Liberty may be conceived … as the exercise of a universal right, or as the enjoyment of a privilege. In the middle ages, those who possessed any liberty of action, viz. the feudal aristocracy, figured to themselves their liberty under the latter type. They desired it, not because it was what all were entitled to, but because each considered himself as possessing, in his own person, a peculiar right to it. And thus has liberty almost always been understood in aristocratic societies, where conditions are very unequal…. This aristocratic notion of liberty produces, among those who have imbibed it, an exalted idea of their own individual value, and a passionate love of independence…. —Alexis de Tocqueville1
“On peut voir dans la liberté l'usage d'un droit commun ou la jouissance d'un privilège. Vouloir être libre … non parce que tous les hommes ont un droit général à l'indépendance mais parce qu'on possède soi-même un droit particulier à rester indépendant, telle était la manière dont on entendait la liberté au Moyen-Age et telle qu'on l'a presque toujours comprise dans les sociétés aristocratiques où les conditions sont très inégales…. Cette notion aristocratique de la liberté produit chez ceux qui l'ont un sentiment exalté de leur valeur individuelle, un goût passioné pour l'indépendance.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Etat social de la France avant et depuis 1789, ed. Mayer des O.C. (Paris, 1952), II, p. 62. The English translation that appears above is by John Stuart Mill from The London and Westminster Review, vol. 25 (April 1836), 165.
I. Introduction
The question I want to look at is this: “How many ‘freedoms’ are there in Plato's Laws?” This question parallels the philosophical (and historical) question as to how many “freedoms” there are in general—one, two, or three? I am, of course, alluding to the debate prompted by Isaiah Berlin's famous 1958 lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty,” and especially to the replies of Gerald MacCallum and Quentin Skinner. MacCallum advocated the reduction of Berlin's two concepts to a single one; Skinner saw the need to consider a third concept of liberty.2
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), in Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); quoted from the abridged reprint in David Miller, ed., Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 33–57. Gerald C. MacCallum, Jr., “Negative and Positive Freedom” (1967), reprinted in Miller, ed., Liberty, 100–122; Quentin Skinner, “A Third Concept of Liberty” (The Isaiah Berlin Lecture), Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2001): 237–68; cf. also Skinner, “The Paradoxes of Political Liberty” (1986), reprinted in Miller, ed., Liberty, 183–205. On MacCallum's position, see also Eric Nelson, “Liberty: One Concept Too Many?” Political Theory 33, no. 1 (February 2005): 58–78.
“Freedom,” as I use the term, refers either to (1) the statutory or legal usage of the Greek word eleutheros, which I (as others do) take to be its original or fundamental meaning (the distinction between free men and slaves), or to (2) its derivative “political freedom,” a notion whose complexity stems from the fact that it applies both to the freedom of the state (in analogy to the statutory freedom of an individual) and to the freedom of the individual within the state.3
This relationship between individual freedom and the freedom of the state is crucial for the republican notion of liberty (see Skinner's essays cited in the preceding note), but is not restricted to it.
On the relationship between this broad meaning and Aristotle's far more restricted concept of “liberality,” see Section III below. In that section, I offer an enumeration of “liberal” qualities, all of which are associated with some form of gentlemanliness.
MacCallum, “Negative and Positive Freedom,” 102.
In any case, things here are slippery. What “positive liberty” means or implies is far from obvious, as can be seen from the discussion prompted by Berlin's essay. In the first pages of his essay, Berlin states that he does not propose “to discuss either the history or the more than two hundred senses of this protean word [that is, ‘liberty’] recorded by the historians of ideas.” Rather, he intends “to examine no more than two of those senses—but those central ones, with a great deal of human history behind them, and, I dare say, still to come.”6
Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 33.
For two very different accounts of why not, see Charles Taylor, “What Is Wrong with Negative Liberty” (1979), in Taylor, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 211–29; and Skinner, “A Third Concept” and “The Paradoxes of Political Liberty.”
See Nelson, “Liberty: One Concept Too Many?”
Nelson himself talks about “metaphor” rather than talking about a “focal meaning” model. I think a “focal meaning” model is more appropriate to describe the relation between the various senses of the term eleutheros. The point, however, can be left aside here.
Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 49. The context makes clear that Berlin is here speaking of positive freedom. Cf. Nelson, “Liberty: One Concept Too Many?” 60.
If freedom consists in some sort of “self-mastery,” then Plato seems to be even more concerned with freedom than Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, or Marx, whose spiritual father he is supposed to be (on Berlin's view). Self-mastery does indeed play an important role in Plato's thought. In Plato, however, self-mastery is connected with virtue, rather than with freedom. Indeed, Plato hardly uses the term eleutheros and kindred terms when discussing self-mastery or free choice (“liberty”).11
This has been stressed by Myles Burnyeat in an unpublished paper, “Ancient Freedoms,” which he kindly communicated to me some years ago. It mainly deals, as far as Plato is concerned, with the Republic. I hope the material I present here from the Laws will be useful for shaping the final version of Burnyeat's paper.
See, e.g., Robert Müller, La doctrine platonicienne de la liberté (Paris: Vrin, 1997).
See note 11.
