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ОглавлениеA more careful approach to the problem of defining “freedom” than the realistic one that we have here rejected would involve a preliminary inquiry concerning the nature and purpose of such a definition. It is customary to distinguish “stipulative” from “lexicographic” definitions. Both are descriptive of the meaning attached to a word; but the former refers to a meaning that the author of the definition proposes to adopt for the word in question, whereas the latter refers to the meaning that ordinary people give to the word in common usage.
Since the Second World War a new trend in linguistic philosophy has emerged. It recognizes the existence of languages whose purpose is not only descriptive or even not descriptive at all—languages that the school of the so-called Vienna Circle would have condemned as altogether wrong or useless. The adherents of this new movement grant recognition also to nondescriptive (sometimes called “persuasive”) languages. The aim of persuasive definitions is not to describe things, but to modify the traditional meaning of words with favorable connotations in order to induce people to adopt certain beliefs or certain forms of behavior. It is obvious that several definitions of “freedom” may be and have been contrived in this way with the object of inducing people, for instance, to obey the orders of some ruler. The formulation of such persuasive definitions would not be a proper task for the scholar. On the other hand, the scholar is entitled to make stipulative definitions of “freedom.” By doing so, a student may at the same time escape the charge of using equivocal definitions for purposes of deception and relieve himself of the necessity of elaborating a lexicographic definition, the difficulties of which are obvious because of the already mentioned multiplicity of meanings actually given to the word “freedom.”
Stipulative definitions may appear to be, on the surface, a solution to the problem. Stipulating seems to depend entirely on us or at most also on a partner who agrees with us about what we want to define. When the adherents of the linguistic school speak of stipulative definitions, they emphasize the arbitrariness of such formulations. This is evidenced, for instance, by the enthusiasm with which the advocates of stipulative definitions quote an authority who is not properly a philosopher—at least not an official one. This oft-quoted gentleman is Lewis Carroll, the brilliant author of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, who describes the impossible and sophisticated characters met by Alice during her travels. One of these, Humpty Dumpty, made words say what he wanted them to say and also paid them a sort of salary for their service.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”1
When they speak of stipulative definitions, the analytical philosophers have in mind chiefly those of logic or of mathematics, where everybody seems to be free to start when and where he wants provided that he defines precisely the terms he employs in his reasoning. Without entering into the complicated questions relating to the nature of mathematical or logical procedures, we feel obliged nonetheless to sound a note of warning against confusing these procedures with those of people who speak of matters like “freedom.” A triangle is certainly a concept, whether or not this concept is also something else—for instance, an object of experience, of intuition, or the like. “Freedom,” while presenting itself as a concept, is also what many people believe in as a reason for living, something they say they are ready to fight for, something they say they cannot live without. I do not think that people would fight for triangles. Perhaps a few mathematicians would do so. But many people say that they are prepared to fight for freedom just as they are prepared to fight for a piece of land or to protect the lives of their loved ones.
This is not intended to be a panegyric on behalf of freedom. The facts referred to here can easily be verified in the historical records of many countries or observed in everyday life. The fact that people are prepared to fight for what they call their “freedom” is related to the fact that they also say they have “maintained” or “lost” or “restored” their “freedom,” although they never say that they have “maintained” or “lost” or “restored” triangles or other similar geometrical concepts. On the other hand, “freedom” cannot be actually pointed to; it is not a material thing. Even if considered as a material thing, “freedom” could not be the same for everybody, since there are different meanings of “freedom.” Nevertheless, we probably can say that “freedom” is, at least for each person who speaks of it, a reality, a definite thing. “Freedom” may be a situation deemed suitable to those who praise it; it may be an object of nonsensorial experience inducing an awareness of nonmaterial things like values, beliefs, and so on. “Freedom” seems to be an object of psychological experience. This means that it is not conceived of by ordinary people simply as a word, as a nominal entity the meaning of which it is only necessary to agree on by means of a stipulation similar to those of mathematics or logic.
