Must-Read: Quentin Skinner: Liberty Before Liberalism and All That

Must-Read: Quentin Skinner: Liberty before Liberalism and All That: “The Digest of Roman Law[‘s]… fundamental distinction drawn at [its] outset…

…is between the liber homo, the free person, and the servus or slave…. A slave is someone who is in potestate, in the power of a master. The contrast is with someone who is sui iuris, able to act in their own right…. Sallust, Livy and Tacitus… answer… that if you are subject to the arbitrary will of anyone else, such that you are dependent on their mere goodwill, then you may be said to be living in servitude, however elevated may be your position in society. So, for example, Tacitus speaks of the servitude of the entire senatorial class under the Emperor Tiberius, so wholly subject were they to his lethal caprice….

Hobbes changes his mind…. Freedom is not absence of dependence; it is simply absence of external impediments to motion…. The only sense we can make of the idea of human liberty is to think of it as the freedom of an object to move. On this account, you are unfree if your movements are impeded by external impediments, but free if you are able to move without being obstructed…. He maintains… that the main reason why people obey the law is that they are more frightened of the consequences of disobedience. But as he now argues, fear does not take away freedom. Freedom, according to Hobbes’s new definition, is taken away only by external and physical impediments to motion. But fear is not an external impediment. On the contrary, fear is a motivating force….

I am very stuck by the extent to which Marx deploys, in his own way, a neo-Roman political vocabulary. He talks about wage slaves, and he talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat. He insists that, if you are free only to sell your labour, then you are not free at all. He stigmatises capitalism as a form of servitude. These are all recognizably neo-Roman moral commitments…. We tend to think of freedom essentially as a predicate of actions. But the earlier tradition took freedom essentially to be the name of a status, that of a free person by contrast with a slave…. For a neo-Roman thinker, many of the situations that in a market society are regarded as free–even as paradigmatically free–would appear as examples of servitude. The predicament of de-unionised labour, of those who live in conditions of economic dependence, of those in particular who live in dependence on violent partners, and of entire citizen-bodies whose representative assemblies have lost power to executives–all these would appear to a neo-Roman theorist to be examples of being made to live like slaves.