Although slaves are barely mentioned at all in the Republic, and only, as it were, through a slip of the tongue, their existence is presupposed in that work, as has been convincingly argued by Gregory Vlastos.14
Gregory Vlastos, “Slavery in Plato's Thought” (1941), in Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 2d ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 147–63.
Typical in this respect are the occurrences in Books 8, 9, and 10 of the Laws. See, for example, the series of occurrences in Book 9, around the theme: “if a slave kills or inflicts injuries to a free man” (866d5; 867c5; 868c2; 869d5; 872b4; 879a2; 882a2 and b3). Further occurrences: 761e1; 842d2. The same legal use provides the basis of the formulas aiming at expressing exhaustiveness (665c2; 838d7; 949c6; 954e6; 930d4; 936b7). See further 874c2; 881c2; 881d7; 909c2 and 5; 914a5–7, c1; 927d7; 932d3; and 937a5.
II. Plato's Laws, Book 3 and Book 6: Where Has Freedom Gone?
Book 3 of the Laws, which constitutes a relatively self-contained piece, aims at showing, on the basis of historical considerations, that the division of powers and a mixed constitution provide the sole guarantee of the authority of the laws. Especially interesting in this respect are (on the one hand) the historical fate of the three Doric cities of Argos, Messene, and Sparta, and (on the other hand) the analysis of the grandeur and decadence of ancient Persia and ancient Athens. Although the two discussions are part of the same demonstration, all the occurrences of eleutheros that interest us occur in the second passage. This fact is significant, as we shall see.
Plato analyzes the circumstances under which “the common resolution of the Athenians and the Lacedemonians” (692e) was able to save the freedom of all Greece against Persian despotism. It is significant that one of the main passages in which the Platonic concept of freedom comes to the fore in the Laws occurs in this context. For, as far as we know, the unexpected victory of the Greeks against the Persians in the Persian Wars turns out to be the framework in which eleutheros and cognate terms really came to be first associated with the idea of a politically independent city, that is, one which is not subject to any other foreign master, as a slave is to his domestic master.16
See Kurt Raaflaub's classic 1985 book Die Entdeckung der Freiheit, now available in English in a revised version: Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Here is what Plato writes at 692e–693c:17
The translations of the passages I quote below (numbered T1a through T26) are all taken from Thomas L. Pangle, The Laws of Plato, translated with notes and an interpretative essay (New York: Basic Books, 1980). I have introduced slight, occasional modifications, mainly of a terminological nature. I adopt, in particular, “constitution” instead of “regime”; “the many” or “people” instead of “populace”; and “wisdom” instead of “prudence.” Also, I have italicized sentences with occurrences of the terms “free,” “freedom,” “slave,” or other terms that are important in the context of this discussion.
[T1a] There are many things that went on during the war at that time that would be the occasion for someone's making unseemly accusations against Greece. And if one were to say that Greece defended itself, he would not speak correctly; had not the common resolution of the Athenians and the Lacedemonians [693a] warded off the approaching slavery, the Greeks would by this time probably be all mixed together and the barbarians with the Greeks and the Greeks with the barbarians…. These are the things, Clinias and Megillus, for which we can blame the so-called statesmen and lawgivers of old—and also the ones now. And the reason we engage in such blame is to investigate the causes [693b] and to find out what should have been done differently. [a] As we said in the present case, they shouldn't have legislated great ruling offices, or unmixed authority; they should have considered something like the following: that a city should be free and wise and a friend to itself, and that the lawgiver should give his laws with a view to these things. [b] By the way, let's not be surprised to find that we have often before laid down goals which we've asserted the lawgiver should look to when he lays down his laws [693c], but that the goals don't appear to be the same for us each time. One should reason as follows: when we assert one should look toward moderation, or toward wisdom, or friendship, these goals are not different but the same. Even if many other words of this sort crop up, let's not let it disturb us.
The passage I have italicized is composed of two parts, the first of which ([a]) contrasts a legislative/constitutional scheme that would give a great or unmixed power to the magistrates with an alternative scheme that would reject such an arrangement in view of the fact that a city must be free, wise, and a friend to itself. The second part ([b]) contains a methodological remark that sounds rather surprising due to its quasi-epicurean overtone, a remark whose importance has, I think, been overlooked by commentators.
Concerning the first part ([a]), I believe it is important to notice that the two contrasted schemes are not exactly at the same level. Whereas the rejected proposition is of a constitutional kind (it concerns the question of what the magistracies, arkhai, should be like), the positive counterpart concerns the consequences, for the city, of its constitutional framework. The result of a constitutional scheme relying on (too) powerful or unblended magistracies is that it suppresses freedom, wisdom, and friendship among the citizens.
What is the exact status of these three items (freedom, wisdom, and friendship)? Obviously, the Athenian considers them necessary features of a desirable city, and this is enough to make them “goals” of a certain kind. The legislator must legislate “with a view to them” (bleponta pros); they are a target (skopos) for him. But does this make them proper ends, rather than, say, necessary conditions?18
I am not suggesting that there is in Plato a terminological distinction between skopos and telos of the kind we later find among Cyrenaics or Stoics.
The Athenian insists that what he has just said contains an element of surprise (me thaumasomen),19
For another such surprise, see Laws, Book 5, 735a.
