The Assault on Liberty: What Went Wrong with Rights. Dominic Raab
society where individuals experiment as they wish with ideas, beliefs, practices and the general business of running their own lives. His defence of liberty was based on both its value to the individual and to society, as he directly identifies one with the healthy development of the other: ‘[I]t is important to give the freest scope possible to uncustomary things, in order that it may in time appear which of these are fit to be converted into customs.’
When Mill defends particular liberties, such as the freedoms of thought, religion and speech, he also has firmly in mind a wider benefit, beyond the individual, that comes from guaranteeing the expression of competing views. His comment, ‘[h]e who knows only his side of the case, knows little of that’, shows his concern with the ossifying of lazy, untested opinions into dogmatic truths. Mill explicitly links the competition of ideas – made possible in a vibrant, free society – with human development and social progress. His instinctive hostility to paternalism remains an enduring influence on the modern debate about limits of interference by the nanny state in our daily lives, whether it is the smoking ban, rules on parents smacking their children or the introduction of compulsory ID cards.
Mill’s idea of freedom was built on a mistrust of government, even the democratic kind. He recognized that a free country needs more than just elections. It needs to preserve and protect individual liberty. As the American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin quipped: ‘Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.’
If Mill acknowledged the limitations of formal democracy, it was Isaiah Berlin who was honest about the limits of liberty. An Oxford don for most of his professional life, Berlin was born and raised in (what was then) Russia until the age of twelve. He witnessed the Russian Revolution and, as a Jew, felt keenly the horrors of German fascism. His hometown, Riga, was situated along one of the battle lines of the Cold War. Berlin rejected the idea that there was a single coherent theory of life, history or human meaning. He described the belief that ‘there is a final solution’ to the great philosophical questions in life – with the theories that underpinned both communism and fascism firmly in mind – as bearing the greatest responsibility for ‘the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals’. He recounted Immanuel Kant’s adage that ‘from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’. From this conception of history and life, Berlin made the case for pluralism and liberty. He defined and defended ‘negative freedom’, which he associated with fundamental liberties and collectively characterized as ‘the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others’. But he was not dogmatic, recognizing that the precise parameter of an individual’s rights was a ‘matter of argument, indeed haggling’.
Berlin was just as clear about the limitations of relying on liberty. Responding to the classic riposte that freedom so narrowly defined means nothing to the poor peasant or starving child, he readily agreed: ‘Liberty is not the only goal of men’ – and might not mean much to those living in poverty or squalor. Nevertheless, Berlin argued, it was preferable to discount the relevance of liberty – as an inadequate answer to social inequality – than confuse it with some wider mission to achieve social justice, let alone try to expand its scope to incorporate the latter: ‘Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture or human happiness or a quiet conscience.’
Berlin defended the British idea of liberty, but he kept it in perspective. He acknowledged the need to weigh liberty against other aspects of the public interest – today brought into sharper focus by the demands on law enforcement in fighting crime and terrorism. Perhaps most importantly, Berlin recognized that liberty is not the only – or even the most important – thing we value in life. You cannot pay the mortgage with habeas corpus or raise a family standing on a soap box at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. Most of us will never need to rely on the safeguards that make a criminal trial fair. Berlin defended liberty as a pillar of our liberal democracy, but was under no illusion that it could somehow eradicate social inequality, cure cancer or stop global warming. At a time when every gripe and grievance in modern life can be dressed up as a violation of someone’s human rights, Berlin reminds us of the risks of inflating rights and presenting them as a panacea for every ill in the world.
These, and many other influential thinkers, contributed to the philosophical, historical and constitutional development of a unique British model of liberal democracy, a model in which freedom under law supports and reinforces a system of parliamentary democracy. Our civil and political liberties represent the first and fundamental freedoms we enjoy as citizens of this country. They are the crown jewels of our liberal democracy, carving out an area of autonomy, free from the interference of the state, which is enjoyed by every individual as of right.
We take advantage of British liberty without thinking about it. We spend most of our waking lives preoccupied with making a living, paying the bills, spending time with friends and family and pursuing the range of things that give value and meaning to our lives. Yet, in an increasingly apathetic age, it is worth recognizing the extent to which such carefree indifference is the privilege of living in a free country. The ability to dislocate ourselves from politics, public debate and the prying eye of the state is a testament to freedom under law, which has traditionally been protected in Britain and is now under threat. Even if we take our freedoms for granted, much of what we do on a daily basis is dependent upon liberty, or would soon vanish without it.
The freedom to switch off and get on with our lives unmolested is not something that happened by accident. The apathy option was won through great sacrifice. It took seven hundred years of inspiration, perspiration and, above all, struggle to crystallize the British idea of – and commitment to – liberty, in clearer and sharper form. As one historian summed up, it ‘cost blood, and took centuries’. In 1939, Churchill characterized and inspired Britain’s lonely defiance of the totalitarian menace sweeping Europe in terms of:
a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual…a war to establish and revive the stature of man.
During that war alone, hundreds of thousands of British soldiers and civilians died, an immense sacrifice for the liberties we leisurely enjoy today. While the British commitment to liberty withstood the assault from fascism, it faced another serious – and more sustained – onslaught, this time from the authoritarian left.
Writing around the same period as Mill, Karl Marx was contemptuous of the idea of liberty evolving in Britain in the nineteenth century. For Marx, rights epitomized a corrupt egoism, separating the individual from his real identity, absorbed as part of society: ‘Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no-one else…It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad withdrawn into himself.’
Marx argued that the individual would only be free once he conceived himself in terms of a wider collective. Marx criticized rights as purely formal legal constructs, divorced from any real or meaningful content – a right to property is meaningless to the homeless, free speech of limited value to the starving. In fact, liberty was worse than irrelevant because it crystallized unjust – middle-class – privileges at the expense the working class. As Lenin claimed: ‘Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.’
Marx’s theory of class struggle was based on the imperative to realize the real needs of humankind rather than the artificial attachment of a liberal and bourgeois elite to an arbitrary selection of formal rights that perpetuate an unjust status quo.
Fellow communists like Engels asserted – somewhat counter-intuitively – that ‘Freedom is the recognition of necessity’. The logical implications for the individual were sobering. Individual worth must be subordinated to the overriding imperative driving a Marxist society towards inevitable class struggle and revolution. Real freedom can only be achieved by recognizing and participating in that emancipation of the downtrodden from the shackles of capitalism.
Built on these philosophical foundations, socialism and communism were constructed in direct and aggressive antagonism to individual liberty. Marxism is all too willing to sacrifice the individual for the collective good. Communist