"Not to follow your own course of reasoning is an act of disobedience against God."
&emdash; St. Thomas Aquinas
Addressing the question how to live free in an unfree world, I want to start with my own political biography.
My political convictions are shaped in the post-60's. The heros of my youth are the rebels against the conformist and authoritarian society. And sure, they still are. What attracted me most were the anarchist, or libertarian, tendencies of the youth rebellion. The characteristics of this tendencies which inspired me is best expressed in two slogans. The first slogan reads: "Be radical. No compromise with the powers that be." The other slogan reads: "Be practical. Start with building the free society right now."
Of course, even in the times of greatest enthusiasm, we knew that these two solgans to some extend contradicted each other. Starting to build the new order included compromise with the surrounding society of the old order. But after a while we realized the harsh truth that we had to decide ourselves between being radical or being practical. The reason was that sooner or later all practical projects with radical background failed. The projects either had to be given up or to compromise more than originally had be planned. Most radicals concluded from this experience either to resign or to let themselves co-opted by the system.
In the first part of my lecture I will show with two examples how the libertarian theory can explain the failures of the youth rebellion without drifting into resignation. But we ought to give up some illusions. The first example is the free school movement, which tried to establish schools apart from the influence of the state. The second example is the free life movement, which aimed at conducting a more happy daily life. In the second part of my lecture I will go on discussing the libertarian conception of freedom.
The idea behind the free schhool movement in the 60's was very convincing: By its power over education the state controls the lives of the young people and forms them to become subjugated grown-ups. The thesis was: Authoritarian education produces an authoritarian character. Great educators always have doubted the wisdom of state directed educational institutions, for instance the German classical liberal Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Russian anarchist writer Leo Tolstoj, the American progressivist John Dewey, and the Scottish psychologist A.S. Neill, to name but a few. Why not put the theories of those thinkers into practise and take the education of our children into our own hands? This was the starting thought of the free school movement, that is: founding schools outside the established state school system.
Because American citizens historically are endowed with some self-esteem, the free school movement, although present in nearly all western countries, had the most followers in the US. In its first years, the movment seemed to be a great, unexpected success. Thousands of free schools were formed all over North America. The activists dreamed of rolling back authoritarian state edcuation totally. But soon they were startled by three severe problems.
Education, even self-financed private education, is regualted by the state. Because of the compulsory schooling laws you have to get an admission to run an educational institution, otherwise the pupils you take will be considered as truants. Getting the admission means, of course, to accept whatever government bureaucrats think is essential to education. The free schools had give in or give up.
Most careers are linked to the diplomas you get in school. Definitely all government jobs and state regulated vocations require official diplomas. That is, if you run a free school without the government license to award diplomas, the career chances of the pupils you educated are very small, notwithstanding the question of how much has been learned. Of course, not many parents and pupils were prepared to accept such a condition. Consequently, this condition strictly limited the further growth of the free school movement.
The free schools had to charge tuition. But the competition, the government schools, were financed by tax money and charged nothing. That is, however efficient the non-bureaucratic free schools were run, they were more expensive than the state schools. I want to stress that this does not touch the question of whether or not people are able to pay for the education of their children. Of course they are. They are paying for the education anyway. But this tuition is hidden in your tax bill. That is, if you choose a free school, you pay double tuition: the first one is embodied in your tax and the second one goes to the school of your choice. Naturally, not many people are able, or willing, to pay double tuition.
In effect, the three problems of: educational regulations, credential society, and competition against zero price forced every free school activist to decide
n either to give up the idea of independence and to submit under the educational regulations, to accept government defined diplomas, and to apply for tax money,
n or to give up the idea to put radical educational thinking into practise and instead to campaign to change the rules.
There was not a third way. Sadly enough, most activists decided to give in and compromise with the conditions set fourth by government. There may be many different reasons for this decision, but one of the main reasons to me seems to be that most activists did not understand the origins of their failures. Most understood the influence of the educational regulations, some understood the influence of the credential society, but only a few realized the influence of competition against zero price.