The first step, of course, is to identify the various items that have been mentioned so far as being the goal of the legislator. I think we can distinguish four of them: (a) the best (628c6); (b) external peace and internal concord (628c9–d1); (c) the happiness of the city and of the citizen (628d5; cf. 683b); and (d) virtue considered as a whole and its constitutive parts (630e). Now we can try to clarify the relationship between these different items. Obviously, the status of (a) is special, in that it is purely formal and does not provide for any specification; it can be left aside. Items (c) and (d) belong together, inasmuch as the possession of virtue is supposed to be the sufficient condition for happiness; but, again, “happiness” possesses a degree of formality that makes it akin to (a). We are thus left with (b) and (d) as specifications of the goal of the legislator. Their status and relationship is not immediately clear. But item (b), the first legislative goal to be mentioned in the course of the argument, is obviously set as a plausible alternative to the goal set by the Dorian institution, namely, war. The relationship of external peace and internal concord to the doctrine of the virtues, partial and total, needs to be worked out, but I think there is no doubt that in the same way that virtue secures happiness it also secures peace (at least internal peace). In short, the more encompassing formula for the specified version of the goal of the legislator is “(total) virtue.”
Now we can ask ourselves, as a second step, how these various goals, related as they are, connect with the three goals mentioned at 693b, namely, freedom, wisdom, and friendship. Let us take these three items in reverse order, which happens to correspond to their increasing difficulty.
Friendship is the simplest case, for it can be equated with peace, or the absence of war. In this case, the relationship of this term to the previous ones is one of synonymy or direct equivalence. We can represent friendship with (b′), to make clear its relation to (b).
The case of wisdom is a bit more complicated. Phronesis is the highest good and the highest virtue (virtues are “divine goods”), the one on which all others depend for their goodness (631c6). Thus, for a city to be emphron is for it to be under the control of the highest virtue, and hence of virtue tout court. Although the relation between the two items is not the same as in the case of friendship—we have to deal with metonymy rather than synonymy, so to speak—we can still call wisdom (d′), to make it correspond to (d).
Whether in the case of (b′) or (d′), then, we can easily follow the Athenian's plea for excuse concerning terminological variation. The case of freedom, however, is different. Two striking facts should give us pause here: (1) eleutheria has not been mentioned before as one of the targets of legislation, either directly or indirectly (through synonymous or metonymic terms); and (2) the second, explanatory or apologetic part of the relevant passage does not mention freedom again, for the three items we get at 693c2f. are moderation (sophrosune), wisdom, and friendship.20
Interestingly, Martin Schanz thought that pros to sophronein should be deleted. (Martin Schanz, Platonis opera quae feruntur omnia, vol. XII.1, 1879, as reported in John Burnet, Platonis Opera, Oxford Classical Text, 1907.) Klaus Schöpsdau, in his commentary (Platon, Nomoi/Gesetze. Buch I–III [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1994], 450), rightly defends the transmitted text.
Some help may be drawn from the lines that follow. Here is what Clinias replies (Book 3, 693c–d):
[T1b] We'll make an attempt to proceed in this way when we go back over the arguments. But for now, tell us what you intended to say—just what is it the lawgiver should aim at with regard to friendship and wisdom and freedom.21
The suggestion is not, as we might think at first reading, that the legislator has an aim beyond the three items mentioned. The problem is grammatical. I take it that (pros) hoti is not an interrogative depending on the imperative lege whose reference would be distinct from to peri tes philias … , but rather a relative, to peri … being the direct complement of lege: “But for now tell us about the conjunct friendship and wisdom and freedom that you were willing to explain that it should be aimed at.”
Two things are to be noted here. First, the expression to peri stresses the unity of the three items. Second, these three items are now listed in an order contrary to the order of [T1a]. This small fact is significant, I think. Taken with the substitution of “moderation” for “freedom” at 693c3, it may be interpreted as the beginning of eleutheria's disappearance.
Now the Athenian engages in the requested exposition (693d–e):
[T1c] Listen, then. There are, as it were, two mother-constitutions. It would be correct for someone to say that the others spring from these, and correct to call one monarchy and the other democracy, and to say that the Persian type is the full development of the former, while my people's country is the full development of the latter. Almost all other regimes, as I said, are woven from these. Now a constitution must partake of these two forms if there is to be freedom and friendship, together with wisdom: [693e] this is what the argument wishes to set before us when it says that no city will ever have a fine political life if it lacks a share in either of these.
In this passage, the Athenian does not give any further clarification about the goals themselves; rather, he indicates how the goals are achieved, namely, through a constitution that “partakes” (metalabein) in a certain way of the two highest “mother-constitutions,” namely, monarchy and democracy. But we should notice, again, a change in the manner in which the goal is specified. Instead of being simply coordinated, as in the two preceding instances, the three items now appear to implement a binary structure: freedom and friendship (that is, the two extreme terms of the two preceding triadic enumerations) on the one hand, and wisdom on the other hand.22
Another manner of linking the items would be: liberty on the one hand; friendship with wisdom on the other. But I don't think this would lead us anywhere.
The link between the rule of a single individual (the king) and wisdom is stressed in Plato's Politicus.
