44
coin. He first notes that: “We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs
without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past” (Hayek 2007, 67).
And, then, “economic freedom was the outgrowth of a free growth of economic activity which
had been the undersigned and unforeseen by-product of political freedom” (
ibid
. 69). In the
space of two pages, Hayek completely reverses the causal relationship: He first argues that
freedom in economic affairs is the necessary precursor to political freedom, or at least that
political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom. He then argues that economic
freedom was an accidental result of political freedom. Friedman
has a similarly difficulty
clarifying the relationship between these two phenomena. He originally contended that
“economic freedom is…an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom,”
(Friedman 2002, 8), thus agreeing with Hayek’s first formulation. However, in his 2002 preface,
he acknowledges that this relationship is not so straightforward: “political freedom, desirable
though it may be, is not a necessary condition for economic and civil freedom” (
ibid
. ix). More
pointedly still, “political freedom, which under some circumstances promotes economic and civil
freedom…under others, inhibits economic and civil freedom” (
ibid
. x). For example, when
Chileans democratically elected a socialist president, Salvador Allende, this would for Friedman
be a case in which political freedom inhibited “economic freedom,” as he understands it. Thus,
they both see democracy as in some way linked with freedom and worthy of support, but they
struggle to formulate exactly how this relationship works and hesitate
to endorse political
freedom as of primary importance.
Moreover, at other points in their texts, they are both deeply suspicious of democracy and
the political sphere, more broadly. For Friedman (2002, 15):
The characteristic feature of action through political channels is that it tends to
require or enforce substantial conformity. The great advantage of the market, on
45
the other hand, is that it permits wide diversity. It is, in political terms, a system
of proportional representation. Each man can vote, as it were,
for the color of tie
he wants and get it; he does not have to see what color the majority wants and
then, if he is in the minority, submit.
Thus, Friedman’s principle objection is that democratic politics, in contrast to markets, requires
two social evils: coercion and conformity.
Hayek’s basic libertarian commitments lead him to oppose majoritarian rule because it
would necessarily involve forcing a minority against their will. The “fashionable concentration
on democracy…is largely responsible for the misleading and unfounded belief that,
so long as
the ultimate source of power is the will of the majority, the power cannot be arbitrary” (Hayek
2007, 110). As Harvey (2005, 25) succinctly puts it:
The founding figures of neoliberal thought took political ideas of human dignity
and individual freedom as fundamental…These values, they held, were threatened
not only by fascism, dictatorships, and communism, but by all forms of state
intervention that substituted collective judgments for those of individuals free to
choose.
In short, these libertarian theorists saw “democracy” as
a threat to individual liberty, as a form of
majoritarian coercion. If democracy is just another collectivist system whereby individuals must
submit to a Rousseauian “general will” enforced by a centralized state apparatus, then Hayek and
Friedman would be right to see democratic politics as in tension with freedom. However,
democracy need not be equated with state-based majority rule. In large part, the aim of the
subsequent chapters of the dissertation is to elaborate one way we might conceptualize and
practice democracy that bears little resemblance to state-based majority rule. I will argue that a
democracy decoupled from the state and detached from an ideal of majority rule is actually the
correct politics for thinkers committed to individual liberty. I will, in other words,
articulate a
“freedom-centered” account of democracy – one that is not committed to state sovereignty, but
instead to the dispersion and decentralization of power throughout society.
46
For the time being, however, I want to focus on a preliminary problem: If politics – even
democratic politics – is fundamentally coercive and centralizing, then to be free is to be free
from politics. Because they are suspicious of even democratic politics, both Hayek and
Friedman think about freedom as private and non-political. As Arendt (2000, 443) puts it in her
essay “What is Freedom?”:
The rise of totalitarianism, its claim of having subordinated all spheres of life to
the demands of politics…makes us doubt not only the
coincidence of politics and
freedom but their very compatibility. We are inclined to believe that freedom
begins where politics ends…Was not the liberal credo, ‘The less politics the more
freedom,’ right after all? Is it not true that the smaller the space occupied by the
political, the larger the domain left to freedom?
In the next section, I aim to show, with Arendt, why the answer to these questions is a definitive
“no,” that libertarian thinkers – those committed to freedom above all else – ought to view
freedom as fundamentally a political phenomenon and that democracy (albeit not a statist,
majoritarian democracy) is crucial for freedom to flourish.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
