Abstract
Freedom occupies a central position in Western politics and society, and is frequently invoked to criticize or justify any number of policies, practices, and behaviors. But what is freedom? Baldissone deliberately refuses to answer what he calls this “fateful question,” since he claims that any attempt to locate a core idea or fix the meaning of freedom in a single definition falsely assumes that there is one such “entity” as freedom (p. xvi). Instead, in this ambitious volume, Baldissone presents readers with a “Western genealogy of liberty,” which consists of a wide-ranging and erudite narration of some of the numerous historical constructions of “freedom” that have shaped the Western tradition over the past 25 centuries. While this genealogy offers a trove of insights and will particularly interest more historically and philosophically inclined readers of Organization Studies, the fifth and final chapter, which culminates in Baldissone’s articulation of his own version of freedom, arguably offers more useful and potentially generative resources for scholars within and beyond organizational theory.
Baldissone makes clear from the outset that he wants to give readers direct access to “Western notions of freedom” by making extensive use of quotations, all of which are also given in their original language. Over the course of the first four chapters, he guides us on the winding path of freedom’s evolution, from ancient Greece to the present day, and along the way draws numerous thought-provoking parallels and connections between different articulations of freedom. I will not try to summarize Baldissone’s fascinating and insightful narration here, but instead highlight some of the discussions that particularly interested me. For example, we learn that the word “free” (eleutheron) appears in Homer’s writing long before the emergence of “freedom” (eleutheria), which Pindar uses in the fifth century
There is no doubt that the book succeeds in its purpose of showcasing the multiplicity of meanings that freedom has taken in the history of Western thought. However, at times one wonders whether Baldissone strikes the right balance between breadth and depth. Combined with the author’s admirable commitment to bringing the reader directly into contact with the original sources, the inevitably limited space that he can devote to each thinker results in a presentation of their ideas that might unfortunately prove at times inaccessible to the average non-philosopher. Moreover, Baldissone does not explain his criteria for selecting the particular authors under consideration, and there are several notable omissions from his genealogy, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt. To be sure, by exhaustively charting the various historical constructions of freedom, Baldissone can effectively emphasize the hubris of a claim like Friedrich von Hayek’s, that “while the uses of liberty are many, liberty is one” (quoted on p. 120). However, even if it is true that Hayek thus forces “the plurality of past trajectories of freedom-related words within the bottleneck of one of the modern definitions of freedom,” it is not clear why exactly that matters for citizens of contemporary society (p. 124). In the Introduction, Baldissone claims that negative freedom is “ridiculously simplistic” and its widespread adoption has a “tangible (and disastrous) impact on our daily lives” (p. xiv). It would have strengthened the book’s case to explain in more detail exactly how negative freedom has a negative practical impact on our lives, which in turn would have entailed an assessment of the relationship between neoliberal philosophy and neoliberal society. Moreover, the neoliberal injunctions to be self-enterprising and to find self-realization through paid work and consumerism arguably rest on a different notion of freedom than freedom as non-interference, and we might ask whether freedom really has been so effectively reduced to its negative variant, as Baldissone claims.
