The literature of liberty has two abiding concerns: to explain how freedom is best defined and to account for how it might be secured. The two works under review here address both these topics, though Sharon Krause’s engagement with the institutional issue is more deeply grounded in the conceptual question, while Jacob Levy’s work reaches into the history of European thought to find the guidance he needs. What these authors share is a conviction that freedom can be understood in a variety of ways and given expression in a plurality of traditions, practices, and forms of governance. Out of this comes a broader conclusion about the political (and more generally, human) condition—that it is one in which certain deep tensions between ways of living, thinking, and governing can never ultimately be resolved, so we had better get used to it, and perhaps also start setting our theoretical sights a little more realistically. Since I consider their conclusions to be sound, I am inclined to think them very fine works. But my assessment is also based on the quality of the arguments developed, and these are worth a closer look.

Krause’s purpose is to take our liberal theorizing about freedom away from its focus upon (or obsession with) the agency of the sovereign individual. Those who have thought most deeply about liberal freedom have tended to fall into one of three camps: defenders of positive liberty; defenders of negative liberty, who see freedom as the product of non-interference; and advocates of conceptions of freedom as non-domination. The focus of all these understandings, in her view, is the protection of agency—with agency conceived of as an inner faculty of the individual. Krause’s aim is to show that “liberal individualism is not only compatible with a non-sovereign, socially distributed account of human agency but that liberal individualism, properly conceived, requires such an account” (p. 13). A focus on the ideal of sovereign agency under-appreciates the informal ways that power interacts with human agency to compromise justice and constrain freedom (p. 10). It also fails to recognize the way in which the marginalized and oppressed fight back against those who would take away their freedom: “The world is replete with transgressive responses to power” (p. 17). A better form of theorizing about freedom, Krause argues, would be one that forswears the reductionist temptation to supply a uni-dimensional account of freedom and recognizes that the pluralism of forms that freedom takes requires a theory that appreciates the impossibility of perfecting the art of freedom, and the foolishness of attempting to impose it on everyone in the world (p. 19).

Among the implications of conceiving agency as “a relational experience rather than an inner faculty” (p. 61) is that it becomes unnecessary to consider the idea of the social construction of identity as a threat to agency. It opens up the way to thinking about freedom not simply in terms of the operations of an autonomous self but to considering the various aspects under which we understand ourselves to be free or unfree. Freedom from interference is one such aspect; autonomy or self-determination is another; and so too is living without domination or oppression (which Krause insists is a very different thing to domination—pp. 149–158) important if one is to live freely. These various dimensions of freedom cannot be reduced to a single one—by suggesting, for example, that one acts freely only when one acts under the guidance of an undominated, rational will. Contra Philip Pettit, Krause argues that we need to rid ourselves of the idea that freedom is somehow equated with a kind of control that is seen as the key to agency (pp. 80–82); for we are never really in control, either of our actions or of our identities. We are often free, if only to some degree, even when we are marginalized or oppressed.

We are free, Sharon Krause would persuade us, when we are not interfered with, when we are not dominated, when we are not oppressed, and when we can engage collectively in “collective world-making”—but we will not always be able to enjoy all these aspects of freedom at once, for the demand of one kind of freedom sometimes pulls against another. To some degree we have to learn to live with the tension. The plurality of forms of freedom reflects a deeper pluralism of values; and the challenge is to negotiate the conflicts that must inevitably arise without thinking that any ultimate resolution is possible and yet not giving in to indifference or despair. To try to conceive of freedom under the aspect of a single concept or ideal—whether it be justice or political action or community—is to invite failure, for no one standard of rationality will capture all of freedom’s demands. “The call for a more collectivist spirit found in participatory democrats and some contemporary Arendtians is valuable, for example, but its insistence on action in concert and political participation does not fully capture the multiplicity of freedom’s forms, some of which are experienced in more individualized ways” (p. 190). Similarly “freedom as non-interference and freedom as non-domination are crucial components of any free society, but they are not sufficient” (p. 192).

That rationalism and pluralism cannot be reconciled is the ultimate conclusion of Jacob Levy’s work, which ends with the thought that “if we are concerned with liberal freedom we are… left with no choice but to reject synthesis—whether of intermediate groups’ ethos with the state, or of rationalism and pluralism. This means living with a degree of disharmony in our social lives, our moral psychologies, and our political theory” (p. 295). While Krause’s primary aim is to criticize the temptation to seek conceptual unification, so as to reconstruct a case for liberal individualism, Levy’s concern is to criticize the longing for a different kind of theoretical resolution on the part of those who want to describe a type of regime under which the freedom of individuals as members of groups and particular communities is reconciled with the freedom of individuals as beings who also seek relief from the burdens of membership and local identity.

Reconciliation might be sought in different theoretical forms. In the “pure theory” (pp. 47–51), it would mean establishing the correct, rationally defensible, understanding of freedom to which appeal might be made to resolve conflicts or disagreements about what or whose freedom should prevail. If groups have rights, for example, these are nothing other that the rights that are the product of individuals with rights, whose freedom to associate has given the groups life and moral significance. Freedom, in Krause’s terms, is reducible to the agency of individuals, and the social formations we see—groups, communities, associations—are nothing but the product of that agency. But there is more to groups than this, sociologically speaking—or at least, so Levy argues. The alternative to the pure theory is the “congruence” approach (pp. 53–56). It seeks to resolve the problem of the plural forms that freedom might take by insisting on a consistency in freedom’s demands from one context to the next. The norms governing freedom in a community or group must be congruent with those of the wider society if freedom is to be recognised as prospering. In reality, however, no such theoretical reconciliation is possible without doing violence to the way in which people live—to the different ways in which freedom is experienced and valued.

To be a pluralist is to recognize that freedom might be enjoyed in various ways of living and under any number of social arrangements. But it also means conceding that freedom can be violated in different ways. Protecting one kind of freedom might mean forgoing another, or denying freedom to someone else or some other form of association. It just isn’t possible to have it all.

An instructive example is supplied by John Rawls’s efforts to maintain that principles of justice do not directly govern family relations. Yet the family is also surely a part of the basic structure of society, which the principles of justice govern. Rawls’s attempt to defend the autonomy of the family without forswearing his understanding of the application of the principles of justice leads him to a contradiction that feminists like Jane English and Susan Okin, and more recently, critics of liberalism like G.A.Cohen, have shown cannot be resolved. The correct way to understand this contradiction, however, Levy argues, is to acknowledge that there are fundamental liberal values in conflict here that cannot be reconciled—and that theoretical inconsistency is preferable to a coherence bought by giving up or denying the importance of one kind of freedom (p. 292).

Together, these two works make an important contribution to our understanding of freedom by reminding us, as pluralists are wont to do, that there is no world without loss and that all values cannot be had at once. More than that, however, they push the point further to say that not even all liberal values can be reconciled, or synthesised into a theoretically satisfying hierarchy of ideals. Indeed, the value of freedom itself comes in many forms, and often one must be sacrificed or diminished for the sake of another.

All of this prompts the following thought: What, then, is the point of political theory? The answer, perhaps, is that while theory can offer us many things, including a better understanding of the ethical and political dimensions of the world in which we live, it cannot provide an unambiguous guide to reforming it or even to making our way in it. That, surely, is a lesson worth taking to heart.