Under these circumstances, I wonder whether or not we can define “freedom” stipulatively. Of course, every definition is to some extent stipulative, since it implies a certain agreement about how a word is to be used. Even lexicographic definitions do not exclude stipulations concerning the way of describing, say, what people mean by a certain word of ordinary usage in France or in England or in both countries or all over the world. For instance, we can make stipulations about the languages to be taken into consideration in elaborating a lexicographic definition or about the choice to be made among the meanings of the same word when dictionaries give several. But in all such cases we never forget that there are some uses which are revealed by common dictionaries and which cannot be changed by stipulation without disregarding the meanings of the words as other people actually use them.
Stipulations are simply instrumental devices to convey to others something we want them to know. In other words, they are a means of communicating or transmitting information, but the information itself cannot be stipulated. We can stipulate that black shall be called “white,” and white, “black,” but we cannot make stipulations about the actual sensorial experiences which we communicate and to which we arbitrarily give the name “black” or “white.” A stipulation is possible and also useful in so far as there is a common factor that makes its communication successful. This common factor may be an intuition in mathematics or a sensorial experience in physics, but it is never itself a subject of stipulation in its turn. Whenever a stipulation seems to be based on another stipulation, the problem of finding a common factor that permits the stipulation to function is simply postponed; it cannot be eliminated. This would be the limit of Humpty Dumpty's power if Humpty Dumpty were not a fictitious character in a children's tale, but a real person making stipulations with other persons about the use of a word.
It would be of little use, therefore, to make a stipulative definition of “freedom” that would not convey to other people some kind of information included in the very meaning of that word as already understood, and it may be questioned if the theorists, in speaking of stipulative definitions, had such a thing as “freedom” actually in mind.
Thus, if a stipulative definition of “freedom” is to have significance, it must transmit some information. It is doubtful whether information knowable only by the author of the definition would be of any interest whatever to other people who have no share in the content of that information. Being completely personal, it would be of little concern to others. Indeed, it would be impossible to reveal it to other people. An exclusively stipulative definition of “freedom” could not avoid this deficiency. Whenever political philosophers have proposed a stipulative definition of “freedom,” they have not only wanted to transmit information about their personal feelings and beliefs, but also to remind others of feelings and beliefs that they considered as common to those whom they addressed. In this sense also the stipulative definitions of “freedom” proposed from time to time by political philosophers are more or less clearly concerned with some lexical use of the word “freedom” and therefore with some lexicographic research about it.
Thus, a really effective definition of “freedom” must be, in the last analysis, a lexicographic one, regardless of the fact that this will involve the difficulties of lexicographic research.
To sum up: “Freedom” is a word used by people in their ordinary language to mean special kinds of psychological experiences. These experiences are different at different times and in different places and are also connected with abstract concepts and technical words, but they cannot merely be identified with abstract concepts or reduced to a mere word. Finally, it is possible, and probably also useful or even necessary, to formulate a stipulative definition of “freedom,” but stipulations cannot avoid lexicographic research because only the latter can reveal the meanings people actually attach to the word in ordinary usage.
“Freedom,” by the way, is a word with favorable connotations. Perhaps it may be useful to add that the word “freedom” sounds good because people use it to point to their positive attitude toward what they call “being free.” As Maurice Cranston has observed in his essay on Freedom (London, 1953) quoted above, people never use expressions such as “I am free” to mean that they are without something they consider to be good for them. No one says, at least in speaking of day-to-day affairs, “I am free from money” or “I am free from good health.” Other words are used to express the attitude of people toward the absence of good things: they say that they lack something; and this applies, so far as I know, to all the European languages at present as well as in the past. In other words, to be “free” from something means “to be without something that is not good for us,” while, on the other hand, to lack something means to be without something that is good.
Of course, freedom has little meaning when it is complemented only by the expression “from something,” and we expect people to tell us also what it is that they are free to do. But the presence of a negative implication in the word “freedom” and in certain related words like “free” seems unquestionable. This negative implication is also present in derivative words connected with the term “liberty,” which is simply the Latin counterpart of “freedom” and not a word with a different meaning.2 For instance, “liberal” is a word that designates both in Europe and in America a negative attitude toward “constraint,” regardless of the nature of the “constraint” itself, which in its turn is conceived of very differently by American and by European “liberals.”
