On 4/15/2013 12:29 PM, David Shemano wrote: > I never said the word “freedom” was unknown in English before Hegel, or > even that liberty and freedom had different meanings prior to the 20^th > Century. I was answering a different question, which is why 21^st > Century “money libertarians” prefer “liberty” to “freedom” when they > speak, and my answer is that the Left has the unfortunate tendency of > coopting perfectly good words, thereby requiring everyone else to adjust > (e.g., the somewhat surreal notion in the United States that > libertarians are more likely characterized as a “conservatives” as > opposed to “liberals”). The same is true for “freedom”, which had > perfectly good meaning in the English speaking world prior to the > introduction of Hegelian ideas in the late 19^th Century. The Hegelians > had to overcome an individualistic resistance to their organic view of > the state, which necessitated an attack on the common understanding of > the value of “freedom.” > > David Shemano
==================== Surely you cannot be intimating that freedom & liberty are metapolitical invariants? There's no such beast as a "perfectly good meaning." One could just as easily assert that it is the Right that exhibits the unfortunate tendency to take deeply problematic terms and demand everyone agree with their particular redescription of said terms and then shout-write, with infantalizing-narcissistic rhetoric, that anyone who complicates the issues will launch us on the road to serfdom or the gulag or whatever. Skinner follows Lincoln below. Students of G.A. Cohen, take note; lots to re-purpose here. <http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1067> The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name———liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names———liberty and tyranny. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails to-day among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty. Recently, as it seems, the people of Maryland have been doing something to define liberty; and thanks to them that, in what they have done, the wolf’s dictionary, has been repudiated. <http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/liberty-before-liberalism-all-that/> The neo-Roman theory is not interested in telling you how you should make use of your liberty; it merely wants you to espouse a particular view of how liberty should be understood. I strongly agree with you when you speak about our current historical blindness. I think that we have closed ourselves off from understanding a lot of our history by failing to see that, until relatively recently, the concept of liberty was generally understood in a way that we now find unfamiliar and even hard to grasp. We tend to think of freedom essentially as a predicate of actions. But the earlier tradition took freedom essentially to be the name of a status, that of a free person by contrast with a slave. Let me end by following out your last train of thought. I believe that there is certainly a sense in which we fail to understand some features of our contemporary situation through not having a grasp on the neo-Roman way of thinking about liberty. For a neo-Roman thinker, many of the situations that in a market society are regarded as free – even as paradigmatically free – would appear as examples of servitude. The predicament of de-unionised labour, of those who live in conditions of economic dependence, of those in particular who live in dependence on violent partners, and of entire citizen-bodies whose representative assemblies have lost power to executives – all these would appear to a neo-Roman theorist to be examples of being made to live like slaves. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
