Abstract
Charting the history of freedom as a political concept is an audacious undertaking—and that is only one of many tasks that Eric MacGilvray sets up for himself in The Invention of Market Freedom. MacGilvray, an assistant professor of political science at Ohio State University, argues persuasively that over the last two centuries liberals have wrested away the concept of freedom from republicans, ostensibly draining it of moral and political content. In modern society, freedom has been reduced to market freedom—the creation of an apolitical zone in which individuals can exercise consumer choice. Such a definition strips away many of the political dimensions of freedom that existed in earlier republican thought. MacGilvray concludes that the republican concept of freedom should be resuscitated in order to permit a wider political debate. To support this argument, MacGilvray orchestrates a wide-ranging and engaging tour of political thought, beginning with the Greco-Roman origins of republican thought, and ending with Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. The effect is truly dazzling, but still not entirely persuasive.
To lay out the conceptual terrain, MacGilvray traces the meaning of freedom from its origins in classical republicanism. It emerged in slaveholding societies that were profoundly unequal in the distribution of political rights. For MacGilvray, these origins in inequality help to explain republicanism’s concerns with political caprice; different classes provided implicit checks on each other. At its core, the republican concept of freedom lies “where the practice of virtue is associated with the control of arbitrary power” (p. 42). MacGilvray readily acknowledges that the republican tradition is hardly uniform on just how arbitrary power should be constrained. Nevertheless, three conditions must be preserved for republican freedom to exist: there must be “a shared conception of the common good,” “instrumental mechanisms in place that prevent any individual or faction from acquiring arbitrary power so defined,” and “transparency in the conduct of public affairs” such that citizens can hold their leaders accountable (p. 50).
According to MacGilvray, modern liberalism—he uses the term “juristic” more often than not—has its origins in the natural law response to the bloody wars of the Protestant Reformation. On the one hand, Hobbes and other liberals argued that liberty was a fundamentally egalitarian concept; natural rights are bestowed upon all men. On the other hand, the juristic model put forward arguments for why man should surrender those natural rights to live in society: “the most striking political consequence of the emergence of subjective-right theories was not to advance what is now thought of as the contractarian case for limited government, but rather to provide a new and powerfully secular defense of the legitimacy of absolute rule” (p. 66). In contrast to republicans, MacGilvray argues, liberals such as Hobbes could logically advocate for absolutism in the defense of liberty. To underscore this point, MacGilvray allows that Locke weaved together republican and liberal thought—but he concludes that the former is a much weaker reed in Second Treatise of Government. Locke’s right to revolution is “rather timid” (p. 77) and his endorsement of a separation of powers is made “only in passing” (p. 80).
By the late eighteenth century, the rise of commerce introduced a new topic into republican debates. MacGilvray argues that modern republicanism embraced market freedom for two reasons. First, commerce was replacing war as the way for nations to interact. Second, commerce was seen as complementary to the health of the republic: “the pursuit of commerce is essential to the security and independence, and thus to the freedom, of the polity itself” (p. 89). Adam Smith and other advocates of commercial liberalism relied on the republican concern for arbitrary power to argue that the market should be the primary mechanism for determining value. “By shifting decision-making power from the political to the economic realm, they concluded, we are trading a process that is highly fallible and subject to abuse for one that is reliably beneficial” (p. 111). In so doing, MacGilvray concludes that modern republicans sacrificed the intrinsic value of virtue in politics for a more instrumental process of generating virtuous behavior.
The end result of these debates was not a competition between republican and liberal conceptions of freedom, but rather that “key elements of both traditions were brought together for the first time into a single political vision” (p. 119). Republicans promoted market freedom for the utilitarian reason of societal benefit. “Jurists” defended market freedom as a matter of justice. Over time, this fusing of the two approaches collapsed into the liberal defense of market freedom, as republican thought began to atrophy in the nineteenth century. The growth of mass democracies delegitimized republican arguments at exactly the moment when these arguments could have tackled the issues raised by the second industrial revolution. Modern capitalism generates impersonal and invisible constraints on individual wage laborers—precisely the opposite of the desires of classical republicans to make the exercise of power transparent. Discussions of virtue simply disappeared from modern liberal debates.
MacGilvray’s contribution to the ongoing revival of republicanism in political theory is exceptionally clear and cogent. Through his arguments, theorists like John Stuart Mill are comfortably situated within the republican tradition, as opposed to being paragons of classical liberal thought. Therein lies part of the problem. MacGilvray’s definition of republican thought is expansive, to say the least—it incorporates everyone from Machiavelli to Marx. MacGilvray acknowledges casting a wide net, noting that “there is a difference between being a republican and holding a republican view about the meaning of freedom” (p. 16). In his interpretation, the positive attributes of Locke and Smith’s advocacy for a commercial society also flow from their republicanism. The problem is that MacGilvray’s definition of the liberal concept of freedom is not nearly as generous. He acknowledges that liberal and republican concepts of freedom overlap, but he essentially cedes all the areas of overlap to the republican side of the Venn diagram. It is little wonder that in this book, republicanism is a hearty stew contrasted to the thin, apolitical gruel of liberalism.
McGilvray’s “rump liberalism” overlooks two significant aspects of the intellectual history of market freedom that are elided in The Invention of Market Freedom. The first is the extent to which liberals came to their embrace of market freedom because of concerns about the agglomeration of economic power as well as political power. Political theorists such as Hobbes, Jefferson, and especially Adam Smith were concerned about the possibility of excessive commercial power. Smith embraced capitalism but was profoundly suspicious of capitalists, famously observing that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” This leads to the other problem: in recounting the origins of market freedom, MacGilvray gives short shrift to the presence of mercantilism as the status quo economic doctrine that liberals like Smith vehemently opposed. This might be because a healthy fraction of republicans—most notably Alexander Hamilton—were perfectly comfortable with using the state to empower domestic industry. Smith, in contrast, viewed it as a doctrine that advantaged the rich at the expense of the poor.
MacGilvray’s purpose in this book is explicit: “to challenge the hegemony of this market-centered conception of freedom . . . by learning to see it as something that was invented at a particular time and place, in response to specific practical demands and in order to serve specific ideological purposes” (p. 182). The Invention of Market Freedom successfully problematizes the concept of market freedom. Whether it necessarily leads to a scholarly embrace of MacGilvray’s own ideological purposes, however, is another question altogether.