Public Freedom - Softcover

Villa, Dana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691135940 ISBN 13: 9780691135946

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2008

Synopsis

The freedom to take part in civic life--whether in the exercise of one's right to vote or congregate and protest--has become increasingly less important to Americans than individual rights and liberties. In Public Freedom, renowned political theorist Dana Villa argues that political freedom is essential to both the preservation of constitutional government and the very substance of American democracy itself.


Through intense close readings of theorists such as Hegel, Tocqueville, Mill, Adorno, Arendt, and Foucault, Villa diagnoses the key causes of our democratic discontent and offers solutions to preserve at least some of our democratic hopes. He demonstrates how Americans' preoccupation with a market-based conception of freedom--that is, the personal freedom to choose among different material, moral, and vocational goods--has led to the gradual erosion of meaningful public participation in politics as well as diminished interest in the health of the public realm itself. Villa critically examines, among other topics, the promise and limits of civil society and associational life as sources of democratic renewal; the effects of mass media on the public arena; and the problematic but still necessary ideas of civic competence and democratic maturity.



Public Freedom is a passionate and insightful defense of political liberties at a moment in America's history when such freedoms are very much at risk.

About this title

About the Author

Dana Villa is the Packey J. Dee Professor of Political Theory at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Socratic Citizenship; Politics, Philosophy, Terror; and Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (all Princeton).

From the Back Cover

"Public Freedom breaks new ground. Villa's stance is distinctive and compelling. He writes with confidence and authority. The book is full of subtle, important, and in some cases controversial readings of major thinkers and represents a significant move forward in Villa's own thinking, placing him into conversation with some unexpected intellectual traditions, and also disclosing some revisions to his own earlier positions. Public Freedom is an impressive and successful piece of work."--Patchen Markell, University of Chicago

"A significant contribution to the field of political theory. Public Freedom is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking inquiry into the problem of civic life as viewed by a group of important nineteenth- and twentieth-century political theorists. With its reconsideration of the relationship between public freedom and civil society, the book has done something new and it should gain a good deal of attention."--James Schmidt, Boston University

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PUBLIC FREEDOM

By Dana Villa

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13594-6

Contents

Acknowledgments...........................................................................................ix1 Introduction: Public Freedom Today......................................................................12 Tocqueville and Civil Society...........................................................................273 Hegel, Tocqueville, and "Individualism".................................................................494 Tocqueville and Arendt: Public Freedom, Plurality, and the Preconditions of Liberty.....................855 Maturity, Paternalism, and Democratic Education in J. S. Mill...........................................1086 The Frankfurt School and the Public Sphere..............................................................1437 Genealogies of Total Domination: Arendt, Adorno, and Auschwitz..........................................2108 Foucault and the Dystopian Public.......................................................................2559 Arendt and Heidegger, Again.............................................................................30210 The "Autonomy of the Political" Reconsidered...........................................................338Notes.....................................................................................................355Index.....................................................................................................421

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: PUBLIC FREEDOM TODAY

The Liberty of a Subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which in regulating their actions, the Soveraign hath praetermitted: such as is the Liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own aboad, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves think fit; & the like.... There is written on the Turrets of the city of Luca in great characters at this day, the word LIBERTAS; yet no man can thence inferre, that a particular man has more Liberties, or Immunitie from the service of the Commonwealth there than in Constantinople. Whether a Commonwealth be Monarchicall, or Popular, the Freedome is still the same. —Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 21 To the state as an essentially political entity belongs the jus belli, i.e., the real possibility of deciding in a concrete situation upon the enemy and the ability to fight him with the power emanating from the entity.... The state as the decisive political entity possesses an enormous power: the possibility of waging war and thereby publicly disposing of the lives of men. —Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. —Carl Schmitt, Political Theology I have heard the voices, I read the front page. But I'm the decider. —President George W. Bush, April 18, 2006

Americans, we are repeatedly told, cherish freedom more than almost any other value or good. Yet the freedom we cherish is peculiarly one-sided. It is, first and foremost, a freedom of choice: the individual's freedom to decide on a career path, choose a religion, a life partner, a place of residence, a lifestyle, how to raise and educate their children. While it is tempting to view this identification of freedom with individual choice as a more or less direct outgrowth of consumer culture, it is important to remember that its fundamental presupposition is not the market. Rather, it is the absence of an authoritarian or tutorial state that tells us how to live and what to believe. As liberal political theorists have long insisted, freedom as choice depends upon freedom from interference—by the state or by any other powerful social body.

This "negative" form of freedom—the freedom from something—is often contrasted with more positive (and potentially authoritarian) forms. Americans, in large part, instinctively reject the latter. Whatever freedom is, Americans believe, it cannot be the "freedom" that supposedly results when we are coerced to conform to someone else's idea of civic, moral, or religious virtue. Realizing one's best self—pursuing one's own good in one's own way, as J. S. Mill famously put it—may be a laudable private goal. However, the Rousseauian notion that we can somehow be "forced to be free" by public authority—that is, forced to rise above our individual desires and interests, so that we might better recognize and support the "common good"—elicits an instinctive abhorrence.

