There is a central difficulty with the idea of liberty as independence. In any state system, we are not our own masters
By Nazarul Islam | USA
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. For more than 50 years Quentin Skinner has been one of the most admired historians in the world, and surely the most admired historian of ideas. This book, short though it is, is immensely ambitious, the culmination of an intellectual project that began in 1997 with Liberty Before Liberalism. Even before that, Skinner’s work was constructed around a binary opposition between two canonical authors: Machiavelli, spokesperson for republican liberty, and Hobbes, advocate of absolutist rule. This book follows the conflict between the resulting two traditions of thought through the 18th century to the age of revolution.
The argument is straightforward. Since the mid-17th century there have been, Skinner claims, two conflicting ideas of liberty in the Anglophone world. The first he calls ‘liberty as independence’. According to it, we are free if we are not under the control of another person or institution. Thus, until relatively recent times, married women were controlled by their husbands, and lacked freedom. A slave is under the control of their master. In a despotism, the subjects are controlled by their sovereign. From the point of view of liberty as independence it does not matter if the husband is kind, the slave master benevolent, the despot enlightened: that does not diminish their control over their subordinates. To be free is to be a free person. The antimony of liberty, to this way of thinking, is slavery. Not surprisingly its origins lie in Roman sources, and Skinner used to call it the neo-Roman idea of liberty. Liberty as independence was, he argues, the dominant view in England for roughly a century from the Revolution of 1688 until the American and French Revolutions.
There is a central difficulty with the idea of liberty as independence. In any state system, we are not our own masters. Therefore, liberty as independence has to have a second claim bolted on to it: if I am the member of a community, and have agreed that decisions will be taken by majority vote, the vote of the majority counts as my own will. In obeying it I continue to obey myself. In a larger system, where I am represented by someone I have had the opportunity to elect, the decisions of the representative body count as my own decisions. I am free if I am governed by the decisions of the majority of a truly representative legislature. As Skinner summarizes it, ‘no democracy, no liberty’. Nor does it apparently worry Skinner that there might be issues of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, or of identity – such as sexual orientation – where individuals might think it positively wrong to allow the majority to take decisions on their behalf. What is important for Skinner is that liberty as independence requires that we individually should be governed by ourselves acting collectively.
There is a second difficulty with the idea of liberty as independence, which is perhaps less obvious, at least to modern readers. One can have a belief that liberty lies in independence while at the same time accepting, as the Romans did, the subordination of subjects, women, and slaves. Perhaps liberty is a privilege confined only to a few. If someone contrasts liberty with slavery it does not follow that they think political despotism is necessarily illegitimate. A strong theory of liberty as independence thus needs to have attached to it the further view that we have fundamental rights that are inalienable (a revolutionary view) or that at least have not been alienated (a constitutionalist view); we (whether all human beings, or all men, or all Englishmen) could never consent, or at least have never consented, to being enslaved.
The second, contrasting view of liberty is that we are free if no one is constraining our actions. Here liberty is not about our status as persons but about our freedom to make choices. I am free to drive from London to Liverpool, but I am not free to drive at 100 miles an hour or (except when overtaking) on the right hand side of a single carriageway. I am free where the law is silent. I am not free if I am held up by an armed robber or, perhaps, if blackmailed by someone who has the capacity to do me harm. But the (18th-century) wife, the slave, the subject are all free whenever their superior allows them to go about their business without interference. Hobbes is the first proponent of this definition of freedom, and Skinner argues that it came to be generally adopted in Britain in response to the American and French Revolutions. There’s a puzzle here: for Skinner ‘liberalism’ (a word he wants to avoid using for thinkers who were unacquainted with the word ‘liberal’ in its modern political sense) originates not in texts such as the American Declaration of Independence but in the Benthamite attack on rights theory; liberals have only a thin, Hobbesian conception of liberty.
