Abstract
Hamilton is a republican, albeit a deeply uncommon one, who holds that the fundamental and complex interconnectedness of modern society means that freedom requires the exercise of power in individual and group and national domains. This demanding conception of freedom is rooted in a Marxian conception of freedom as the capacity to bring about a choice, as well as to make that choice at all. Thus, Hamilton defines freedom as the “combination of my ability to determine what I will do and my power to do it—that is, bring it about” (10). It is this definition that located in a theory of contemporary social and political life, yields the Hegelian style synthesis of “freedom as power” across four domains.
Hence freedom as power requires (a) the power to overcome existing obstacles in my life, (b) the power to determine who governs, (c) the power to resist the disciplining power of the community, and (d) the power to determine social and economic environment via control over representatives (95). Critically, Hamilton notes that these domains are not definitional, so much as a list of the ways in which freedom depends on power, and further that, for the individual, there is more to freedom than dependence of power in these ways as there is always a personal and subjective component to freedom. For society more widely, and specifically for groups, Hamilton believes that his account offers “objective” and “necessary” conditions for freedom. They are objective because they are shared by all in a society, and necessary because all in that society need them too (96).
Hamilton’s account means that securing freedom is demanding as it requires constant work by both individuals and groups on many fronts. In addition, it is difficult work, as Hamilton follows Machiavelli in imagining politics in agonistic terms of group (and usually class) struggle (38–49). Hence, he conceives of democracy as about institutionalised conflict between contending groups, and stands in significant contrast to familiar republican accounts of democracy as about constructing the “common good” and or “the people.” Freedom may require that citizens are empowered to participate in decision making in a free state, but there is no “people” undifferentiated by needs and interests. Rather, groups fights for themselves in the political process, and cannot be assumed to orientate towards the common good. Debate is necessary and important to better accommodate competing views, but deliberation orientated towards consensus is just unrealistic. Finally, but critically, everything is political, especially economics, and whatever is contracted out of the decision-making process is lost to the project of freedom (173–91). A free society is one in which politics trumps economics.
Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly, Hamilton identifies representation rather than direct participation as the primary form of political engagement to be institutionalised under modern conditions (113–53). This is not just a pragmatic recognition of the scale and complexity of modern life, but also a normative affirmation of the important role of judgement in the political process, and the central responsibility of representatives both to better account to their groups, but also to make choices informed by consideration of all views, needs, and interests at play in a debate. Freedom requires power, power requires recognition of the multiple dimensions of the social order that confronts us, and the contending groups that constitute the social order require representatives to advocate for the needs and interest in institutions that adjudicate laws, policies, and decisions.
To give more accurate institutional expression to “freedom is power,” Hamilton advocates for new institutions, giving by way of provocation, a list of four possible such innovations including (a) district assemblies at the sub-national level to surface local needs and interests; (b) a revitalised consiliar system, where representatives from each district are selected, preferably by lottery, to advocate for local needs and interests to the national; (c) an updated tribune of the plebs, which is an independent and partisan legislative house for the poor, equal to the main house; and (d) a decennial plebiscite following a month-long public holiday for citizens to decide on revising any aspect of the constitutional order, in which any citizen can propose changes, and through which vital needs (food, shelter, clothing, rest, exercise, etc.) of all are satisfied before other needs and interests (202–5). These institutional reforms are designed to surface social conflict rather than repress it, and to enable major social groups the opportunity to create an environment in which all have more power, and therefore more freedom.
Like Condorcet, in Freedom Is Power Hamilton looks to marry the modern desire for individual choice with the ancient understanding of freedom as collective participation in deciding the laws that govern us, but also informed by a recognition that the world is both becoming more diverse, stratified, conflicted, and yet interdependent at the same time.
A rich and wide-ranging argument there is much to engage, including Hamilton’s claim that the traditional contrast between negative versus positive liberty, is more accurately framed as one between private and public; his critique of the private conception of liberty (a la John Stuart Mill) as naïve about power given that the obstacles that the individual must overcome are invariably socially formed, even if they are not directly politically constructed; his view that most republican notions of politics are naively communitarian, and rather that, following Machiavelli, we ought to “the people” as always divided into contending groups with different needs, interests, and identities; his relational account of power, derived from Foucault, that includes (but is not limited to) conceptions of domination where individuals or groups cannot even identify or express their needs and interests; and his critique of Philip Pettit’s constitutional republicanism as affirming the common good at the expense of the particular, with the likely consequence of privileging powerful social groups over the majority.
To my mind, however, four issues stand out as especially significant. First, framed as a practical theory of freedom based on appeals to realism rather than universal principles, and introduced in respect of the South African context, Freedom Is Power has wider relevance than is initially evident, or for that matter, even claimed by Hamilton himself. This is because his theory moves from assumptions about the demos and politics that resonate across the global south, and increasingly in the more developed north with the rise of multiculturalism through migration, and the politics of war refugees and terrorism. Assuming an ethnically and religiously diverse population who are increasingly socio-economically differentiated and yet economically interdependent, and whose needs and interests are beyond easy reconciliation into some version of the common good resonates profoundly. Second, his work resonates with the empirical reality of a deep desire for the state, and for political rule over economic, for the vast majority of people in the global south. It also suggests, against pejorative associations of this desire for the state with clientelism, patronage, and corruption that what is really at stake is freedom.
