On the Struggle Between Liberty and Authority

Political Theory, 2011

This essay argues that many modern discussions of Locke’s political theory are unconsciously shaped by an imaginative picture of the world inherited from the past, on which authority and freedom are fundamentally antipathetic. The consequences of this picture may be seen in the distinction made customarily in Locke studies between the ‘authoritarian’ Locke of Two Tracts on Government, for whom authority descends from God, and the later, ‘liberal,’ Locke, for whom authority arises from the will and agreement of individuals, and felt in the emphases placed on consent and resistance in most interpretations of Lockean political thought. The essay examines the composition and contours of this picture and, by holding up a mirror to contemporary Locke scholarship, draws attention to some of the ways in which it unwittingly distorts Locke’s thinking.

A short article on John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' for a non-academic audience.

The Review of Politics 77, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 1-22.

This paper aims to illuminate the ongoing significance of Locke's political philosophy. It argues that the legitimacy of political authority lies, according to Locke, in the extent to which it collaborates with individuals so as to allow them to be themselves more effectively, and in its answerability to the consent such individuals should thereby give it. The first section discusses how the free will inevitably asserts its authority; the second shows the inevitability of the will's incorporation of authority as a kind of prosthesis, which in turn transforms the operation of the will; and the third treats the issue of consent, arguing that Locke is less interested in explicit acts of consent than in the norm of consent, in answerability to which structures of authority should be shaped so as to honor the beings whose capacity to consent is definitive for them.

The main concern of this essay is to point out that John Stuart Mill’s defence of autonomous individuals in On Liberty is limited to civilised societies as he characterised them, and thus, excludes peoples he viewed as barbarous. It is well-known that On Liberty expresses Mill’s advocacy for individuals ‘autonomy in order to fight the danger of civilizations ‘stagnation of progress. However, the author dismissed “barbarians” as individuals lacking the proper features in order to be in fact, recognised as constituents of a civilised nation. This paper will argue that it is because of this rather condescending approach, that J.S.Mill’s principles of liberty were not extended to the cases of despotic rule and imperialism in “barbarous” countries.

2003

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In this paper I look at changing conceptions of liberty by examining the views of Aristotle, Machiavelli, and then Locke and Madison. I compare and contrast their views on ethics, then their views on relations between people, then the political structures they propose. I argue that the change in views on liberty began with changes in ideas of self-control leading up to Machiavelli, but the Liberal view did not replace the Republican view until Locke and Madison espoused new ideas about the state of nature emphasizing individual property rights.

This paper seeks to argue that the notion of executive prerogative forwarded by John Locke as a necessary political tool for a sovereign to exercise in times of national emergency is not practically or theoretically suitable in a modern context. Furthermore, the paper seeks to reveal a theoretical tension between Locke's idea of executive prerogative and more valuable foundational political ideas such natural rights and social contract theory.

2023

Nowadays, the idea that man as such has rights is almost evident. It is also clear that these rights must not be infringed by others and above all by those who hold political authority. The contemporary debate concerns rather what these rights consist of or what their content is. Even autocratic regimes pay the kind of homage that vice pays to virtue by making hypocritical statements that they violate in practice. There is even a paradoxical correlation: the more declarations of human rights a regime subscribes to, the more likely it is that serious violations of these rights will occur. It is hard for us to imagine that man as such has not always been considered a subject of rights. The ancients, however, did not recognize the rights of man as a man, but only as a citizen. Medieval and even modern people throughout the Ancien Régime thought that rights depended on the body politic, the stance in office or “the corporation” to which one belonged; we can best describe them as “privileges.” Obviously, there are great difficulties in explaining the basis and even the nature of the actual rights that man has as a man, as it may seem that, in the absence of some basic social institutions or civic framework, their content cannot be specified. This is why some think that without a minimum of social context these human rights are as mythical as witches and unicorns. Even these thinkers, however, do not deny that men are holders of rights; they just uphold that rights presuppose a historical and political framework. How is it possible that, suddenly, man became an obvious subject of rights? To understand this, it is important to note that there was a radical shift in emphasis in seventeenth-century political philosophy. Before, citizens had, both in moral life and in civic life, certain natural duties, but from then onwards man was mostly the undeniable holder of certain rights. Natural duties were those precepts of natural law that had been identified by the medievals. For example, when Thomas Aquinas considers what the precepts of natural law are, he begins by saying that they are found when, through practical reasoning about what is good for us, we realize that it is good to live rather than to die, or develop our capabilities instead of not doing so. There is thus a natural precept about the preservation of life and there are also various precepts concerning what is necessary for our well-being as human beings, such as living in harmony with others in our community. This is different from saying that we have a natural right to live rather than die, or a natural right to seek our own well-being. It is, above all, very different from saying that the justification of political society is that political society safeguards our natural rights instead of merely allowing us – as social creatures by nature – to fulfill our natural duties to others and to God. This difference is inaccurately described by those who qualify modern rights as “subjectivist” or “individualist”, as they are concerned with emphasizing the freedoms and entitlements of the individual against the rival forces of authority, other individuals and, ultimately, man’s natural state. It is one possible way of describing the difference between the moderns and the ancients, but not the most accurate. Not everyone recognizes the novelty of rights. Some find the idea so self-evident that they find it difficult to admit that it is not very ancient, not to say eternal, and retrospectively discover man’s natural rights where we find above all natural duties arising from natural law. Indeed, there are at least three ways of blurring the difference between natural duties arising from natural law and the new modern natural rights. The first consists in confusing a natural right with what is permissible and not punishable in certain circumstances, such as taking what is necessary for subsistence, or resisting aggressive forces. A second way is to judge that certain moral injunctions, such as giving alms or the prohibition against murder, correspond to a natural right, like the right to assistance or to life. A third confusion is to see natural rights in what are natural obligations—for example, as if the duty to obey God before men was a right to rebellion. This shift occurred in the seventeenth century. However, rights and duties are very different and to better understand this difference we need, at the very least, a genealogy of the shift in emphasis from natural duties (which emerge from natural law) towards natural rights (which emerge from man’s natural state). When does this start? Was it already with the medievals, or even earlier, with the Roman jurists? Nothing is more difficult than dating a major change in ideas. Whatever the case, the shift in emphasis from natural duties to natural rights can be said to be consummated when the role of political authority becomes that of securing the natural rights of man. It is obvious that the change took place during this process. Currently, political discourse and even conversation among citizens proceed as if it was evident that human rights must be untouchable, or at least that they “trump” other considerations. We also assume that a political authority that systematically violates human rights is detestable and illegitimate and must be removed. Hobbes is perhaps the originator of this shift in emphasis from duties to rights, but Locke is the first to argue that the new natural rights that man has as such by his nature are not lost in civil life. If we never lose them, this imposes severe limits on the scope of governmental action. Locke is therefore the first theorist in the modern tradition of limited government and the inalienable rights of man.

Constellations, 1999

2009