When Plato in Book 6 (756e) comes to characterize the constitution of his own projected city, and more specifically the manner in which the magistrates should be chosen (by reference to the two mother-constitutions mentioned in Book 3), he presents it as a mean (meson, meseuein) between those two (Book 6, 756e–757a):
[T2] This selection procedure would strike a mean between a monarchic and a democratic constitution, which is the mean the constitution should always aim for.
The justification Plato gives refers only to friendship, which cannot be secured under either of the two mother-constitutions: not under a monarchy, “for slaves and masters would never become friends” (757a), and not in a democracy, because it is equally impossible that friendship should prosper between “bad” and “good” men, even when they occupy equal positions: “equal rewards would become unequal if they were distributed to men who are unequal, unless the distribution struck a proper measure.”
The striking feature of this passage, when compared to the parallel passage in Book 3 ([T1]), is that whereas it refers to “friendship,” no mention is made of freedom. It is true that there is no mention of wisdom or intelligence either. But while accordance with reason may be presupposed, the absence of freedom requires a specific explanation.
It seems to me that the concept of “mediation,” which I have employed elsewhere to explain some essential features of the constitution in Plato's Laws, might be helpful here.24
See André Laks, Médiation et coercition (Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2005), 61f.
The same line of thought could be followed, of course, with the other term of the pair, namely “despotism,” and could provide for a confirmation of the analysis about “freedom.” See Laks, Médiation et coercition, 62.
Consider the way the Athenian describes the manner in which freedom functions in Persia under Cyrus (Book 3, 694a–b):
[T3] The Persians under Cyrus, possessing the proper amount of slavery and freedom, began by becoming free and then became despots over many others. For the rulers shared their freedom with the ruled and drew toward equality: as a result the soldiers felt more friendly [694b] toward their generals and faced danger with eager spirit. Moreover, if someone among them was wise and capable of giving counsel, the king wasn't jealous but allowed freedom of speech and honored those capable of giving counsel; hence, a man was willing to share his capacity, in their midst, as something common. Everything prospered for them in those days because of freedom and friendship and a common sharing in intelligence.
The final triadic expression (because of freedom and friendship and a common sharing in intelligence) presents once more an interesting variation with respect to the initial formula, in that it suggests the way “wisdom” is implemented: namely, by some “common sharing of intelligence” (nou koinonia). This last expression obviously refers to a situation where the king considers the advice of counselors. By implication, eleutheria, in spite of its generality, would refer to the specific form freedom takes under Cyrus.
The more important point, however, is that the passage clearly shows that freedom cannot be considered as a separate goal—no more than slavery or, for that matter, despotism can. For what is really aimed at, and implemented in its specific way by Cyrus's regime, is to metrion douleias te kai eleutherias, the mean between slavery and liberty. This shows clearly in the general conclusion of the passage (698a):
[T4] Then let this be the end of the discussion of what pertains to the Persians, and of how their affairs are at present incorrectly managed because of an excess of slavery and despotism.
Now the idea of a mean implies that there are degrees of proximity to the mean. Persia under Cyrus represents one such degree; ancient Athens would represent another one; the city of the Laws a still different one. It is possible that the adaptability of the scheme is linguistically reflected in the triadic, apparently paratactic, formula that describes the legislative target in [T1a], if one admits that the binding particles (te kai … kai) are as important as the terms they bind. The meaning and implications of those particles also oscillate between the two poles of mixis and krasis, since in certain contexts they indicate something more than addition, namely inseparability and even equivalence. In any case, it should be clear that the triadic conjunct, paratactically construed, is less universal than a first reading of 693b [T1a] suggests. Freedom is the specific antidote of despotism, an equilibrating factor in a given situation, viewed from one extreme, so to speak. The formula would probably not have been the same, if we were talking about Athens, that is, starting from the other extreme.
In this context, it is important to ask what exactly stands beyond the general formula at 694a5f. (“freedom bestowed by the archontes to the archomenoi”). In 694b4, freedom appears as freedom of speech, parrhesia, whose counterpart is the readiness of the king to listen to his advisers. Does freedom extend beyond that? One may doubt it, although [T5] does say that freedom is that of “the many” (697c–d):
[T5] We have been led to speak about these things at greater length because of the investigation into the constitution of the Persians. We find that they got worse year by year, and we claim the cause of this [was that] by going too far in depriving the many of freedom, and by bringing in more despotism than is appropriate, they destroyed [697d] the friendship and community within the city. Once this is corrupted, the policy of the rulers is no longer made for the sake of the ruled and the many, but instead for the sake of their own rule.
This passage makes it clear that freedom, although a goal, is submitted to various constraints and limitations. This is further confirmed by the passage on Athens that provides the counterpart of Persian decadence. As 699e shows, in spite of their differences, or rather because of their differences, the Athenian and the Persian cases boil down to the same thing:
[T6] See how this sounds to you: my people have in a way suffered the same thing the Persians suffered—they by leading their people into complete slavery and we by leading the majority in the opposite direction, into complete freedom. Given this, the arguments we laid down earlier are in a way fine for showing us what we should say here and how we should say it.