Thus, “freedom” and “constraint” in ordinary language are antithetical terms. Of course, one can like “constraint” or some kind of “constraint,” like the Russian army officers of whom Tolstoy said that they liked military life because it turned out to be a sort of “commanded idleness.” Many more people in the world like “constraint” than we probably imagine. Aristotle made a penetrating remark when he said at the beginning of his treatise on politics that people are divided into two broad categories, those who were born to rule and those who were born to obey rulers. But even if one likes “constraint,” it would be an abuse of words to say that “constraint” is freedom. Nevertheless, the idea that “constraint” is something very closely connected with freedom is at least as old as the history of political theories in the Western world.
I think that the main reason for this is that no one can be said to be “free from” other people if the latter are “free” to constrain him in some way. In other words, everyone is “free” if he can constrain in some way other people to refrain from constraining him in some respect. In this sense, “freedom” and “constraint” are inevitably linked, and this is probably too often forgotten when people speak of “freedom.” But “freedom” itself in ordinary language is never constraint, and the constraint that is linked inevitably with freedom is only a negative constraint; that is, a constraint imposed solely in order to make other people renounce constraining in their turn. All this is not merely a play on words. It is a very abridged description of the meaning of words in the ordinary language of political societies whenever individuals have any power whatever to be respected or, as one might say, whenever they have any power of a negative kind entitling them to be called “free.”
In this sense, we can say that the “free market” also inevitably implies the idea of a “constraint” in that all the members of a market society have the power to exercise restraint against people like robbers or thieves. There is no such thing as a “free market” with some constraining power superadded. A free market is rooted in a situation in which those engaged in market transactions have some power to constrain the enemies of a free market. This point probably is not emphasized sufficiently by those authors who, in focusing their attention on the “free market,” end by treating it as the very antithesis of governmental constraint.
Thus, for instance, Professor Mises, an author whom I admire greatly for his adamant defense of the “free market” on the basis of lucid and compelling reasoning and a superb mastery of all the issues involved, says that “liberty and freedom are terms employed for the description of the social conditions of the individual members of a market society in which the power of the indispensable hegemonic bond, the state, is curbed lest the operation of the market be endangered.”3 We notice here that he has qualified as “indispensable” the hegemonic bond of the state, but he means by liberty, as he also says, “restraint imposed upon the exercise of the police power”4 without adding exactly, as I would consider it reasonable to add from the point of view of a free-trader, that liberty means also restraint imposed on the exercise of the power of anyone else to interfere with the free market. As soon as we admit this meaning of liberty, the hegemonic bond of the state is not only something to be curbed, but also, and I would say first of all, something we make use of to curb other people's actions.
Economists do not deny, but also do not take into direct consideration, the fact that every economic act, as a rule, is also a legal act the consequences of which may be enforced by the authorities if, for instance, the parties to the transaction do not behave as they are expected to behave on the basis of their agreement. As Professor Lionel Robbins pointed out in his The Nature and Significance of Economics, studies of the connection between economics and the law are still rather unusual on the part of the economists, and the connection itself, although indisputable, is rather neglected. Many economists have debated about the distinction between productive and nonproductive work, but few have examined what Professor Lindley Frazer, in Economic Thought and Language, calls “misproductive” work— i.e., work that is useful for the worker, but not for those for whom, or against whom, he works. “Misproductive” work, such as that of beggars, blackmailers, robbers, and thieves, remains outside the scope of economics, probably because the economists take it for granted that “misproductive” work is usually against the law. In this way economists recognize that the utilities that they usually take into consideration are only those compatible with the existing law of most countries. Thus, the connection between economics and the law is implied, but it is rarely regarded by economists as a special object worthy of their research. They consider, for instance, the exchange of goods, but not the behavioral exchange that makes possible an exchange of goods, regulated and occasionally enforced for that purpose by the law of all countries. Hence, a free market seems something more “natural” than government or at least independent of government, if not, indeed, something that it is necessary to maintain “against” the government. In fact, a market is no more “natural” than government itself, and both are no more natural than, say, bridges. People who ignore this fact ought to take seriously a couplet once sung in a cabaret in Montmartre:
Voyez comme la nature a en un bon sens bien profond À faire passer les fleuves justement sous les ponts.
