Liberty as Independence and Liberty as Non-Interference

Very short summary: This essay addresses two claims made by the historian of ideas Quentin Skinner regarding republican liberty, according to which to be free is to be non-dominated: first, that this ideal can only be realized within democratic institutions; second, that one must choose between republican freedom and alternative conceptions, such as negative freedom. I agree with the first claim but with some caveats. As for the second, I argue that freedom as non-domination and freedom as non-interference are different values that can enter into conflict but are also complementary. Public reason liberalism provides an illustration of the way these two liberties are intertwined.

A few days ago, I listened to a podcast with the great historian of ideas Quentin Skinner. The conversation centered around Skinner’s last book Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal.[1] Skinner discusses the conditions under which the ideal of liberty as independence, sometimes also called “republican freedom,” emerged, and how this ideal has been progressively superseded by the alternative conception of freedom as non-interference. In this essay, I want to focus on two claims that Skinner makes toward the end of the conversation: first, the ideal of liberty as independence can only be realized within democratic institutions; second, one must choose between liberty as independence and alternative conceptions such as negative or positive freedom.

Before discussing these two claims, it might be useful to quickly recall what differentiates republican and negative freedom. Negative freedom, as famously characterized by Isaiah Berlin in his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” is a “freedom from” type of liberty. To be free in this sense means not to be interfered with in the pursuit of one’s goals. It’s negative in the sense that it is not assessed in terms of an individual’s ability to do something or even to have a large range of choices open to them but rather in terms of the condition that no effective interference from other individuals restricts one’s choices and actions. Rather than non-interference, republican freedom emphasizes the importance of non-domination. Domination is exemplified by the relationship of master to slave or servant. Philippe Pettit, one of the most prominent contemporary proponents of the republican conception of freedom, writes:[2]

“Such a relationship means, at the limit, that the dominating party can interfere on an arbitrary basis with the choices of the dominated: can interfere, in

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