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‘Freedom is Slavery’: a Slogan for Our New Philosopher Kings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Antony Flew
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Extract

But if you want to be free, you've got to be a prisoner. It's the condition of freedom—true freedom.

‘True freedom!’ Anthony repeated in the parody of a clerical voice. ‘I always love that kind of argument. The contrary of a thing isn't the contrary; oh, dear me, no! It's the thing itself, but as it truly is. Ask any die-hard what conservatism is; he'll tell you it's true socialism. And the brewer's trade papers; they're full of articles about the beauty of true temperance. Ordinary temperance is just gross refusal to drink; but true temperance, true temperance is something much more refined. True temperance is a bottle of claret with each meal and three double whiskies after dinner…

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 15: Of Liberty , March 1983 , pp. 45 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1983

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References

1 It is in the present context worth remarking that when Lenin first developed his proposals for a party of a new type he made no bones about their totally undemocratic character. Instead he argued that this defection from the theoretical ideal was practically essential in a period of illegality. See my ‘Russell's Judgement on Bolshevism’, in Roberts, G. W. (ed.) Bertrand Russell Memorial Volume (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979).Google Scholar

2 Recently I have myself seen both Jane Fonda and J. K. Galbraith described in the Los Angeles Times as liberals. This was in defiance of the fact that Galbraith is a self-confessed socialist, on the record as saying: ‘I am not particular about freedom.’ Miss Fonda's commitment is so hard and, we might add, so callous that she refused to abandon her stated principle of never criticizing socialist countries even in order to join Joan Baez in protesting the holocaust wrought by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. That Galbraithian nugget was one of several extracted by Sir Keith Joseph from an interview given to Die Zeit, and shared by him with readers of the The Times of London in letters published on I April and 4 May 1977. Asked by his interviewer how he could say such things within sight of the Berlin Wall, Galbraith showed that he at least suffered no hesitations in The Age of Uncertainty: ‘I think the wall is a good thing; at least it has maintained the peace’.

3 He quotes Capital on Mill (p. 85)Google Scholar and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Buonaparte on the lumpenproletariat (p. 140)Google Scholar, while the unquoting reference is to Marx maintaining ‘the habits and manners of respectable bourgeois citizens’.

4 Another gross fault is that what Gibbs denounces as ‘heartless laissez faire’ is not a free, competitive and pluralist economy. It is what Marx labelled oriental despotism, making desultory and ineffective efforts to squeeze this uncovenanted discovery into his already supposedly complete schema of inexorable historical progress. Thus the Gibbs specification runs: ‘If a ruler owns all the land and means of production, he need not burden his people with a multitude of laws and taxes. He need not make explicit demands, because his subjects have no choice but to sell him their labour in order to survive’ (p. 24). Had our Radical Philosophers any sincere interest in liberty and liberation as popularly conceived they would surely remark that this is very like the situation under socialism; the difference being that there the despot is not an individual but a collective. Radical Philosophers will not listen to any ‘bourgeois liberal’ critic. But to Trotsky they might: ‘In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle, who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.’ This passage, to which I was directed first by Hayek, F. A., comes in The Revolution Betrayed, translated by Eastman, Max (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1937), 76.Google Scholar

5 See Matson, Wallace, ‘What Rawls Calls Justice’, The Occasional Review No. 8/9 (Autumn 1978) (San Diego: World Research, 1978)Google Scholar; and perhaps compare Chapter III of my The Politics of Procrustes (London: Temple Smith, 1981).Google Scholar

6 Here however Gibbs keeps the best of company. For in the great chapter ‘Of Power’ in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke gives an ostensive definition of what he wrongly describes not as an agent simply but a free agent: ‘Everyone, I think, finds … a Power to begin or forbear, continue or put an end to several Actions in himself… We have instances enough, and often more than enough in our own bodies. A Man's Heart beats, and the Blood circulates, which 'tis not in his Power … to stop; and therefore in respect of these Motions, where rest depends not on his choice … he is not a free Agent. Convulsive Motions agitate his legs, so that though he wills it never so much, he cannot … stop their Motion (as in that odd Disease called Chorea Sancti Viti,)but he is perpetually dancing: He is … under as much Necessity of moving as a Stone that falls or a Tennis-ball struck with a Racket’ (II (xxi) 7 and 11: italics and everything else original).

7 See, for a collection of choice specimens. The Politics of Procrustes, Chapter II, Sections 4–5.

8 In discussion both before, on and after the occasion of the reading of the first two parts of this paper at the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Gibbs protested that I have misrepresented the position of Freedom and Liberation. I can only respond by insisting that further rereadings leave me still equally persuaded that I have not: the other passages to which he would draw attention do not affect the point to which I take such strong exception. I had hoped to make the nature of that point clearer to him by comparing and contrasting: on the one hand, his own exercise of redefining (the highest kind of) freedom, as being made to act only in approved ways; with, on the other hand, the attempt of the Platonic Socrates to assimilate virtues to skills. For, whereas the former are dispositions to act in one sort of way and no other, the latter, as the critics always insist, are powers to act in different and even opposite ways. But Gibbs has reminded me of his contribution to the Symposium ‘Virtue and Reason’ at the 1974 Joint Session, which actually defended, albeit in a much qualified form, precisely that assimilation I see as preposterous (PASS XLVIII, 23–41).Google Scholar

9 Nor can it be said too often, especially in contexts like the present, that in no socialist country are even the most fundamental civil liberties guaranteed and respected; and that in some though not in all the countries called capitalist citizens enjoy a range of liberties which, Gibbs suggests, is without precedent.

10 Two other scholarly corrections, less relevant to my main theme, may be administered in the discreet privacy of a final footnote. First, Kant cannot have forsaken any of the ideas of the Groundwork in the Critique of Pure Reason: these works were first published in, respectively, 1785 and 1781 (p. 52). Second, and much more important, it is false to say ‘that doctrines of predestination … usually say only that God has predetermined human destinies, not that he has predetermined every human choice and deed’ (p. 28, italics original). In fact, as is required by the theist commitment to God as the constant and necessary sustaining cause of everything in the Universe, all the classical theologians seem to be on the record as supporting the stronger doctrine. For a collection of proof texts from Luther, and Calvin, , Aquinas, and Augustine, , see my God and Philosophy (London: Hutchinson, 1966)Google Scholar, Sections 2.34ff. and 5.19; also The Presumption of Atheism (London: Pemberton Elek, 1976), 93ff.Google Scholar