(See how Nature had the extreme good sense
To make the rivers flow exactly under the bridges.)
To be sure, economic theory has not ignored the fact that it is the government that gives people the practical power to avoid constraint on the part of other people on the market. Robbins aptly emphasized this in his essay, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Political Economy (London, 1952), noting that “we would get an entirely distorted view” of the significance of the doctrine of what Marshall called the system of economic freedom “unless we see it in combination with the theory of law and the functions of government which its authors (from Smith onwards) also propounded.” As Robbins says, “the idea of freedom in vacuo was entirely alien to their conceptions.” But Professor Robbins also pointed out, in Economic Planning and International Order (London, 1937), that the classical economists paid too little attention to the fact that international trade could not emerge as a simple consequence of the theorem of comparative costs, but required some kind of international legal organization to ward off the enemies of international free trade, who, to a certain extent, are comparable to such enemies of the free market within a nation as robbers or thieves.
On the other hand, the very fact that constraint is in some way inevitably linked with “freedom” in all political societies gave rise to or at least favored the idea that “increasing freedom” could be somehow compatible in those societies with “increasing constraint.” This idea was, in its turn, connected with a confusion about the meaning of the terms “constraint” and “freedom” which is chiefly due, not to propaganda, but to the uncertainties that can arise about the meaning of these words in ordinary usage.
Professor Mises says that “freedom” is a human concept. We must add that it is human in so far as some preference on the part of men is always implied when we use that term in ordinary language. But this does not mean that a man can be said to be “free” only from the power of other men. A man also can be said to be “free” from a disease, from fear, from want, as these phrases are employed in ordinary language. This has encouraged some people to consider “freedom from other men's constraint” on a par with, say, “freedom from want,” without observing that the latter kind of “freedom” may have nothing to do with the former. An explorer may be starving in the desert where he wanted to go alone without being constrained by anybody else. Now, he is not “free from hunger,” but he is, as he was before, completely “free from coercion or constraint” on the part of other people.
Several thinkers, ancient as well as modern, have tried to connect the fact that some people are not free from hunger or from disease with the fact that other people in the same society are not free from the constraint of their fellow men. Of course, the connection is obvious when someone is in bondage to other people who treat him badly and let him die, for instance, through starvation. But the connection is not at all obvious when people are not in bondage to others. However, some thinkers have erroneously believed that whenever someone lacks something he needs or simply desires, he has been unjustly “deprived” of that very thing by the people who do have it.
History is so full of examples of violence, robbery, invasions of land, and so on, that many thinkers have felt justified in saying that the origin of private property is simply violence and that it is therefore to be regarded as irremediably illicit at present as well as in primitive times. The Stoics, for example, imagined that all the land on earth was originally common to all men. They called this legendary condition communis possessio originaria. Certain Fathers of the Christian Church, particularly in the Latin countries, echoed this assumption. Thus, Saint Ambrose, the famous archbishop of Milan, could write in the fifth century C. E. that while Nature had provided for things to be common to all, private property rights were due to usurpation. He quotes the Stoics, who maintained, as he says, that everything in the earth and in the seas was created for the common use of all human beings. A disciple of Saint Ambrose, called the Ambrosiaster, says that God gave everything to men in common and that this applies to the sun and to the rain as well as to the land. The same thing is said by Saint Zeno of Verona (for whom one of the most magnificent churches in the world is named) in reference to the men of very ancient times: “They had no private property, but they had everything in common, like sun, days, nights, rain, life, and death, as all those things had been given to them in equal degree, without any exception, by the divine providence.” And the same saint adds, obviously accepting the idea that private property is the result of constraint and of tyranny: “The private owner is without doubt similar to a tyrant, having himself alone the total control of things that would be useful to several other people.” Almost the same idea can be found some centuries later in the works of certain canonists. For instance, the author of the first systemization of the rules of the Church, the so-called decretum Gratiani, says: “Whoever is determined to keep more things than he needs is a robber.”