Rousseau, of course, is one of the two great political theorists of the civic republican tradition (the other is Machiavelli). This tradition has been competing with liberalism for over 200 years, although as a tradition it is much older. Whereas the liberal tradition has emphasized constitutional limits on governmental power and the priority of individual rights, the civic republican tradition has focused far more on active citizenship and the preconditions of public liberty. As readers of Machiavelli's Discourses and Rousseau's Social Contract are well aware, the theoretical results of this focus are not always pretty. Whether it's Machiavelli's insistence on military discipline and civil religion as the two most important "schools" of citizenship, or Rousseau's anti-cosmopolitan image of upright peasants deciding their common affairs under an oak tree, the civic republican tradition has often displayed a deep-seated resistance to pluralism and anything resembling open-ended argument. It has valued unanimity over difference, and a quasi–a priori idea of the public good over the more ad hoc kind that emerges through robust debate and argument.

Appeals to civic virtue, patriotism, and the Roman Republic have never gone completely out of style in Western political thought, and they have been more influential on American political development than many of us would care to admit. The contemporary American cult of the military as the one remaining locus of authentic civic virtue is but a single example. However that may be, most Americans would heartily endorse the criticism Benjamin Constant made of Rousseau and the civic republican tradition generally in his 1819 lecture "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns." Drawing a contrast between the "freedom as collective sovereignty" idea found in ancient republics with the type of freedom offered by modern representative governments, Constant poses his audience a rhetorical question: "Ask yourselves, Gentlemen, what an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a citizen of the United States of America understand today by the word `liberty.'" His answer continues to resonate:

For each of them it is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives and undertakings. It is everyone's right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they and their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is most compatible with their inclinations and whims. Finally, it is everyone's right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government, either by electing all or particular officials, or through representations, petitions, demands to which the authorities are more or less compelled to pay heed.

The liberty of the ancients, on the other hand, "consists in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws and pronouncing judgments; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in accusing, condemning or absolving them." Such "collective" freedom—which Rousseau-inspired Jacobins futilely tried to resurrect during the French Revolution—was, as Constant points out, entirely compatible with "the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community," a subjection no modern individual would find bearable. The "liberty of the moderns," then, is irreducibly and for the most part individual freedom. If the achievement and preservation of this liberty came at the price of older, possibly more "edifying" notions of public freedom, so be it. As Constant implies, it is a price we moderns simply have to pay.

Constant's manner of posing the alternatives apparently pays tribute to what has become our contemporary "common sense." We know better than to yearn after direct democracy and collective sovereignty; we realize that such a system is impractical in large nation-states; and we flatter ourselves that we have exchanged the "bellicose spirit" of the ancient republics for the far more benign "spirit of commerce." In short, we know (albeit intuitively and often inarticulately) that "we can no longer enjoy the liberty of the ancients," and that (as a result) "our freedom must consist of peaceful enjoyment and private independence." Public freedom, Constant seems to be telling us, is a thing of the past. Any attempt to revive it would result in a miserable abortion. Most Americans—even those utterly unfamiliar with the history, ideological origins, and political excesses of the French Revolution—would probably agree. An individual and essentially privatized liberty is "the true modern liberty."

Yet this self-flattering conclusion is grossly premature. Even Constant, his praise of the spirit of commerce and the romantic idea of self-development notwithstanding, did not carry through on the exhaustive either/or his lecture seems to construct. Unlike ourselves, the choice for Constant is not between political or public freedom (on the one hand) and individual freedom (on the other). The latter may, in fact, be the "true modern liberty," but the former "is its guarantee." While commerce may have made people more alike and wars less likely, the fact remains that even representative governments have a tendency to enlarge their powers, with or without the excuse of war. As a result, Constant warned, "the danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily." For this very reason, "political liberty"—public freedom—"is indispensable."

This warning—echoed by Alexis de Tocqueville and J. S. Mill in the nineteenth century, and by Hannah Arendt in the twentieth—has largely fallen on deaf ears in America, and never with more disastrous results than in the present. What Constant, Tocqueville, and Mill saw as essential components of modern liberty—namely, the protection of individual rights and the recognition of individual interests—has become, in twenty-first century America, a defining creed and epistemological limit. The dyad of rights and interests effectively circumscribes our moral, political, and social world, as well as our conception of what freedom is or can be. The fact that group rights loom larger these days (thanks to the so-called "politics of recognition") does little to alter the basic equation. "Rights" supposedly hold overweening governmental (or corporate) power in check, while "interests" propel our associations or affinity groups to enter the public realm episodically, if at all.

