The great motor of human history is the struggle for freedom. Practically all wars were fought for freedom. All revolutions were launched for freedom. All human endeayors in the scientific, economic and technical fields take their impulse from the desire for greater freedom. The idea of freedom is the origin of practically all the ideals in the political and social fields for which men are fighting today, just as they fought for thousands of years. And yet no notion has created greater confusion than the idea of freedom.
What freedom really is, we still do not know, and it is wide open to interpretation. These various interpretations of the idea “freedom” are the cause of that inextricable confusion in which the various nations, the various ideologies, the various parties and various classes are bitterly opposed to each other. However difficult it appears, we must try to define as clearly as possible what freedom is, if we want to operate with this idea so that we may approach it and not destroy it.
Unfortunately, we are used to debate about political, social and religious principles by the dialectical method. We [ p. 15 ] have not yet available a better, more abstract and more scientific method of research and debate.
This dialectical method, which we find already very highly developed in the works of the Greek philosophers, is operating with contrasts, with antitheses. We say that freedom is the antithesis of compulsion, that peace is the antithesis of war, that independence is the antithesis of commitment, and so on. In order to understand how dangerous it is to follow this road, we must remember that this dialectical method of philosophy, after its highest expression in the dialogues of Plato, led straight ahead to the Sophistic school.
If we examine all these notions on which each controversy on political and social problems is based, we can easily see that what we regard as opposing conceptions are in fact on the same level and express identical phenomena in different degrees.
Liberty without equality is an inconceivable state of affairs. As equality between men, nations or between any other human groupings is obviously against nature—it never existed and probably never will exist—freedom in its pure and total conception would result in a state of affairs which would be the exact opposite of any kind of freedom.
If we gave every man—strong and weak—and every nation—large and small—complete freedom of action without imposing any restriction whatsoever on their impulses, it would result in the greatest terror, oppression, violence—in total anarchy.
It is obvious, therefore, that that kind of freedom which we regard as a human ideal is some kind of a synthesis between [ p. 16 ] freedom and compulsion. The fact that some outside power forbids me to kill a man I dislike, or to take away the property of those who have more than I, considerably restrains my freedom. But this very same restraint protects me from being murdered by those who dislike me, and of being robbed by those who envy whatever I may possess. I definitely have the feeling that being protected against assassination and theft adds to my feeling of liberty in greater proportion to how much this same restriction deprives me of my liberty in prohibiting me from committing these same acts against others.
This very simple and obvious inter-relationship could be illustrated by any number of examples. But no matter how many examples we may cite, it appears evident that freedom and compulsion have a functional relationship and cannot be regarded as contrasts. The ideal of freedom, as we conceive it, is, therefore, an entirely relative notion depending upon two factors: first, to what degree man can act freely; and second, to what degree he is exposed to the free actions of others. It is only in the right synthesis of these two factors that the optimum can be achieved and that we can bring about a state of affairs among men which might be called freedom.
This close inter-relationship between freedom and compulsion in the social life among men has been recognized at the very beginning of our civilization. The most primitive forms of social life began with the prohibition of certain acts. The fundaments of the Christian religion are the Ten Commandments, stating clearly ten acts which “Thou shalt . . .” or “Thou shalt not . . .”
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We may, therefore, state, however paradoxical it may sound, that freedom in the history of mankind started with the first legal imposition of a compulsion.
These original and age-old compulsions were limited to those most primitive impulses of men, the prohibition of which obviously means more freedom for the community than its free exercise.
From the Ten Commandments to the most intricate legislation of our days, there is one clear line: Only through legal restrictions of the free exercise of human impulses can we achieve a state of affairs which we may call “freedom.”
In social life this is self-evident, and nobody except an anarchist would pretend that the laws prohibiting assassination, theft, perjury, forgery or overdraft of a bank account are laws contrary to the principle of freedom. We all know that, with the progress of civilization, our social life is becoming more and more complicated, and that this evolution demands more and more compulsion on human actions, and that only the total of these compulsions can give us freedom.
It is of the utmost importance to understand clearly the inter-relationship between freedom and compulsion if we want to solve all those many political, economic and international problems with which we are confronted.
The peculiar thing is that this inter-relationship between freedom and compulsion which is an age-old experience in our social life and which has been all through our history the basic principle of the great legislators and the founders of religion, in order to put some system into the social relationship between man and man, and create the maximum [ p. 8 ] possible individual freedom, has not yet been accepted nor recognized as a basic principle in the political field and in international relations among nations.
In these two important fields in which the present crisis is raging, we still maintain that freedom and compulsion are contradictory, that any compulsion is against the principle of freedom, and that established freedoms can only be maintained without any compulsion. Hence the anarchic situation in which we are living.
The democratic countries have established as a great historic achievement freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and many other political freedoms, to be enjoyed equally by all citizens. These freedoms have been granted without any limitations and without any clear definition, without any restriction, with the result that in most countries freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and all the other freedoms have been destroyed only and solely because these freedoms have been granted in an absolute form, in the belief that any restriction or compulsion would be contradictory to the principles of the freedoms granted.
The fact that in so many countries in our generation these freedoms, so dearly paid for through centuries of fighting for them, have been destroyed only and entirely by the freedom of actions these democratic privileges granted to the enemies of freedom, is sufficient proof that as established in their absolute form these freedoms do not guarantee freedom.
It makes no sense that a free and democratic country should give to everybody unlimited freedom and every democratic [ p. 19 ] means to combat freedom and democracy itself. The doctrinaire democrats believe that such a condition is inherent in the principles of democracy and it is against these so-called, but never defined, democratic principles to grant freedoms in varying degrees to different people. This is a very simple and self-evident viewpoint, if we operate with the notion that freedom and compulsion are in contrast. But such a way of thinking is fundamentally erroneous. In the public life of a nation the relationship between freedom and compulsion is exactly the same as in social life, and whether or not we shall enjoy political freedom will depend entirely on the right interpretation of these principles.
The problems concerning the international relationship of peoples are exactly of the same character. Based on the absolute conception of freedom, we arrived at the conceptions of national independence and national sovereignty as the highest expressions of the freedom of a state in its relationship to other states. We believe that any limitation of these absolute conceptions of sovereignty and independence would be contrary to the ideal of freedom of a nation. It is thanks to this conception of absolute freedom, which has created in the international field the same anarchic situation as absolute freedom would create in the social life of any community, that so many nations have been attacked, defeated and conquered, with brute force as the only arbiter among nations, and that hundreds of millions of people have become slaves again.