Does the freedom we invoke result from the rejection of a more demanding ideal? ? Supporting the idea that independence from power has given way to freedom conceived as the simple absence of constraints, Quentin Skinner identifies a mutation at the root of liberal discourse.
In one of his very first articles, published in 1965, shortly after he began teaching at Christ’s College, Cambridge (where he remained until 2008), Quentin Skinner already looked at the ideological conceptions of English revolutionaries in the XVIIe century. He underlines the historical rereading carried out by the party whigaffirming the antiquity of Parliament and the rooting of English freedoms in Saxon tradition – as if the Norman conquest of 1066 had changed nothing. He also reports the arguments of the opponents. David Hume in particular, sweeping away the arguments whigsaffirms on the contrary the state of original subjection of the English population, “ the so-called freedoms » from the time of the Saxons being nothing more than a “ inability to submit to government “. The primitive state of barbarian nations », as historians such as John Millar or William Robertson qualified them with Hume, could not be compatible with the guarantee of rights and freedoms.
Beyond the historiographical debate, implicitly two conceptions of freedom and what founds it clash, the jusnaturalist anchoring of whigs opposing the conceptions of their opponents, supporters of a rationalist history. These, by displaying a positivist conception of freedoms made possible by the protection of a sovereign power, echo Hobbes and the subject of Leviathan of 1651, on the state of nature and the founding character of a social contract guaranteeing security, the condition of all freedom.
Freedom and its double
These youthful intuitions appear, this time centrally, as the crux of the argument made by Quentin Skinner in his new work, Liberty as Independence. Centered on the concept of freedom, the study in fact starts from a distinction with major implications in the philosophical and political landscape of British modernity. According to a first definition, placed at the center of the Revolution of 1688 and the English Declaration of Rights of 1689, freedom is understood as the state of one who is not subject to the exercise of arbitrary power, as non-servitude, non-dependence: “ freedom as independence “. However, during the XVIIIe century, a new conception of freedom takes off, to the point of sweeping away the first, corresponding to the state of one who is not restrained in his actions, whose will is not restricted in its exercise: a freedom conceived as “ non-interference “.
From the “ freedom as independence ” to the “ freedom as absence of constraint “, the evolution is anything but picrocholine. Others, before this book, have already put forward the idea of a change of approach to the concept of freedom specific to modernity, generally echoing the On the freedom of the Ancients compared to that of the moderns by Benjamin Constant (1819). Positive freedom versus negative freedom, freedom of liberalism versus republican freedom: revising this distinction to update it, Isaiah Berlin (himself referring to Kant), John Pocock or Philip Pettit reaffirmed the specificity of a republican definition of freedom, attached to the status of the individual, to his non-subjection as a citizen, to distinguish it from a liberal vision of freedom as the possibility of realizing oneself fully – and politically – without encountering obstacles.
In order to better historically situate the moment when this opposition was formalized, Quentin Skinner goes back once again to English revolutionary thought from XVIIe century and the intellectual apparatus whigwith the stated desire to “ understand what is implied by the assertion that freedom can be assimilated to independence » (p. 3), while affirming the political potential of freedom-independence for contemporary societies.
Freedom against tyranny
As a historian of republicanism, and as a republican himself, Quentin Skinner has always made the notion of freedom a central element of republican thought. However, this study focused on the English context of XVIIe And XVIIIe responds in a certain way to the criticisms which may have been aimed at Skinner and the entire Cambridge contextualist school, to underline insufficient attention to the mobility of concepts, to changes and disagreements in their definitions, and to the reifying character of a “ great story » aggregating authors by denying their specificities, and making the history of notions with too loose a definition and ultimately dehistoricized, against the contextualist principles supposed to guide it.
Certainly, pages attempting to establish a continuous link with “ there » Roman conception of freedom, from Cicero, Livy, Sallust and Tacitus, remain subject to discussion, and we can regret that the rich non-English bibliography on the evolution of conceptions of freedom (from the free condition or legal privilege to free will) from the end of the Middle Ages is almost absent. In contrast, Skinner’s evocation of Italian Renaissance thinkers such as Francesco Patrizi, Gasparo Contarini, or Machiavelli, focuses on the reception of their ideas in England. From then on, the revolutionary context shows the diffusion of the equivalence between freedom and independence, in writings marked by anti-tyrannical rhetoric, and under the pen of authors such as John Milton or John Locke, contrasting the condition of the free man and that of the slave, placed “ under the absolute arbitrary power of another » (p. 53).