Our attitude toward what Constant called political liberty is, as a result, almost entirely instrumental. Occasionally such liberty is invoked in the struggle to gain or redeem certain basic rights, such as citizenship, the right to vote, the right to strike, the right to a decent education, and so on. More often than not, however, it is exploited to further the agenda of a particular interest group and its members. "The public" is less an arena for the exercise of a distinctive (nonprivate) form of freedom than it is an all-purpose container or scrim for the endless lobbying, bogus "citizen initiatives," and staged political events that presently define our political lives.

The most striking feature of the contemporary public realm is how uniformly the attitudes of manipulation and opportunism characterize all who enter it. From the moralizing evangelical to the politically correct academic; from industry lobbying groups to those protesting "illegal aliens"; from unions to corporate boards—virtually everyone treats "the public" as a stage that can be briefly seized in order to get their particular "message" (and interest) across. This effort—what passes today for the exercise of "political liberty"—is the result of a strictly strategic calculation, one predicated on the media-dominated nature of our public sphere and the resulting tyranny of public relations and advertising. In the past, Constant observed, war was the primary means of "getting what one wants." In modern times, commerce took its place, but the goal was the same. To this basic "world-historical" schema we might well add: and where commerce fails, "politics" as public relations provides the most obvious avenue for "getting what one wants."

This is not to say that interests have no place in the public realm, or in motivating our exercise of political freedom. Ever since Hegel and Tocqueville attempted to renovate the civic republican tradition, the legitimacy of interests (properly mediated) has been seen by political theorists as an absolutely essential component of modern politics. Rather, my point is that the pursuit of interest (understood in its most vulgar and unmediated form) has become so ingrained in our political culture and character that it has made other, more authentically political attitudes and practices all but impossible. By universally taking up an exploitative, instrumental, and fundamentally strategic approach to politics and political action, we have rendered the public sphere an unfit place for human habitation.

The result is that many of us who still feel the tug of civic obligation (to use an old-fashioned term) participate at arm's length. We write checks to well-meaning NGOs and political action groups, the better to combat the disproportionate influence of multinational corporations and other "sinister interests" on the political and legislative process. There is an obvious irony here, one that is compounded when we take to the streets in protest over some new outrage. Our government views such public demonstrations—and there were many, both here and abroad, in the run-up to the Iraq War—as little more than "letting off steam." Where political action actually transcends the opening of a checkbook—where it is relatively popular, spontaneous, and civic-minded in character—it is treated by our leaders as little more than white noise, irrelevant to the political "process." The resulting impression is that of enormous, interlocking corporate and governmental structures far removed from the "noise" emanating from an emaciated and impoverished public sphere.

This configuration doesn't exactly mirror the nightmare of "administrative despotism" that Tocqueville outlined in the second volume of Democracy in America, but there are eerie resemblances nonetheless. Tocqueville worried about how the advent of democratic equality would destroy "intermediary powers," leaving equal but impotent individuals to confront an enormous, albeit attentive, bureaucratic state. Without organization, Tocqueville thought, such a "confused mass" would be unable to "raise new secondary powers." As a result, it would soon find itself relegated to the status of a well-tended herd.

Such an over-centralized sovereign power—one that usurps the educational, economic, and welfare functions of civil society—has not exactly been our fate. Libertarians to the contrary, market forces play far too large a role in our daily lives for our government to convincingly fill the role of the omni-competent Leviathan Tocqueville sketches. The contemporary reader is, however, struck by Tocqueville's descriptions of popular impotence and docility. It is these passages—rather than his description of a single, towering, and omnipotent central power—that resonate in the present. For what Tocqueville saw with unparalleled clarity was the way in which a people unused to the exercise of public freedom would soon forget both its practice and its value. Given broad social equality by recent revolutions, divorced from the corporate or caste affiliations of the feudal past, relieved of the exercise of traditional local freedoms—in such a condition, the dissociated "democratic individual" would invariably turn in upon himself, his family, his friends, and his material interests. He would value public order more than public freedom, and would view the latter's demands as a set of irritating obstacles to the untrammeled pursuit of his self-interest.

There is, then, a "bourgeois" and not merely a socialist "road to servitude," a fact that Tocqueville, if not his twentieth-century disciples, knew all too well. The distinguishing characteristic of the former is that it prefers tranquility, order, and the accumulation of wealth to a "dangerous freedom." It is one of the ironies of Tocqueville's legacy that the peculiar danger he saw American democracy as successfully eluding—thanks to a pervasive public spirit, an intense attention to political matters and local administration, and a habit of association for all sorts of purposes—has returned to haunt us with a vengeance. What was once a pathology peculiar to the haute bourgeois class in Europe has become a universal affliction. The "taste for physical gratification" that Tocqueville saw reflected in but contained by American middle-class mores has become an obsessive pursuit for nearly everyone. In our hyped-up consumer culture, the public realm and the responsibilities of citizenship are, for the most part, well and truly neglected. Our sense of political powerlessness grows as our creature comforts accumulate.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691135940
• ISBN 13: 9780691135946
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 456