Relation to others· Power and justice
Republican non-domination
Axis: Political liberty — What is it to be politically free?
To be free is to depend on no one's arbitrary power. The slave of a kind master who never interferes is still a slave: he lives under an ever-possible domination. Liberty requires protections that make arbitrariness impossible, not merely its present absence.
Philosophers 1
Show inferred positions (1)
Machiavelliinferable
The people, in the , desire one thing only: not to be commanded or oppressed. The liberty they defend is first of all independence from any arbitrary power, abroad as at home. This vivere libero, upheld by mixed government and by laws born of the conflict of the orders, makes Machiavelli a source of the republican tradition of , more than of mere liberty-as-absence-of-interference.
The Prince, ch. IX (the people and the great) · Discourses on Livy, I.4 and I.16
Argument
- Living exposed to another's good will changes conduct without any interference being needed: whoever can lose everything at another's whim learns to please, to keep quiet, to anticipate the wishes of the powerful.
- This self-censorship is a real loss of liberty: options that no law and no one forbids become practically unusable, out of prudence.
- Present changes nothing here: it rests on discretionary permission, not on an enforceable right, and so remains revocable; what weighs is not what the powerful do, but what they could do with impunity.
- Only protections independent of anyone's good will (laws, enforceable rights, counter-powers, avenues of appeal) undo this hold: they do not make the powerful better, they subject their power to check and contest.
Therefore Liberty is a status: not living under arbitrary power, that is, a power that could be exercised without possible check or contest.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the reasoning
- Distinguish what I can do today from how solid that power is tomorrow: being free is one thing, being assured of remaining free another.
- The kind master's slave can, today, act as he pleases across the whole field left open: what he lacks is the certainty that this field will stay open, that is, the security, not the extent, of his liberty.
- The dependent's self-censorship shows the practical cost of dependence; describing it needs no new definition: the mere probability of interference already reduces the liberty one can count on, and it is precisely in terms of expected interference that it gets measured.
- It will be replied that only arbitrary, uncontrolled power dominates; but then the disagreement becomes one of degree: the more a power is checked, the less likely interference becomes, and "domination" can be measured as a risk of interference, with no new concept.
Therefore Dependence makes liberty fragile and precious to guarantee; it does not change what being free means.
See the page- PrescriptivePolitical & legal SituationThe limits of speech
Speech that demeans without striking a blow: must a free society protect it in the name of freedom itself, or restrain it in the name of the freedom of those it targets?
public speech - DescriptiveFree from the law, or free through the law?
Every law takes something from what I may do; where laws fall silent, I do as I please. Yet without law the weak are at the mercy of the strong, and a people gives itself laws precisely to be free. Does law limit freedom, protect it, or constitute it?
the law