Freedom and the Law. Bruno Leoni
after the passage of the Norris–La Guardia Act everyone became “free” in this country from the constraint of everyone else except in cases where union officials or union members wanted to constrain employers to accept their demands by threatening or actually causing damages to the employers themselves. Thus, the expression “freedom from constraint” in the particular case of injunctions has changed its meaning in America not less than in England since the passage of the American Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 and the English Trade Disputes Act of 1906. The American Wagner Labor Relations Act made things even worse in 1935, not only by limiting further the meaning of “freedom” on the part of the citizens who were employers, but also by openly changing the meaning of the word “interference” and therefore introducing a semantic confusion that deserves to be quoted in a linguistic survey of “freedom.” As Watts has pointed out, “No one should interfere with the legitimate activities of anyone else if to interfere means the use of coercion, fraud, intimidation, restraint, or verbal abuse.” Thus, a wage earner does not interfere with the owners of General Motors when he goes to work for Chrysler. But, as Watts points out in his essay, we could not say that he does not interfere if we had to apply to his behavior the criteria used by the Wagner Act to establish when an employer “interferes” with the union activities of the employees whenever he hires, for instance, nonunion employees in preference to union members. Thus, of this use of the word “interference,” the extraordinary semantic result is that while union people do not interfere when they constrain employers to accept their demands by unlawful acts, employers do interfere when they do not constrain anyone else to do anything whatever.3
We are reminded of some strange definitions, such as the one given by Proudhon (“Property is theft”), or of the story of Akaki Akakievitch in Gogol's famous tale The Overcoat, in which a robber deprives a poor man of his overcoat, saying, “You have stolen my overcoat!” If we consider the connections that the word “freedom” has in ordinary language with the word “interference,” we can have a fair idea of the extent to which a change such as the one we have seen may now affect the very meaning of “freedom.”
If we ask what is actually the meaning of “freedom from constraint” in such present-day political and legal systems as the American or the English, we are confronted with tremendous difficulties. We must say, to be honest, that there is more than one legal meaning of “freedom from constraint,” depending on the people who are constrained.
Most probably this situation is connected with a semantic change that huge pressure and propaganda groups have promoted in recent times and are still promoting all over the world in the sense given to the word “freedom” in ordinary language. Professor Mises is accurate when he says that the advocates of contemporary totalitarianism have tried to reverse the meaning of the word “freedom” (as it was previously more or less commonly accepted in Western civilization) by applying the word “liberty” to the condition of individuals under a system in which they have no right other than that of obeying orders.
This semantic revolution is probably connected in its turn with the speculations of certain philosophers who enjoy defining “freedom,” in opposition to all the usual meanings of the word in ordinary language, as something that implies coercion. Thus, Bosanquet, the English disciple of Hegel, could state in his Philosophical Theory of the State that “we can speak, without a contradiction, of being forced to be free.” I agree with Maurice Cranston when he suggests, in his recent essay on this subject, that such definitions of freedom are based mainly on a theory of the “bifurcated man,” that is, of man as a “mind-body unit” that is at the same time rational and “irrational.” Freedom thus would imply a sort of coercion by the rational part of man over the irrational part. But these theories often are strictly connected with the notion of a coercion that can be physically applied by self-styled “rational” people on behalf of, but also eventually against the will of, allegedly “irrational” people. Plato's theories seem to me the most notorious example in this respect. His philosophical notion of a bifurcated man is strictly connected with his political notion of a society in which rational men ought to rule the others, if necessary without regard to the latter's consent—like surgeons, he says, that cut and burn without bothering about the cries of their patients.
All the difficulties to which I have referred warn us that we cannot use the word “freedom” and be rightly understood without first defining clearly the meaning we attach to that word. The realistic approach to defining “freedom” cannot be successful. There is no such thing as “freedom” independent of the people who speak of it. In other words, we cannot define “freedom” in the same manner as we define a material object that everyone can point to.
A more careful approach to the problem of defining “freedom” than the realistic one that we have here rejected would involve a preliminary inquiry concerning the nature and purpose of such a definition. It is customary to distinguish “stipulative” from “lexicographic” definitions. Both are descriptive of the meaning attached to a word; but the former refers to a meaning that the author of the definition proposes to adopt for the word in question, whereas the latter refers to the meaning that ordinary people give to the word in common usage.
Since the Second World War a new trend in linguistic philosophy has emerged. It recognizes the existence of languages whose purpose is not only descriptive or even not descriptive at all—languages that the school of the so-called Vienna Circle would have condemned as altogether wrong or useless. The adherents of this new movement grant recognition also to nondescriptive (sometimes called “persuasive”) languages. The aim of persuasive definitions is not to describe things, but to modify the traditional meaning of words with favorable connotations in order to induce people to adopt certain beliefs or certain forms of behavior. It is obvious that several definitions of “freedom” may be and have been contrived in this way with the object of inducing people, for instance, to obey the orders of some ruler. The formulation of such persuasive definitions would not be a proper task for the scholar. On the other hand, the scholar is entitled to make stipulative definitions of “freedom.” By doing so, a student may at the same time escape the charge of using equivocal definitions for purposes of deception and relieve himself of the necessity of elaborating a lexicographic definition, the difficulties of which are obvious because of the already mentioned multiplicity of meanings actually given to the word “freedom.”
Stipulative definitions may appear to be, on the surface, a solution to the problem. Stipulating seems to depend entirely on us or at most also on a partner who agrees with us about what we want to define. When the adherents of the linguistic school speak of stipulative definitions, they emphasize the arbitrariness of such formulations. This is evidenced, for instance, by the enthusiasm with which the advocates of stipulative definitions quote an authority who is not properly a philosopher—at least not an official one. This oft-quoted gentleman is Lewis Carroll, the brilliant author of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, who describes the impossible and sophisticated characters met by Alice during her travels. One of these, Humpty Dumpty, made words say what he wanted them to say and also paid them a sort of salary for their service.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”1
When they speak of stipulative definitions, the analytical philosophers have in mind chiefly those of logic