However, even if you understand all three problems properly, you cannot change them for yourself by your own personal decisions, but only by changing the system. Thus, you cannot find free education in a country with state education.
Next to free education, the other great experiment of th 60's was the cultural revolution to remove narrow-minded conformity from the backs of our lives. The principle of this revolution was extremely individualistic: Do Your Thing, they said in the 60's, be happy and you will find the strengh to resist to co-operate in war and other criminal activities of the governments.
The individualist revolution had a lasting effect on society. Before I explain the failures of this revolution, I want to express my greatefulness to the activists of the 60's that they succeeded in breaking down many squeamish conventions. In those countries with a strong youth rebellion today you can wear your hair long or short, wear clothes as colourful as you want to, sleep with whom you want to, belive in whatever you want to, decide against your family and so on. There are tendencies to reduce these freedoms, but I hope we will be able to prevent a total relaps into authoritarianism.
Nevertheless, the free live movement failed to bring about a distinct increase in happiness. Happiness is a private quality, and many libertarians seem to dispute any indication of an influence of society on the personal well-being because they tend to regard such an indication as collectivist ideology. Therefore, I want to begin my discussion with an economic theory well-reputated among libertarians.
We all will agree, I think, that economic success of an entrepreneur is as well as happiness in general a private quality. Economic success is based on your personal decisions. So is economic failure. But libertarian economic theory established the insight that there may be government interventions which cause entrepreneurs to decide wrongly. Says Murray Rothbard in his book on America's Great Depression, one single business failure is due to personal incompetence, but a cluster of failures as in a depression must be explained structurally by economic factors. Otherwise one had to accept the conclusion that the free market of individual responsibilities leads to economic crisis.
I reformulate this special thesis to apply to the whole life, thus founding a libertarian sociology in the tradition of Paul Goodman: A single failure to reach personal aims is due to individual deficits, but a cluster of failures must be attributed to the influence of social factors. Otherwise you had to assume that people are not ready to take care for themselves.
But how can society actually influence the personal well-being? Take for instance sexuality, which for most people is essential to the concept of a happy life. One of the psychological pre-conditions of a happy sexual contact I think we all can agree upon is the ability to act out.
Look, then, at the life we live. A child is born into a world which is not shaped by the wishes of its parents and neighbors. The streets are decided on by political bodies. The buildings are results of the housing policies. The parents have long working hours because much of their income is taxed away and wasted by government. Then there are government schools which are to educate the child, leaving not many choices to either the parents or the child. And so on. Thus, the child grows up with no chance to act on one's own decisions and to see people around to decide on their own. After that, the grown-up person is expected by the conventional theory to act out freely for the few hours of sexual contact, whereat such freedom should be strictly limited to those hours (according to the concentional theory). This expectation is too strange to be taken seriously. It is mere make-believe.
This example shows that you cannot, as the young rebels of the 60's thought, decide to simply ignore the conventions and go on to live a happy, sexually satisfying life. The conventions are expressions of the real structures of society. And if you ignore them and do not change the structures, they will come back one way or other.
As in the case of the free school movement not many radicals understood the reasons behind the failures of the free life movement. Most just came to the conclusion that the conventional life is adequat to the nature of man and forgot about changing lifestyles. But my conclusion, or the libertarian conclusion, is that you cannot find happiness in an unhappy world. Our task is, then, to fight for a free and happy world so that we ourselves can be free and happy.
What, then, do I mean by the term "freedom?" I will discuss three common conceptions of freedom and relate them to the examples just presented. The conceptions are: inner freedom, negative freedom ("freedom fromŠ"), and positive freedom ("freedom toŠ").