The obvious problem with this second concept of liberty is that wives, slaves and subjects have to ingratiate themselves with their rulers in the hope that they will not be bullied, beaten, or imprisoned. To call them free is a form of gas lighting. One can also see how this line of thinking is open to improvement: in despotism, the ruler’s will (or whim) is all that counts; but an absolute ruler can choose to govern by known and settled laws. One can argue that if ‘political liberty’ requires participation in government, ‘civil liberty’ is present whenever you have a government not of men but of laws. Civil liberty is liberty as envisaged by Montesquieu and Hume, but also by Bentham and J.S. Mill. On this view, rights are not what matters (Bentham called them nonsense upon stilts); what matters is the welfare and happiness of the population, and representation is important only in so far as it leads to policies which foster happiness.
Clearly, this very broad-brush picture is capable of a great deal of refinement: at any time there were minority as well as majority views, and there are turning points when the clash between the two views becomes particularly sharp and revelatory. But this quick summary points to a fundamental feature of Skinner’s method. He proceeds not by the close analysis of texts, by disputing interpretations, or by testing arguments (the only exception here is when he discusses the origins of Bentham’s view that liberty consists in absence of interference). Rather he piles up example after example in order to show that a particular view was generally held. Skinner enunciates a paradigm, and then ‘proves’ it by accumulating quotation after quotation. He has always been a brilliant lecturer, and the technique of exposition and repetition at work is that of the lecture hall.
The paradigm once stated, an army of Skinner’s acolytes stands ready to extend and refine the account: Liberty Before Liberalism, for example, generated a recent volume celebrating its 25th anniversary entitled Rethinking Liberty Before Liberalism (2022). The result has been, in Kuhnian terms, a new ‘normal’ history of political theory, a feature of what Kuhn called normal science that those engaged in it enter into debate only with those who accept the broad outline of the theory: ‘rethinking’ here is a constructive rather than a destructive enterprise.
What Skinner’s paradigm offers is what he has called elsewhere a genealogy (with an implicit reference to Foucault): we get a Darwinian account of ideas competing for survival in a changing environment, and, of necessity, adapting. The claim (not fleshed out here) is that this is the right way to study ideas in time, rather than concentrating on their intellectual coherence or the canonical texts in which they find classical expression. In short, he is studying not a political philosophy but a ‘hegemonic ideology’.
Neo-Roman liberty or liberty as independence bears a close relationship to what scholars have called ‘republicanism’. It’s a much broader category than republicanism, in that it includes many people who favoured a mixed constitution (but it is worth noting the Latin word respublica and its standard English translation ‘commonwealth’ were used to include mixed constitutions along with what Renaissance Italians had come to call more narrowly repubbliche). Skinner outlines the ways in which his own thinking differs from that of other historians and philosophers of republican liberty; but he offers no account of how his own thinking has changed since Liberty Before Liberalism and, to go further back, since his 1990 chapter ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’. In many ways this book builds upon Liberty Before Liberalism, pushing its argument forward into the 18th century, but readers will want to go back to that earlier text and to his 2016 published lecture Thinking About Liberty: An Historian’s Approach and it would have been helpful to have a map of the evolution of his own thought over time.
In Liberty Before Liberalism Skinner presented John Locke as someone who held a neo-Roman conception of liberty but was not a republican. That book (unlike the present one) fitted in with a vast array of work arguing that what mattered in the build-up to the American Revolution was the Machiavellian republicanism of an Algernon Sidney, not the rights theory of Locke. Two remarkable things happen in this book. The first is that Locke becomes once again an absolutely central figure for 18th-century political theory. Here, Skinner’s case is entirely convincing. The second is that Locke and Sidney now seem to have much more in common than separates them. But, as Robin Douglass has pointed out in an important review essay, Locke only speaks of independence when discussing individuals (and states) in a state of nature with regard to other individuals (and states); he does not regard the liberty that exists within a political community as a form of independence. It is therefore wrong to classify him as a theorist of liberty as independence.
