FREEDOM AND AUTONOMY

INTRODUCTION

Our collection of extracts on key concepts of democracy starts with the related
ideas of freedom and autonomy. These are the fundamental concepts of democ-
racy: a democratic system is justied because it creates and guarantees human
beings their freedom. But what is the democratic concept of freedom? For
many writers on democracy it has been bound up with an idea of autonomy
or self-determination, being ones own master. As Rousseau puts it in the rst
of these extracts, through the social contract we gain civil liberty and moral
liberty: the former involves being ruled by the general will instead of following
our individual self-interest. The latter means obedience to rules which we, in
association with our fellow citizens, have made. These rules or laws regulate
our actions, instead of the mere impulse of appetite.
This line of reasoning is followed by Kant in the somewhat complex extract
which follows. For Kant, autonomy involves deciding our plan of life for
ourselves. Even a benevolent paternalist government would be the greatest
despotism imaginable, because it would take away our right to decide what
is best for ourselves. Kant also invokes ideas of equality, by which he means
equality of opportunity and equality under the law. No legal transaction, he
argues, can ever make us cease to be our own master. He also appeals to an
ideal of independence, the independence of each member of the common-
wealth as a citizen. However, Kant makes it clear that this is the independence
of male property owners, who alone can be citizens. He sees it as obvious
that citizens have to be adult males, who own some property, even if it is only
property in terms of some skill, capacity or knowledge. Here we can see some
of the limits on the apparent universality of the democratic ideal, as expressed

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 SECTION I FREEDOM AND AUTONOMY 99

in Kants formulation of it. Autonomy is the preserve of a restricted group of

citizens (male, property-owning, socially independent and self-reliant): they
alone are capable of acting autonomously.
The democratic concept of freedom is different from the liberal concept of
freedom. In his classic lecture distinguishing the liberty of the ancients from
that of the moderns, the Swiss liberal thinker Benjamin Constant suggested
that ancient liberty involved direct participation in making the law. This could
not be realised in the modern world, where freedom meant peaceful enjoy-
ment and private independence. To seek to recreate direct participation in
politics in the conditions of modern society risked the crushing of individual
liberty.
A similar distinction between liberal and democratic concepts of freedom
emerges in the thought of the celebrated twentieth-century liberal thinker
Isaiah Berlin. He distinguishes between the two in his lecture on Two
Concepts of Liberty: liberalism involves freedom from freedom from coer-
cion by the state or the tyranny of majority opinion. This is contrasted with
positive freedom, freedom to be ones own master or to be autonomous. This
(says Berlin) can justify some higher power claiming to liberate people by
acting in the way that they would choose if they were not slaves to their lower
natures or immediate desires. This suggests that the concept of autonomy
is highly problematic: can democracy justify coercion (forcing people to be
free) by some body, or group, which subordinates individual desires to some
higher collective interest? Does being ones own master open the way to the
domination of the collective over the individual?
Finally, Robert Paul Wolff endorses ideas of autonomy, which for him
involve the need for moral deliberation, and the idea of people taking respon-
sibility for their own actions. For Wolff, this means that for the autonomous
person there is, as he puts it, no such thing as a command. We might entrust
some decisions in limited spheres to the judgement of experts in that particu-
lar eld. But as democratic citizens we cannot or should not abrogate the
responsibility for taking decisions, and for the deliberative process of arriving
at decisions.
Two problems are raised by these extracts: is the criterion of autonomy and
democratic deliberation too high a standard for citizens to aspire to? And can
the idea of autonomy be perverted or distorted to create a situation in which
individual freedom is suppressed in the name of some higher good, as Berlin
warns?

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