I like to fly, preferably long distances, preferably non-stop. Flying offers me uninterrupted time to read, write, and reflect without the constraints or limitations of normal, day-to-day routines. Which may explain why flying, for me, serves such an appropriate metaphor for freedom.
I was again reminded of the reasons flying for me invokes freedom while traveling yesterday from SFO to DCA to attend the Fulbright Pre-Departure Orientation for my upcoming Fulbright in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Of course, I am not the first to use this metaphor. WW Rostow invoked it in 1960 in his attempt to offer a “non-materialist” account of economic development. Economic development, according to Rostow, reaches its intended goal with take-off: when all of the institutions, laws, wealth, and cultural understandings are in place to sustain long-range economic growth, such as in the US or Europe. And with “take-off” comes freedom.
The analogy between air flight and economic development – and the ways that both are able to invoke our experience of “freedom” – works on a metaphorical level in part because when I am flying (and especially when I am flying on someone else’s nickel) I allow myself to forget for a moment all of the hard work that actually goes into getting me from one place to another; not only the work of the stewards, the pilots, the ground crew, the hospitality industry, the ticketing agents, and so on, but also the work of those who purchased the fare. I feel free – I am free – only because of the unfreedom I and others have been (or will be) willing to endure to enjoy this brief four or five hours of unconstrained bliss. For, as economists everywhere, going back at least as far as Aristotle, have noted: freedom is born of necessity. We do not have one without the other. The “absence of constraint,” which we often associate with freedom, cannot arise except through the “presence of work,” which is one common definition of necessity. (Only among fascists and some communists did anyone seriously entertain the convenient fiction that Arbeit macht frei, “work makes us free.”)
Yet, beginning in the late nineteenth century with the writings of Carl Menger, some economists allowed themselves to forget the close relationship that exists between freedom and necessity. Easing back into their seats at 35,000 feet, they began to forget that the freedom they were experiencing was not really produced by the “absence of constraint.” For, notwithstanding their experience of freedom, this experience could not have been possible without the work of the ground crews, pilots, stewards, hospitality workers, ticketing agents, and so on, not to mention the work to pay for the ticket, upon which their experience of “take-off” is based. Which is why, rather than defining freedom as “the absence of constraint,” it might instead be more helpful to define freedom as “the fruits of constraint.” Work does not make us free. But neither is freedom the absence of constraint.
The reason this metaphor may be important for economic policy in the former Yugoslavia and for the Balkans more generally is that it was under the false flag of freedom that neoliberal economic theorists and policy makers promised Balkan communities that, by eliminating the constraints of public institutions, regulations, and protections, they could realize the economic and political freedoms enjoyed by individuals and communities in the rest of the global economic community. All they needed to do was dismantle the constraining state apparatus, cast off the legal and regulatory chains imposed by public institutions and replace them with free market mechanisms – and all would be well. As I lean back in my seat at 35,000 feet, all that I must do to experience the exhilaration of freedom is momentarily forget the cost of my fare and the work of all of those who made my flight possible, including the air regulations and rights-of-way governing the behavior of planes operating within regulated air space, both in the air and on the ground. The illusion is broken, however, the instant that all of these constraints flood back into my experience.
And it is for this reason that Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen prefers the contrast between “freedom” and “unfreedom” to the contrast between “freedom” and “necessity.” Only with the rise of neoclassical economic theory, and even then not among all theorists (Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes, for example), did the absence of constraint come to be mistaken for freedom. Most economists prior to the 1870s knew quite well and eagerly acknowledged that freedom entailed the conditions that make for freedom. Freedom, in other words, entails laws, regulations, institutions, historical and social conditions, not to mention cultural understandings, without which freedom is no more than a mathematical statement: the null set. And, yet, beginning in the 1950s, following World War II, a militant community of economists clustered around the University of Chicago began to argue – against every philosophical precedent in Western history – that freedom was nothing other than this null set, the absence of constraint, the absence of conditions, mathematically zero. And they began to argue that it was only with the removal of these conditions and constraints that true freedom would reign.
Communities in Western Europe and North America that enjoy political, economic, and intellectual freedoms did not come upon their freedoms by following an ideological program. They did not come upon their freedoms by removing all legal, institutional, social, political, or economic constraints. To the contrary, as Karl Polanyi has shown, it was precisely through the implementation of an extensive web of regulations, laws and institutions that the political, economic and intellectual freedoms we value were created and are sustained. Work does not make us free. But neither is freedom the absence of constraint.
And, yet, when sophisticated, educated, western economists and policy makers promised communities living under the constraints of Soviet-style communism that all they needed to do to claim their freedom was to cast off all public, governmental, state controlled laws, regulations, and institutions and replace them with the free market, who can blame them for casting off their oppressor and seizing upon this null set in the name of freedom? The only problem is that except in pure mathematics there is in reality no such thing as a “null set.” (By definition, “reality” is not a zero: it is not null.) So to confuse “freedom” for this “null set,” or to mistake “freedom” for the absence of all conditions or constraints, is a pure fiction.
Although it is most closely associated with Thomas Hobbes, there is no political theorist of note who has ever argued that freedom can appear, persist, or be maintained in the absence of all conditions or constraints. Which is why it took a generation of economic theorists entranced by the notion of mathematical zero and completely ignorant of history to propose an economic policy based in large measure on the absence of constraint.
The consequence of the removal of such constraints is what we have experienced in the Balkans, which could be mistaken for freedom only by someone committed to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche – freedom as absence, freedom as death. But this also suggests a way forward. Policy makers both within and beyond the Balkans need to begin to understand freedom not as the absence of constraint, but as the conditions that make for freedom: the institutions, laws, and regulations, but also the cultural understandings and the real wealth.
It was a tragic error when western policy-makers proposed that freedom could be achieved through the removal of institutions, laws, and regulations. But this error is only compounded when we counsel austerity and deprivation – necessity – as the path to liberty. Policy-makers should instead be reflecting critically upon the conditions that make for freedom and should be doing all in their power to realize these conditions not only in the Balkans, but throughout the world. For, we have seen and are still seeing where the opposite policy leads.
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