Modern socialists, including Marx, have simply produced a revised version of this same idea. For instance, Marx distinguishes various stages in the history of mankind: a first stage, in which the production relations had been those of cooperation, and a second stage, in which some people acquired for the first time control of the factors of production, thereby placing a minority in the position of being fed by the majority. The old Archbishop of Milan would say in less complicated and more effective language: “Nature is responsible for a law of things in common; usurpation is responsible for private law.”
Of course, we can ask how it is possible to speak of “things common to all.” Who decreed that all things are “common” to all men, and why” The usual reply given by the Stoics and their disciples, the Christian Fathers in the first centuries after Christ, was that, just as the moon and the sun and the rain are common to all men, so there is no reason to maintain that other things, such as land, are not also common. These advocates of communism did not bother to make a semantic analysis of the word “common.” Otherwise they would have discovered that land cannot be “common” to all men in the same sense in which the sun and the moon are and that it is therefore not altogether the same thing to let people cultivate land in common as it is to let them use moonlight or sunlight or fresh air when they go out for a walk. Modern economists explain the difference by pointing out that there is no scarcity of moonlight, while there is a scarcity of land. Notwithstanding the truistic nature of this statement, a purported analogy between scarce things like arable land and abundant things like moonlight has always been a good reason in the eyes of many people for maintaining that the “have-nots” have been “constrained” by the “haves,” that the latter have illicitly deprived the former of certain things originally “common” to all men. The semantic confusion in the use of the word “common” introduced by the Stoics and the early Christian Fathers in this connection has been retained by modern socialists of all kinds and lies, I believe, at the origin of the tendency, manifested particularly in recent times, to use the word “freedom” in an equivocal sense that relates “freedom from want” with “freedom from other people's constraint.”
This confusion is connected, in its turn, with another. When a grocer or a doctor or a lawyer waits for customers or clients, each of them may feel dependent on the latter for his living. This is quite true. But if no customer or client makes his appearance, it would be an abuse of language to assert that the customers or clients who do not appear constrain the grocer or the doctor or the lawyer to die by starvation. In fact, no one committed any constraint against him for the simple reason that no one put in an appearance. To put the matter in the simplest possible terms, the customers or clients did not exist at all. If we now suppose that a client puts in an appearance and offers a very small fee to the doctor or the lawyer, it is not possible to say that this particular client is “constraining” the doctor or the lawyer to accept his fee. We may despise a man who can swim and does not save a fellow man whom he sees drowning in a river, but it would be an abuse of language to assert that in failing to save the drowning man he was “constraining” the latter to drown. In this connection I must agree with a famous German jurist of the nineteenth century, Rudolph Jhering, who was indignant at the unfairness of the argument advanced by Portia against Shylock and on behalf of Antonio in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. We may despise Shylock, but we cannot say that he “constrained” Antonio or anybody else to make an agreement with him—an agreement that implied, under the circumstances, the death of the latter. What Shylock wanted was only to constrain Antonio to respect his agreement after he had signed it. Notwithstanding these obvious considerations, people are often inclined to judge Shylock in the same way as they would judge a murderer and to condemn usurers as if they were robbers or pirates, although neither Shylock nor any ordinary usurer can properly be accused of constraining anyone to go to him to ask for money at a usurious rate.
In spite of this difference between “constraint,” in the sense of something actually done to cause harm to somebody against his will, and behavior like that of Shylock, many people, especially in the last hundred years in Europe, have tried to inject into ordinary language a semantic confusion the result of which is that a man who has never committed himself to perform a definite act in favor of other people and who therefore does nothing on their behalf is censured because of his purported “omission” and is blamed as if he had “constrained” others to do something against their will. This is not, in my opinion, in accordance with the proper usage of ordinary language in all the countries with which I am familiar. You do not “constrain” someone if you merely refrain from doing on his behalf something you have not agreed to do.