After the installation of a majority whig in Parliament from 1715, the kingdom saw a double movement of diffusion of this freedom-independence, but also of negotiation around its real political scope, and its implications in terms of participation in government. While praising the political model specific to England and “ the spirit of freedom » characteristic of its people (p. 107), the party whig finds himself confronted with his own failure to recognize the persistence of slavery » in the colonies (p. 120), and to respond to demands in favor of civic equality for women, carried by various anonymous treatises, and by a figure such as Mary Astell. The very persistence of these injustices discredits the rhetoric whig on freedom-independence and the British spirit of liberty, swept away by abundant and sometimes popular critical literature, such as Henry Fielding’s novel, Tom Jonespublished with great success in 1749 (p. 135-140).
Locate freedom under sovereignty
The diet whig finally finds itself forcefully confronted with revolutionary arguments in the American possessions, and their most famous iterations in Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine, which turn the logic of freedom-independence against the crown, against British imperialism and for the right to govern oneself, affirmed in the American Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, which affirms the necessity of the consent of the governed, and the right of the governed to abolish unjust or arbitrary governments (p. 153-170).
American independence appears, in Skinner’s account, as the source of a “ counter-revolutionary reaction » British (p. 173), giving way to the reception of continental absolutist thought, itself influenced by Hobbes. The French anti-monarchomachs, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, serve the reformulation of a freedom which cannot be conceived as an inalienable right, but on the contrary is anchored in an original alienation, the renunciation of independence. Only then, as William Blackstone argues, can individuals benefit from rights guaranteed by the authority to which they submit, and of which the first three are “ the right to security, the right to personal liberty and the right to private property » (p. 196). Thus affirmed, freedom as “ non-interference » is opposed to natural freedom, replaced by a “ new creation ” the extent of which is determined by law, according to an entirely positivist logic summarized by Thomas Mortimer: “ Everything that the law does not prohibit is authorized, and it is on this permission that the rights of individuals in any State are built. » – and hence, Skinner emphasizes, the extent of their freedom (p. 197).
Republican freedom versus liberal freedom
Such a distinction between two definitions deemed incompatible of freedom, thus dramatized around a single shift, has some limits, as soon as we look at their insertion into competing logics, one absolutist, and the other republican. The Hobbesian anchoring, in itself, clearly shows the coexistence of these approaches in an intellectual landscape which, British as well as European and beyond, is characterized by its diversity and by permanent reconfigurations around concepts such as freedom. We can particularly regret that on two occasions (p. 189 and 197), Quentin Skinner cites Montesquieu as a major source of this opposition to freedom-independence (even through Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui whose Principles of political law were translated and published in London in 1752): this reading, which we guess was inspired by the work of Thomas Pangle (not cited however) would have benefited from a more nuanced rereading, like that proposed by Bernard Manin, and from its salutary reminder of the way in which Montesquieu himself conceives of security, also, as protection against the arbitrariness of those who govern.
Nourished by a profusion of writings giving a vivid image of the debates and controversies in the landscape of the English Enlightenment, the subject highlights the way in which the French Revolution, as a reaffirmation of the ideal of freedom-independence, strengthened the British reaction against its reiterations, which notably targeted Thomas Paine, or the writings of Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft in favor of women’s right to education and political representation. If the reaffirmation of such a divide with the “ freedom-independence ” perhaps does not appear as politically fruitful today as the author seems to believe in conclusion, at least the logic of “ freedom as non-interference » does it ultimately promote the crystallization of liberal thought focused on “ the absence of external obstacles to movement », in the words of Hobbes, strikingly close to the liberal principles decreed by John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer or Henry Sidgwick – a conception of freedom which we can only note with Quentin Skinner that it “ continues to largely dominate the debate » (p. 275).