"Inner freedom" is a religious conception. The term expresses the belief that human beings have the power and the obligation to decide. Human beings decide what to do, what to think, how to react, regardless of the circumstances or outside pressures. They decide to cry with the wolves or to follow their own ways, decide to behave like cowards or like heros, decide to be evil or good. The inner freedom cannot be taken away by any means unless you distort someone's mind, as all tyrants of the world must learn.
This does not mean, however, that circumstances or outside pressures do not have influence on someone's decisions. It just means that whatever the circumstances, you select a single action among the alternatives you realize.
Inner freedom is the pre-condition of every other freedom you can think of. Take, for instance, the example of schooling discussed earlier. The inner freedom to be able to decide that an education quite different from the normal one would fit better, is the pre-condition of the statement that compulsory state education is coercive. By the way, without the assumption of inner freedom you could not even speak of "compulsion."
Inner freedom is necessary but not enough to define freedom. You cannot, as Martin Luther had done, use the conception of inner freedom to defend the obligation to submit to the powers that be. Luther said: Because the inner freedom to believe or think whatever you want to is undestroyable, therefore it is of no importance whether or not you can act according to your convictions. But this is an error in logic. The very meaning of inner freedom is to decide on a certain action. Luckily, inner freedom cannot be taken away, but the action of course can be surpressed. True, under all circumstances you can decide to believe, for instance, in the religion of protestantism. But you definitely can be hindered to exercise the cult.
Removing the hinderances to act in accordance with your decisions is called "negative freedom:" You are not hindered to exercise your cult. You are not hindered to say or publish what you believe in. You are not hindered to associate with like-minded to support whatever cause. You are not hindered to produce, sell, buy, and consume goods you like; and so on.
This negative freedoms in anglo-saxion languages are also named "liberty," a term with no equivalent in German. Liberty is the term "libertarianism" is derived from. Thus it is clear that libertarians are mainly concerned about negative freedom. Libertarians want to defend negative freedoms which exist and to extend the areas of negative freedoms. Example giving, libertarians want to remove the hinderences to decide on your and your children's education.
If "inner freedom" is, as I have said, the pre-condition of freedom, "negative freedom" best is understood as "the social structure of freedom." The term "negative freedom" means that society does not hinder you to put your decisions into action.
But is it enough to just remove the hinderances? What if you lack the money to publish what you belive in? If you lack the brains to decide what the right education for your children is? You not only need to be free from hinderances (negative freedom), but also to be positively free to act. Libertarians tend to distrust the conception of positive freedom. They fear that their pure theory of liberty is watered down by introducing the idea of positive freedom. Admittedly collectivists use the term "positive freedom" to advocate coercive measurements, for example, compulsory education or redistribution. They think, coercive measurements are necessary to enable people to use their freedoms. But this thought does not follow from the conception of positive freedom which we definitely need to fully define what freedom really is. Let me explain, why:
As a model you can think of a society which removes for instance the educational monopoly but nothing changes. No educator decides to offer a different kind of curriculum, no teacher decides to offer a different method of learning, no parent decides to look for an alternative. In such a society not only no one will care about any liberties, but liberties also would be totally irrelevant.
Thus, we must say that positive freedom, that is making use of the negative freedoms that there are, is what we aim at. Put it another way: Because we believe in inner freedom, we are sure that people want to decide. As soon as you remove the hindarences, as soon as you grant negative freedoms or liberties, people will come to decide on their own. And the decisions they will make for themselves will fit better than those coerced on them.
But of course, libertarians think that positive freedom could not be enforced by any authoritarian means. Logic precludes the conception of coercing people to make positive uses of their negative freedoms.
With apologies to the followers of Any Rand, I want to begin the finishing remark of my lecture with a quotation of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. "After setting free people," Kant said, "they of course will start by making the wrong decisions. But there is no way to learn how to use freedom then by granting freedom."
Putting together the first part and the second part of my lecture, my message is: We need to try to act free in the unfree world. Only by doing so, we lay claim to freedom and we begin to learn to use freedom. But we will not find freedom unless we succeed in building a free world.