Consider now the beginning of this section (698a–b):
[T7] Next we should go through the discussion of what pertains to the Attic constitution in the same way, showing how total freedom from all rule is to no small extent inferior to a measured degree of rule by others. [698b] For at that time, when the Persian expedition came against the Greeks, and probably against all the settlements in Europe, there was an ancient constitution with certain rulers based on a division into four classes. In it was a certain despotic mistress—Awe—on account of whom we were willing to live as slaves of the laws that then existed.
Just as authority was presupposed in the Persian case (as accompanying monarchic power), the assumption must be that ancient Athens was free in a certain way. It is worth noticing, however, that the presence of freedom in ancient Athens is from the outset rather discreet. It is not mentioned at 698b, and whatever it might consist of, a further passage makes clear that it does not belong to the common people, whose freedom is tacitly equated with liberty from the constraints of the law in 700a (which follows [T6]):
[T8] Under the ancient laws, my friends, the many in our city were not sovereign over certain matters but were rather voluntarily enslaved, in a certain sense, to the laws.
In any case, what the Athenian insists on in his description of ancient Athens is the counterbalancing presence of an authoritative element: Awe or Reverence (aidos), a moral feeling which significantly enough is called despotis (a despot), although it should be clear that it operates in a way which is certainly different from that of a human despot (as a matter of fact, it represents a further instance of mediation). This obviously has something to do with the fact that the kind of slavery it generates is rather special, “a voluntary slavery to the law.” To take up the idea of the linguistic manifestation, in the text of the Laws, of the process of mediation, we could say that it lies in this case in the use of metaphor on the one hand (the despotic power being that of a feeling) and oxymoron on the other (voluntary slavery).
In Book 3, 700a–701b, we get the famous description of “the excessive development of the free way of life” (ten tou eleutherou lian epidosin tou biou) in Athens, beginning with disrespect for rules governing music, followed by unchecked democracy, and ending in the return to our “Titanic nature” (701c) through “theatrocracy” (700a–701b, following [T6] and [T8]):
[T9] Which laws are you speaking of?—First those regulating the music of that time—if we are to start from the origin of the excessive development of the free way of life. Our music in those days was divided according to its own forms and postures. There was a form of song comprising [700b] prayers sung to the gods, called “hymns”; opposite to this was another form of song which someone might well call “dirges.” “Paeans” were another…. [700c] The authority that knew about these things and used its knowledge to judge them, penalizing anyone who disobeyed, was not, as is the case today, whistling, nor the majority, with its unmusical shouts, nor the clapping that bestows praise. Instead it was accepted practice for the educated to listen in silence until the end, while the children and their attendants and the general mob were kept in order by the threat of a beating. [700d] So the majority of the citizens were willing to be ruled in an orderly fashion in these respects, and did not dare to render judgment by their noise. But later, with the passage of time, the poets became rulers and held sway over unmusical lawlessness. Although by nature poetic, the poets were ignorant about what is just and lawful for the Muse. In a sort of Bacchic frenzy, more overwhelmed by pleasure than they should have been, they jumbled together dirges with hymns and paeans with dithyrambs; they used kithara sounds to imitate the sound of the flute—they confounded everything. [700e] In their mindlessness they involuntarily falsified music itself when they asserted that there was no such thing as correct music, and that it was quite correct to judge music by the standard of the pleasure it gives to whoever enjoys it, whether he be better or worse. By creating works of this kind, and then by adding these sorts of arguments, they instilled in the many a lawlessness as regards music, and made them dare to suppose that they were adequate judges. The outcome was that the theaters have become noisy [701a] instead of quiet, claiming to understand what is beautiful in the Muses and what is not; and in place of an aristocracy in music, a wretched theatrocracy has emerged. If there had emerged only a democracy of free men in music, what has happened wouldn't be so terrible. But as it was, the opinion that everyone is clever in everything, together with lawlessness, originated in our music, and freedom followed. People became fearless, as if they were knowers, and the absence of fear engendered shamelessness. For to be so bold [701b] as not to fear the opinion of someone who is better, this is almost the same as vile shamelessness, and springs from an excessively brazen freedom.
The passage makes abundantly clear, without any further comment, that essential to Plato's admission of freedom as a goal is the question of its scope. Just note that the indefinite article “an” before “freedom,” in the last sentence, does not quite render the Greek tis (= “a sort of”), which is used in order to qualify the decadent freedom of Athenian democracy, as if Plato is suggesting that this is not real freedom.26
In the same vein, cf. the demokratia tis at 701a4.
In Book 3, 701d–e, the Athenian, harking back to the beginning of the whole discussion, concludes:
[T10] We said that the lawgiver must in laying down his laws aim at three things, namely that the city for which he legislates be free, that it be friend to itself, and that it possess intelligence. Those were the goals—weren't they?—Certainly. [701e]—For the sake of these things we chose the most despotic constitution and the freest, and are now investigating which of these is correctly governed. We have seen that when either—the despotic and the free—was limited within measure, affairs went outstandingly well, but when either marched on to its extreme—the one to slavery and the other to the opposite—there was no advantage in either case.