Further, it is not just that starting with the reality of difference and conflict in the design of political institutions, even those committed to values like freedom, seems more sensible than the aspirational end point of an ideal speech situation for instance. It is also that we do not require the mono-theism of the ideal-speech situation, or the general will, or overlapping consensus, to approach political legitimacy. We can be as we are, fractured and fractious, and yet resolve our conflict peacefully through our avatars in the political system. By strengthening the institutional relationship between representatives and social groups, and especially by affirming the importance of the control of the economic by the political, Hamilton offers a vision significantly different from Dahl’s liberal pluralism. At the same time, by always keeping open the gap between the represented and representations, he pushes back against totalising forms of political power associated with state socialism.
Second, the appeal to realism links freedom to a conception of politics that does not begin with a particular idea of ethical behaviour or moral world view. Rather it locates freedom as a practical problem of action against a background of real world challenges regardless of whether one believes that equality is the sovereign virtue, or whatever other more personal conception of the good life is embraced. Notably, Hamilton’s conception of freedom does not require us to want to be good people. In this sense it is a more inclusive conception of freedom for people concerned with the practical knowledge of living rather than theoretical knowledge of the ideal. Indeed, implicit in Hamilton’s work in Freedom Is Power and The Political Philosophy of Needs is a conception of politics as fundamentally about power and conflict over needs and interests, pushing back against the capture of political theory by moral philosophy.
My main concern with the appeal to realism is that it does not take this approach seriously enough, as his account makes various assumptions, especially in the institutional proposals made in the conclusion that reveal some empirical gaps. While it is clear that the reconstitution of the political is central to Hamilton’s notion of freedom, he betrays a state-centric bias in his proposals that altogether ignore the emergent forms of political power (never mind economic and cultural) at the post-national level. In our neo-liberal globalising era, this seems an obvious gap. For example, what are the implications for international politics of the importance of establishing control over our economic and social relations as a condition of freedom? Is it possible to reconstitute Freedom as Power at the international level, and what might this look like?
In addition, there is a clear assumption that class conflict remains the most important social divide, as reflected in the idea of a house of the plebs advanced in the conclusion. But is this really the key divide in most societies today? What of religious and ethnic conflict, and how would these identities best be accommodated to enhance the freedom of all? Lastly, the brevity of exposition of the various forms of institutional reforms listed in the conclusion suggests they are intended more as provocations or illustrations of ways to enhance freedom through representation at the national level. A more systematic account of this, taking into consideration the questions of post-national and global dimensions of power, would be a valuable book project on its own.
Internal to the theory itself, I think Hamilton’s greatest challenge is to develop more systematically his account of power and the practice of politics, especially as engaged by individuals and groups, against the mainstream rights-based, legal model that he opposes. Currently his thinking looks to conjoin a reconstruction of a Foucauldian conception of power where the inevitability of relations of power is distinguished from the (undesirable) contingency of domination, to an account of needs rather than rights as the appropriate subject of politics. However, what remains unclear is how theoretically, but also realistically, power, needs, and practice ought to be conjoined to offer a coherent and practicable account of best deciding the competing claims from religious, ethnic, or class-based groups.
Relatedly, what is the relationship between domination and representation? Hamilton affirms the aesthetic conception of representation such that contending leaders offer different visions of the people from among which the people must choose. This has a Schumpeterian familiarity about it, but also raises the spectre of a slippery relativist slope with little independent basis to adjudicate truth claims meaningfully. Yet this is precisely what is required to avoid domination of one group by another without necessarily escaping power relations altogether. How are we to separate tolerable from oppressive power relations in a political process driven by contending representations? To avoid this case of relativism through representations “all the way down,” Hamilton refers to his prior account of needs and interests in The Political Philosophy of Needs (2003), but even there only vital needs such as food, water, air, and shelter escape a discursive and contextual framing in some form of representation. Theoretically speaking, do we not need more than food and water, and the construction of political institutions to secure these, to resist domination and achieve freedom?
Overall Freedom Is Power is a refreshing and challenging book that confronts mainstream liberal, deliberative democratic and republican thought. It places power at the center of freedom, it affirms conflict over consensus, representation over participation, and reasserts the necessity of political rule over economic governance. For all its anti-idealism, there is something very empowering about the way freedom is linked to conflict, representation, and everyday life, in a way that resonates with politics in the global south. Freedom is thus made quotidian and accessible, not just confined to episodic elections and a mediated public realm. In small part an homage to Marx, if Marx has chosen to be a political scientist rather than a political-economist, and in significant part a reincarnation of Machiavelli for post-structuralist times, Freedom Is Power returns us to the core problem of the idea of freedom—the inescapability of power in all its domains.