reign, This may hold good for a middle-class state, where people and government are contesting forces. But how is it possible with us for an individual to hold opinions different from those of the government? All that we have is at the disposal of everybody. We are the government of the people; we are the people."
This is completely in agreement with Rousseau's doctrine. The State is a community into which the individuals have been completely merged. That State can never wish for anything that would go against the interests of its members. It represents the General Will, and the General will is always right. If an individual wills differently, he must, for the sake of his liberty, be coerced.
It seems a far cry from Rousseau to the Soviets. I am not suggesting that this Moscow Committee member had read the Contrat social. But Rousseau's spirit, Rousseau's trick, this horrifying adulterating of the work "liberty," this argument leading to the conclusion that the citizen must find his liberty in the submission of his will to the State--to the democratic State, it is true, the State founded by the surrender of each to all--this Rousseauan doctrine has become the property of quite a school of thought, and it had come to the Russians via intermediaries. I am thinking in the first place of Hegel.
Hegel, too, saw the individual merged in the community, in the State, able to realize himself only through the State and only thus finding his liberty. In his imposing system history is a development of the Absolute, thinking itself toward liberty--the ultimate goal. The way this happens is through a struggle of States, now this one then that being the elect of the Absolute and bearer of the Idea of History. Germany, Prussia, had been designated by the Reformation to attain the goal, as it was understood in his, Hegel's mind.
The vision of St. Augustine's work, I said above, was one of grandeur. How are we reminded of Augustine here! Hegel's Absolute is Augustine's God, and the predestined goal of liberty toward which Hegel's Absolute is thinking itself is St. Augustine's predestined Day of Judgment, when he and the like-minded faithful will inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.
Hegel's "liberty" is like that of Rousseau, a mere philosophical or rather, romantic liberty; a liberty in the prophet's imagination. In reality the term is made to palliate a veritable enslavement to the State; and in Hegel's case, to war. For to him it is war that necessarily marks the stages of development.
Many men have since operated with this "liberty" paradox, and to suit very different purposes! There was Treitschke, who saw the triumph of liberty in Germany's victory over France in 1870, a victory willed by history. And there was Marx, who announced that triumph for the day when the proletariat could have wrung supremacy from the bourgeoisie and have founded the classless society.
"A community," so we read in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, "on which the free development of every individual will be a condition for the free development of all." The whole of previous history had been, in Marx's view, a struggle, not, as for Hegel, between peoples or States, but between classes. The bourgeois rule, under which men were still living at that moment, was in all ways objectionable and rotten, it must and it would be forcibly overthrown, to make room for the predestined final state of affairs.
The belief in one solution, the only and final one, to be forced through irresistibly, be it by Providence, by Reason, or by History, after which there will be no more strife and practically no more history: this absolutist trait all these ways of thinking (St. Augustine's, Rousseau's, Hegel's, Marx's, and that of the Moscow Committee man) have in common. And it is this very characteristic--absolutist, simplistic, fatalistic, and, I add, unhistorical, however much its presentation is accompanied by rummages in the storage rooms of the past--it is this that lends these systems their power to impose and to fantasize, and at the same time, charges them with deadly danger to liberty.
"There are two schools of democratic thinking," Professor Talmon of Jerusalem wrote not long ago, and he distinguishes them as the Liberal and the Totalitarian. One regards politics as matter of trial and error and leaves a large domain of life outside its sphere; the other assumes a sole and exclusive truth in politics, and its messianism pretends to embrace the whole of life. "Both schools affirm the supreme value of liberty. But while one finds the essence of liberty in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute, collective purpose."
I need hardly say that I belong to the Liberal school--liberal of course not in any party sense. Not only does the other attitude seem illusionary to me, but I see in it the negation of liberty. And yet I must add that by this other road, too--at the cost of heavy shocks and of a deplorable waste of energy, no doubt--mankind has sometimes made headway. Moreover, whenever it took this dangerous turning (for that at the very least it must be called), it was practically always the blind obstinacy of conservatives, or perhaps the shortcomings or hesitations of fellow democrats of the other school, that had tempted it to do so.
The liberty of the privileged under the ancien regime, and later on, that of the propertied bourgeois class continuing their tradition, was before everything their liberty. Nineteenth-century liberals too often shut their eyes to the fact that the property-less masses, left to the free working of economic laws, were bound to be anything but free. These are undeniable truths. And this implies that Marx's criticism was up to a point justified and had its relative usefulness. The social struggles of the nineteenth century have made a contribution of irreplaceable significance to liberty. But that the cause of liberty would be lost without resistance by counter-forces grounded in civilization and history-- I for one am firmly convinced of it. Tocqueville's conservatism is at times somewhat obtrusive; in Mill's thought the neglect of the State and community factor constitutes a weakness; yet the emphasizing of the value of an elite by the one, and the other's insistence on the need for individual diversity and for totally unfettered discussion, count in the history of liberty.
I shall not dream of attempting to draw up, by way of conclusion a definition of my own of the idea of liberty, or of "True Liberty." There have been too many such attempts already. Of the results some appear to me to be no more than impudent sophisms. Others do strike a chord. But to sum up in a formula the conception of its numerous aspects and implications--personal liberty and liberty in relation to the community, political liberty and liberty in social and economic terms--one formula, one definition, one recipe? I feel unequal to the task, and what is more, I believe that it is impossible.
Liberty in the full sense of the word cannot, in the imperfect society in which we imperfect beings live, exist. All that we can do is to strive after conditions in which as much liberty as is practicable will be attained. To strive--not by abolishing history and making an entirely new start. "Liberty": this word, full of wisdom, was spoken by Lord Acton, the Englishman who devoted a long life to collecting materials for a History of Liberty--which he never Wrote: "Liberty is the delicate fruit of a ripe civilization." To strive, in the path opened for us by preceding generations, making use of their achievements, learning by their mistakes. To strive, and if need be, to fight, for unless they had the courage to stand up for it, liberty has never remained the lot of men; and that to fight, or to be prepared to fight, may still prove the only way to retain of it as much as we have, the years in which we live have made abundantly plain.
(1956)