I have argued on the basis of the material provided in Book 3 that freedom in Plato is neither an independent nor an absolute end. Essential to Plato's project, rather, is that man be a slave (namely to the law), even if he should be a “voluntary slave.” As we know, Rousseau and Kant redefined “freedom” in terms of obedience to the law, and this is a conceptual move that Plato could certainly have entertained. He did not, however. This may have something to do with the fact that freedom's positive dimension remains, for him, tightly linked with “liberality,” to which I turn in the following section, rather than with “liberty,” which is always prone to become excessive.
III. Liberality Dawns
Plato does not have any specific term for what I call “liberality.” The words eleutherios and eleutheriotês are used infrequently in Plato: there are seven occurrences of the former and two of the latter in the whole corpus; three and none respectively in the Laws.27
Eleutherios is found in the Laws at 635d6, 669c7, and 823e6. Two interesting occurrences of eleutheros in Tht. 173a and 175e should be added, where the indirect tradition gives eleutherios.
Cf. Edmond Lévy, “Platon et la liberté,” Ktema (2003): 33–46, at 43. Especially interesting in this respect is [T24] below, as well as [T11] below.
What I am interested in here, however, is the broader concept, whose scope emerges from a series of scattered passages in Plato's Laws, which I have numbered from [T11] to [T26]. All of them reflect in a variety of ways some then-current normative views about the type of behavior that is appropriate for free men, behavior that corresponds to what [T23] calls, in general, a life “lived in a liberal state of mind” (en eleutheroi phronemati bebiokos).
These qualities can be divided into active (what a free man should do) and passive (the manner in which he should be treated). As far as active qualities are concerned:
—A free man moves his body in a certain way, sticking to certain rhythms and tunes, which excludes his being involved in comedy (Book 2, 669c, and Book 8, 816d–e):
[T11] The Muses would never make a mistake like setting a man's words to a woman's color and tune, or like harmonizing the tune and postures of free men with the rhythms and postures of slaves and men who are not free, or, again, giving to free (eleutherion) rhythms and postures they've constructed a tune or speech that contradicts the rhythms.
[T12] This brings to a conclusion the discussion of how beautiful bodies and well-born souls behave in the choral performances that have been prescribed; but it is necessary to look at and get to know what pertains to shameful bodies and thoughts, as well as those who turn themselves to laughter-provoking comedies—through speech and song, dance, and the comic imitations all these contain…. [816e] … The imitation of such things should be assigned to slaves and to strangers who work for hire. There should never be any seriousness whatsoever about these things, nor should any free person, woman or man, be observed learning these things.
—A free man practices hunting in a certain way (Book 8, 823e–824a):
[T13] O friends, may you never be seized by a desire or a passionate love for hunting on the sea, for angling, or in general for hunting of the animals that dwell in water, or for those basket-traps that perform the toil of a lazy hunt, whether the hunters are awake or asleep…. May a seductive love of bird-hunting, which is hardly a liberal pursuit (eleutherios), never come over any of the young! [824a] What is left for our athletes is only the hunting and catching of animals that move on their feet.
—A free man does not engage in trade (money-making), for this is vulgar (Book 5, 741e):
[T14] For under such a system great money-making is impossible, and the consequence is that there should not and cannot be anyone who makes money in any way from illiberal pursuits. No one need seek in any way to accumulate money from the sort of occupation that receives the contemptible epithet “gross vulgarity” (banausia) and that can distort the character of a free man.
—A free man has his own way to make compliments (Book 3, 688d):
[T15] It would be rather tasteless for us to praise you in speech, stranger, but we will enthusiastically praise you in deed. We will follow what is said with attentive spirits, and it's in this way that a free man makes clear what he finds praiseworthy and what he does not.
—A free man must be knowledgeable in a certain number of scientific matters, although only in a certain way (Book 8, 817e and 819a):
[T16] Let these be the lawfully ordained customs as regards the entire choral art and the learning connected with it, the things appropriate for the slaves being kept separate from the things appropriate for the masters…. For the free men there are in addition three subjects to be learned. One subject is calculation and what pertains to numbers; second is measurement of length, surface, and volume, considered as one subject; third is the way the stars revolve, in their natural relation to one another as they move.
[T17] After all, extreme lack of experience in everything is not at all a terrible thing, nor is it the greatest evil; a far greater penalty is incurred by much experience, and much learning, acquired under a bad course of study…. So one should declare that the free men must learn, in each of these subjects, as much as the whole mob of children in Egypt learns along with their reading lessons.
—A free man exercises persuasion, rather than compulsion, and this he does in a certain way. In this case, the talk is about legislators and doctors (Book 4, 719e–720d, and Book 9, 857c–d):
[T18] Is the one who is in charge of the laws … just going to explain straightaway what must and must not be done, add the threat of a penalty, and turn to another law, [720a] without adding a single encouragement or bit of persuasion to his legislative edicts? … [T]here is one sort of doctor who [proceeds] in this way, and another sort who [proceeds] in the other way each time he takes care of us…. [720b] Sick people in the cities, slaves and free, are treated differently. [720c] The slaves are for the most part treated by slaves…. None of these latter doctors gives or receives any account of each malady afflicting each domestic slave. Instead, he gives him orders on the basis of the opinions he has derived from experience…. [720d] The free doctor mostly cares for and looks after the diseases of free men. He investigates these from their beginning and according to nature, communing with the patient himself and his friends, and he both learns something himself from the invalids and, as much as he can, teaches the one who is sick. He doesn't give orders until he has in some sense persuaded; when he has on each occasion tamed the sick person with persuasion, he attempts to succeed in leading him back to health.