The distinction between independence in a state of nature and political liberty is an important one. Take John Hervey’s Ancient and Modern Liberty Stated and Compared (1734). Skinner presents Hervey as a straightforward defender of liberty as independence. But Hervey’s argument is that ‘the best regulated and best concerted form of government must be that which… at once preserves mankind from the oppressions consequent to an absolute submission to the will of another, and from the confusions that would result from an unlimited indulgence of their own.’ Thus Hervey does not take political liberty to be the antinomy of slavery, but rather it is to be found at a midpoint between slavery and anarchy. Exactly the same position had been taken in the sermon by Benjamin Hoadly, which Skinner mentions only in passing, The Happiness of the Present Establishment and the Unhappiness of Absolute Monarchy (1708). It follows that this account of liberty mixes together elements of the two paradigms identified by Skinner.
On the one hand, the liberty of the independent individual has to be restrained, not expressed; on the other, the dependence of slavery has to be avoided. Hervey is a significant figure at court, and Hoadly an exceptionally important figure in the Church, so their views matter. As we shall see, they are not the only authors who do not feel obliged to choose between, but rather seek to join together, the two paradigms.
Take Benjamin Ibbot’s sermon on The Nature and Extent of the Office of the Civil Magistrate (1720). This should be read as a continuation of the debate provoked by Hoadly’s The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ (1717), where Hoadly (at that time the bishop of Bangor — thus the debate is known as the Bangorian controversy), with the king’s support, criticized the very notion of ecclesiastical authority. Ibbot, one of the royal chaplains, had previously given a series of Boyle lectures on free thought, both good and bad. He took a straightforwardly Hobbesian view of the purpose of government, which exists to prevent a war of all against all. When society is instituted, people submit their persons and properties to the civil magistrate, but retain a right to freedom of conscience in matters of religion. Civil or temporal rights are alienable; religious or spiritual rights are inalienable; a similar view had been expressed in the anonymous The Case of Toleration Recogniz’d (1702).
Ibbot had published a translation of Pufendorf’s book on the relationship between Christianity and the state the year before (Skinner outlines the reception of Pufendorf, but does not mention Ibbot or his translation of Pufendorf). For Skinner, Pufendorf’s account of liberty as the absence of constraint represents the classic formulation of the second paradigm of liberty; for Ibbot, by contrast, Pufendorf provides the authoritative defence of religious toleration. Skinner thinks that the influence of Pufendorf becomes prominent only much later: he presents a text by George Fothergill of 1737 as an early example. Is Ibbot simply an odd exception in following Pufendorf at this time?
Surely not, for Pufendorf is the key authority cited in defence of Hoadly by the anonymous author of The Divine Rights of the British Nation and Constitution Vindicated (1710). Ibbot’s sermon was delivered on the day of the election of the Lord Mayor of London and was frequently reprinted. Moreover, he provoked a lively controversy, not for allowing too little liberty but too much.
William Berriman, the chaplain to the Bishop of London and also a Boyle lecturer, delivered a rebuttal of Ibbot’s views on religious freedom on the equivalent day in 1722: The Authority of the Civil Powers in Matters of Religion Asserted. Berriman (who read Chaldean, Syriac, and Arabic) larded his text with intimidating quotations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He dismissed Ibbot as a ‘novelist’, i.e. innovator, for no one before him had argued for religious freedom by appealing to Seneca’s brother Gallio, who, asked to judge between the apostle Paul and his fellow Jews, dismissed the case as being of no interest to the Roman courts.
Berryman acknowledged that it would be wrong to go as far as ‘the infamous author of the Leviathan’, who had claimed that subjects must embrace the religion of their prince; instead he called for conscientious objectors to practice passive obedience and inward dissent. Thus, the inalienable rights of conscience were implicitly acknowledged, but only for dissenters to be subordinated to an unchecked sovereign authority.
8Philoclesius, sheltering behind anonymity, joined in the attack on Ibbot, whose ‘discourse abounds with manifold untruths, bold and groundless assertions, false premises, and worse conclusions’. It is quite simply ‘wicked’. For Joseph Slade, in an assize sermon, Ibbot’s doctrine (now entitled ‘Gallionism’) was ‘of the most pernicious consequence both to Church and State’. Slade insisted that he did not intend to endorse the Inquisition – but certainly the Inquisition must be preferred to ‘an unbounded liberty or a general impunity’. In 1734 the Rev Samuel Johnson complained that ‘Gallionism has been openly defended; and the deistical and republican principles have long ago taken a deep root in this nation, and are now shooting forth their deadly branches’.