All socialist theories of the so-called exploitation of workers by employers—and, in general, of the “have-nots” by the “haves”—are, in the last analysis, based on this semantic confusion. Whenever self-styled historians of the Industrial Revolution in England in the nineteenth century talk about the “exploitation” of workers by employers, they imply precisely this idea that the employers were exercising “constraint” against workers to make them accept poor wages for hard jobs. When statutes such as the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 in England granted to the trade unions a privilege to constrain employers to accept their demands by unlawful acts, the idea was that the employees were the weaker party and that they could therefore be “constrained” by employers to accept poor wages instead of high wages. The privilege granted by the Trade Disputes Act was based on the principle familiar to the European liberals of that time, and corresponding also to the meaning of “freedom” as accepted in ordinary language, that you are “free” when you can constrain other people to refrain from constraining you. The trouble was that, while the constraint granted to the unions as a privilege by the Act had the usual meaning of this word in ordinary language, the “constraint” that the privilege was designed to prevent on the part of the employers was not understood in the sense that this word had and still has in ordinary language. If we consider things from this point of view, we must agree with Sir Frederick Pollock, who wrote in his Law of Torts that “legal science has evidently nothing to do with the violent empirical operation on the body politic” that the British legislature had thought fit to perform by the Trade Disputes Act of 1906. We have to say also that the ordinary use of language has nothing to do with the meaning of “constraint” that rendered it suitable, in the eyes of the British legislators, to inflict upon the body politic a violent operation of this kind.
Unprejudiced historians, such as Professor T. S. Ashton, have demonstrated that the general situation of the poor classes of the English population after the Napoleonic wars was due to causes that had nothing to do with the behavior of the entrepreneurs of the new industrial era in that country and that its origin is traceable far back into the ancient history of England. What is more, economists have often demonstrated, both by adducing cogent arguments of a theoretical nature and by examining statistical data, that good wages depend on the ratio between the amount of capital invested and the number of workers.
But this is not the main point of our argument. If one gives to “constraint” such different meanings as those we have just seen, one can easily conclude that the entrepreneurs at the time of the Industrial Revolution in England were “constraining” people to inhabit, for example, old and unhealthful houses only because they did not build for their workers a sufficient number of new and good houses. In the same way, one could say that the industrialists who do not make huge investments in machinery, regardless of the returns they can get, are “constraining” their workers to content themselves with low wages. In fact, this semantic confusion is fostered by several propaganda and pressure groups interested in making persuasive definitions both of “freedom” and of “constraint.” As a result, people can be censured for the “constraint” they allegedly exercise over other people with whom they have never had anything to do. Thus, the propaganda of Mussolini and Hitler before and during the Second World War included the assertion that the people of other countries located as far from Italy or Germany as, say, Canada or the United States were “constraining” the Italians and the Germans to be content with their poor material resources and their comparatively narrow territories, although not even one single square mile of German or Italian territory had been taken by Canada or by the United States. In the same way, after the last World War we were told by many people—especially by those belonging to the Italian “intelligentsia”—that the rich landowners of Southern Italy were directly responsible for the misery of the poor workers there or that the inhabitants of Northern Italy were responsible for the depression of the deep South, although no demonstration could be seriously supplied to prove that the wealth of certain landowners in Southern Italy was the cause of the workers” poverty or that the reasonable standard of living enjoyed by the people of Northern Italy was the cause of the absence of such a standard in the South. The assumption underlying all these ideas was that the “haves” of Southern Italy were “constraining” the “have-nots” to make a poor living, in the same way as the inhabitants of Northern Italy were “constraining” those living in the South to be content with agricultural incomes instead of building industries. I must point out too that a similar semantic confusion underlies many of the demands made upon the peoples of the West (including the United States) and the attitudes adopted toward them by the ruling groups in certain former colonies like India or Egypt.
This results in occasional mutinies, riots, and all kinds of hostile actions on the part of the people who feel “constrained.” Another no less important result is the series of acts, statutes, and provisions, at national as well as international levels, designed to help people allegedly “constrained” to counteract this “constraint” by legally enforced devices, privileges, grants, immunities, etc.
Thus, a confusion of words causes a confusion of feelings, and both react reciprocally on each other to confound matters even more.
I am not so naive as Leibniz, who supposed that many political or economic questions could be settled, not by disputes (clamoribus), but by a sort of reckoning (calculemus) through which it would be possible for all people concerned to agree at least in principle about the issues at stake. But I do maintain that semantic clarification is likely to be more useful than is commonly believed, if only people were put in a condition to benefit from it.