[T19] We didn't make a bad image, when we compared all those living under legislation that exists now, to slaves being doctored by slaves…. If one of those doctors who practices medicine on the basis of experiences rather than reason should ever encounter a free doctor [857d] carrying on a dialogue with a free man who was sick—using arguments that come close to philosophizing, grasping the disease from its source, and going back up to the whole nature of bodies—he would swiftly burst out laughing and would say nothing other than what is always said about such things by most of the so-called doctors. For he would declare: “Idiot! You're not doctoring the sick man, you're practically educating him, as if what he needed were to become a doctor, rather than healthy.”
As far as passive qualities are concerned, a free man, in contrast with a slave, can be admonished (Book 6, 777e):
[T20] Of course, it is necessary to punish slaves in a just way, and not spoil them by mere chiding, as if they were free men. And in speaking with a domestic servant one should almost always use a straightforward command; one should never joke with domestic servants in any way….
—A free man should be punished in a certain way (Book 7, 793e–794a):
[T21] [T]he character of their souls [the souls of children between three and six] would require games, while punishment must be employed to detach them from luxury. The punishment should not be dishonorable, but just as we said before in the case of slaves, that one should punish in a way that is not insolent and hence does not instill anger in those who are punished, yet which doesn't permit luxury by leaving them unpunished [794a], so in the case of the free-born the same rule holds good… .29
Cf. also Book 8, 845c3.
—A free man must be investigated in a certain way (Book 12, 946c):
[T22] In the first year they are to elect twelve such Auditors, until each has attained the age of seventy-five, and afterward three are to be added each year. These are to divide all the offices into twelve parts and examine them by means of every test appropriate for free men.
—Finally, a free man must be persuaded in a certain way. (See [T18] and [T19], quoted above.)
This set of heterogeneous features can be ordered and gradually derived from the statutory sense of “freedom,” a derivation where prejudice and ideology obviously play an important role.
A free man, in the statutory sense, is somebody who is unconstrained in that he is no one's slave. Moreover, because he himself owns slaves, he is not constrained by manual work (this is what slaves are for), or, for that matter, by the necessity of engaging in trade (this is reserved to metics, metoikoi). In other words, he is free from all external constraints. Hence, all that is associated with vulgar activities (banausia), such as comedy, is alien to him. Not being constrained by manual work, he has free time, skhole. How does a free man occupy his free time? In the classical tradition, which is mainly linked to Aristotle's name, this free time is dedicated to education and cultivation of knowledge. Hence the “liberal arts.”30
On the tradition of liberal arts, see Ilsetraut Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1984).
“Liberality,” then, is a normative term, whose scope is related to, but very different from, the statutory, legal sense of the term “freedom.” Liberality is a kind of spirit, a certain way of life (Book 9, 865d–e):
[T23] If someone should involuntarily kill a free man, let him purify himself by the same purifications as in the case of one who kills a slave, and let him not underestimate a certain old saying of the ancient myths. It is said that he who dies a violent death after having lived in a liberal state of mind feels, when freshly dead, spirited rage against the perpetrator….
Indeed, it is not altogether easy to define what “liberality” boils down to (Book 11, 919d–e):
[T24] Among the Magnesians … no one of those who hold a share of land among the five thousand forty hearths is ever voluntarily or involuntarily to become a retail trader, or a wholesale trader, or render any mental service whatsoever to private persons who do not return to him an equal service [919e]—except for his father and mother, and family members of a still earlier generation, and all those who are elder than he, who are free and whom he serves in a liberal way. It's not easy to legislate exactly what is liberal (eleutherikos) and what is illiberal, but let it be judged by those who have obtained recognition for excellence in hating the latter and embracing the former.
The normative aspect of liberality points to a distinction similar to the one that one reads of in Aristotle between “slave” and “natural slave.” Whereas you are, as a matter of fact, a slave or a free man, you do not necessarily behave according to your status. A statutory slave could, in principle, behave liberally. It cannot be said, of course, that this line of thought is really pursued by Plato. But he is, at any rate, clear about the fact that one can be a free man and nevertheless act in a slavish way, and hence not be free in the required sense. This explains why eleutheros has sometimes been translated in this context with the term “gentleman.”31
See, for example, Robert G. Bury's rendering (in the Loeb collection of Plato's works [London, 1926]) of the last sentence of [T24]: “What is becoming, what unbecoming for a gentleman (to eleutherikon kai aneleutheron) it is not easy to fix by law.”
Two passages or sets of passages among those that deal with the liberal character are of special interest, both in themselves and because of their relationship. These are [T18] and [T19], quoted above, and [T25] below. I have written a number of times about the two former passages.32
Most recently in Médiation et coercition, 111–25, and in “Préambule sur les préambules” (forthcoming in Rhetorica 2007/1).