Ibbot had not intended to advocate either deism or republicanism; he did not believe in a strong theory of liberty as independence. Preaching before the Lord Mayor on the Queen’s accession, he was happy to contrast British liberty to the slavery of most other nations, but he did not draw the (to us seemingly obvious) conclusion that tyrannical and despotic states were illegitimate. Opposing him, the defenders of untrammeled authority may have feared their views were no longer ascendant, but they spoke up loudly and in chorus. Johnson, bewailing the prevalence of antiauthoritarianism, was confident that, at least in Oxford and Cambridge, the ‘fountains still run pure and clear’. Skinner, interested only in what he takes to be the ascendant doctrine of liberty as independence, and only in its stronger forms, has missed the chance to drink from these fountains. More importantly, he nowhere discusses religious toleration, which not only should have an important place in any account of liberty in the long 18th century, but also presents particular problems for an account of liberty as collective independence.
A more puzzling case is that of Thomas Rutherforth’s lectures on Grotius, Institutes of Natural Law (1754-56). At first sight Rutherforth appears to fit neatly into Skinner’s scheme in that he publishes when Skinner thinks the tradition of Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf was once more becoming fashionable, and he adopted wholesale the doctrine that liberty lies in the absence of constraint. But Rutherforth’s position turns out to be much more complex than one might expect. He does indeed claim that our natural liberty is alienable (though he does not mean by that what a Hobbesian would expect). Crucially he distinguishes between the civil liberty of individuals, which can exist in an absolute monarchy (so long as the monarch rules through laws for the good of the whole), and the civil liberty of the whole society, which requires mixed government and representation.
Members of a society have a right to civil liberty (i.e. to be restrained only in order to further the common good), but they can only be confident of enjoying that right where they have representative government, where the society itself is free. The civil liberty of the whole is thus necessary to ensure the civil liberty of the parts and of individuals, and absolute monarchy is always, in practice, a danger to liberty. Thus secure liberty requires both the absence of constraint (except where justified to further the common good) and the independence of a self-governing community.
Rutherforth also insists that whenever a ruler rules in their own personal interest rather than the interest of the community the community has (and indeed individuals within it have) a right of revolution. Here, Rutherforth seems to come close to the idea of liberty as non-domination originally propounded by Philip Pettit but rejected by Skinner as ahistorical, which defines arbitrary – and so illegitimate – power as power which is not obliged to track the interests of the governed. It is important to see that Rutherforth had from the start placed a fundamental limitation on our capacity to alienate our liberty: we cannot transfer to someone else the right to do wrong because we never had that right ourselves. Hence, when we alienate our natural liberty we do not authorize its abuse: Rutherforth’s concept of alienation thus comes close to Locke’s account of the trust that subjects place in their rulers. Rutherforth lays out in detail Grotius’ arguments against revolution and Locke’s in favour and comes down firmly on Locke’s side.
If I understand Skinner correctly Rutherforth’s lectures on Grotius really ought not to exist because, like Hoadly, Ibbot and Hervey, Rutherforth mixes and matches arguments from what Skinner takes to be two incompatible ideals of liberty. But Rutherforth is certainly neither careless nor incompetent: rather he has a robust and interesting account of liberty, one that seeks to avoid the obvious objections to Skinner’s two paradigmatic positions. It recognizes that even in a democracy individuals are never independent or self-governing, but rather subject to the decisions of the majority; but at the same time only a self-governing community offers any security for the welfare of individuals.
And, it recognizes the legitimacy of civilized monarchy, while preserving a meaningful right of resistance. Rutherforth was a significant figure: he published widely on moral and natural philosophy and theology, was well-connected, and was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity in 1756. The Institutes was reprinted in England in 1779 and in America in 1799 and 1832. Yet it has somehow escaped Skinner’s attention.
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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.