In the fifth and final chapter, Baldissone suggests that we are in need of a “resemantization of freedom’s lexicon, if not a new vocabulary, which would strike a relational middle path between autonomous and heteronomous alternatives” (p. 133). What motivates such a task are both an “emerging theoretical framework” based on the work of (among others) Nietzsche, Simondon and Foucault, as well as “contemporary political practices,” especially Occupy Wall Street (p. 134). From the theoretical perspective, the challenge can be summarized as follows: once we understand individuals not as entities but as processes of individuation (Simondon) and subjectivation (Foucault), then we need an alternative lexicon of freedom to the one premised on a clearly defined and stable individual subject. In particular, Simondon views individuation as a process by which a “pre-individual” or as yet undetermined portion of the subject “communicates with the other pre-individual realities” (quoted on p. 129), thus blurring the distinction between the inside and outside of the individual and generating fresh individuations. Foucault’s concept of subjectivation similarly draws attention to the social construction of individual entities (negatively, in “total institutions” such as asylums, and positively, in Ancient practices of “care of the self”), grounding these processes in relations of power that rest on shared (but usually unequal) freedom (pp. 128–35). While Baldissone emphasizes negative freedom’s particular shortcomings (only when identity boundaries are “supposed to pre-exist the relations with others, can freedom be claimed as the possibility to act without interference by others” (p. 152)), he seems to want to extend his critique to all earlier notions of freedom that have not taken account of the “processual framework” (p. 153). Similarly, he claims that “whatever the definition of freedom, we may notice that, in general, its modern exercise seems located either in the inner individual recesses, or on the boundary that separates both individual and collective subjects from each other” (p. 142). While possibly true, some examples would have helped the argument here. In the realm of politics, Baldissone claims that movements like Occupy Wall Street, in which the boundaries, collective identity, and role of participants are better captured in the language of becoming and multiplicities, similarly challenge the existing lexicon of freedom (p. 135).
In place of the dichotomous pairings of autonomy and heteronomy, as well as independence and dependence, Baldissone thus proposes his own neologisms, namely “dianomy” (p. 137) and “throughdom” (p. 152). With the prefix “dia-” meaning “through” or “between,” this word “may suggest a condition of constitutive sharing with others” (p. 137). Baldissone refers in passing to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, suggesting that “Nancy’s beautiful formula être singulier pluriel, being singular plural” still fails to adequately express “our participation in the life of each other” (p. 133). Yet not only does this claim call for more detailed argumentation, given the primacy that Nancy gives to the relation and to the idea that existence is necessarily coexistence. In addition, it highlights the fact that Baldissone does not engage with Nancy’s own attempt to theorize freedom in The Experience of Freedom, in which he aims to transform the sense of freedom as “a property held by a subject into the sense of a condition or space in which alone something like a ‘subject’ can eventually come to be born, and thus to be born (or to die) to freedom” (1993, pp. 91–2). Similarly, although Baldissone clearly has a commitment to feminism (as suggested not only by the dedication, but more directly by his use of the term sic after quotations that use a masculine generic pronoun or subject), he does not address feminist scholarship in the area of relational autonomy and interdependence, despite its proximity to his own project of articulating an alternative to autonomy and heteronomy.
As noted above, the last chapter lays arguably the most stimulating and fertile ground for further research by social scientists, and Baldissone approvingly quotes Deleuze’s remark that “a theory is exactly like a box of tools” (p. 155). While Baldissone comes close to answering the question “What is freedom?” (at least, he seems to have a view about what it is not), he refuses to give a definition of “throughdom” and instead, following Wittgenstein, focuses on the family resemblances of different possible uses of his term (p. 156). For example, he suggests that throughdom could “help to address the current mass incorporation of images, behaviours, and techniques carried by social media” (p. 157). In particular, to the extent that this mass phenomenon is based on individual choice, Baldissone suggests that the various discourses and perspectives on freedom are powerless to criticize it, whereas the emphasis that throughdom places on the mutual constitution of subjectivity could be “deployed to orient this negotiation in a participatory direction” (p. 157). Throughdom also offers a better framework for understanding various “practices of commoning” (here again it is worth remarking the importance of the common to Nancy’s thought, which Baldissone does not refer to in this discussion), and “used to negotiate a fair participation” (p. 158). Interestingly, he echoes the acts of citizenship literature (Isin, 2008) as well as radical democratic theory (Rancière, 1999) when he notes that “if we no longer think in terms of individuals but of processes of individuation” then we ought not to think of specific freedoms as entitlements preceding their own exercise, but instead understand that exercise and entitlement often emerge together (p. 159). These examples are crying out for further elaboration, which in many ways suggests their potential to generate fresh insights. Some readers (myself included) may wish that Baldissone had devoted more space to this project than to the preceding genealogy of freedom. Still, this is a truly impressive undertaking that clearly reflects a vast amount of research, and the denaturalization of modern freedom that the book performs helps prepare the ground for the imagination and articulation of alternatives.