In order to explain the notion of a legislative preamble, [T18] and [T19] draw a comparison between medical and legislative practices, or, more precisely, between two different medical and legislative practices. There is a slavish and a free manner of practicing legislation, just as there is a slavish and a free manner of practicing medicine. Passage [T18] argues that the legislator should persuade the citizens (this is the function of the preamble) in the same way that the free physician undertakes to persuade his patients. Otherwise, the legislator would act in a slavish way, which amounts to using violence, and thus to acting despotically (the paradox is intentional). Passage [T19] goes much further than [T18] in that the kind of persuasion that the physician is supposed to practice is meant to be rational persuasion, something which is not implied, or even suggested, by [T18]. Thus, [T19] develops a radicalized version (which I have called “utopian”) of what free medicine, and hence free legislation, should be: namely, a full-blown, rational or didactic education (paideia) to virtue.
The interesting thing about this couple of passages is that they establish some kind of relationship between free legislating, on the one hand, and rationality, on the other. The main point is that exercising rationality takes time, time that only free men have at their disposal. Although the word skhole, “leisure,” does not occur in the context, it does play a background role. Skhole is also, in a somewhat oblique way, the main theme of [T25], an extraordinary passage which is explicitly devoted to insisting that “free time,” when it comes to the acquisition of virtue, must in fact be thought of as the highest form of its contrary, namely “business” (askholia) (Book 8, 807c–d):
[T25] And for men who lived this way the activity (ergon) that would be left is neither the smallest nor the humblest, we assert, but is in fact the greatest of all the tasks that can be assigned by a just law. For just as the life of a man who aims at victory in the Pythian or Olympian games wholly lacks leisure for all the other activities, so doubly or so much more than doubly lacking in leisure is the life that's most correctly called a “life”—that of a man who is devoted to cultivating his body in all respects and his soul as regards virtue. [807d] Not even a small part of any of the other activities should be allowed to pose an obstacle to his giving the body its appropriate exercises and food, and the soul teachings and habits; the whole night and day are scarcely sufficient time for the man who's doing this to get the complete and adequate benefit from these things. Given that this is the way things are by nature, it follows that there should be a schedule regulating how all the free men spend all their time, beginning almost at dawn and extending to the next dawn and rising of the sun.
Passage [T25], on the one hand, and [T18] and [T19], on the other, differ in that the latter pair of texts confronts the citizen with the legislator, whereas in [T25] the citizen is, so to speak, left alone with himself. But [T25] and [T18]/[T19] also correspond to two different models of paideia, “education.” One can, as a matter of fact, distinguish two reasons why the exercise of rationality requires time, and hence freedom from all other occupations: first, because rationality is a complex process, involving a lot of knowledge and difficult problems to be solved (this would be an internal reason); and second, because rationality encounters resistance coming from factors external to it, namely, from irrational desires and affections. Whereas [T18] and [T19] draw on the first model, [T25] relies on the second one, which reflects the official conception of education advocated by the Laws.33
See the definitions of paideia in Book 1, 643a, and Book 2, 653b, 659c–d.
In an unpublished article titled “Ancient Freedoms,” Myles Burnyeat argues, mainly on the basis of the Republic, that although Plato already possessed, through his analysis of self-mastery, all the analytical tools necessary to elaborate a notion of positive (or “metaphysical”) freedom, he lacked the linguistic resources for calling it “freedom.”34
See note 11 above.
[T26] I think the same legislator should have thought the same thing about pleasures. He should have said to himself: “If our citizens grow up from youth lacking experience in the greatest pleasures, if they aren't practiced in enduring pleasures and in never being compelled to do anything shameful [635d], their softness of spirit before pleasures will lead them to suffer the same thing as those who are overcome by fears. They will be enslaved in another and more shameful fashion to those who are capable of enduring pleasures, who know about pleasures, and who are sometimes human beings vicious in every way. They'll have souls that are part slave and part free, and will not be worthy of being called courageous and free men (eleutherioi) without qualification.”
What the Athenian argues here is that if one does not exercise the soul to resist pleasures as well as pains by exposing it to them (something which Spartan education not only neglects, but straightforwardly rejects), then the citizens, and hence their cities, will fall slave to those who do know how to resist pleasures, because their own souls will be only half free (free with respect to pains, but not with respect to pleasures). Freedom is here explicitly conceived as domination of pleasures or self-domination. This may comfort both those who make Plato the ancestor of “positive liberty,” and those who argue that allegedly positive Platonic liberty is but a special instance of negative liberty, since to be free, in this case, is to free oneself from irrational drives.35
Note that freedom consists here in the very process of freeing oneself from internal constraint. One is not free; one must devote one's life to securing freedom.
IV. Conclusion
How many freedoms are there in Plato's Laws, then? One, two, or three? As far as the occurrences of eleutheros and related words are concerned, the correct answer might well be: two and a half—not counting, of course, the basic, statutory meaning of the term. There is, first, the constitutional meaning of freedom, which is put to work in Book 3 (and only there) in order to analyze moderately good as well as degenerate forms of historical constitutions. Strikingly enough, this freedom does not play any subsequent role in the shaping of the Platonic constitution itself. The absence of such a role for freedom is due, I have suggested, to a model of “mediation” according to which, as in the Aristotelian theory of the virtues, neither of the two extremes to be mediated subsists as such in the perfect “mean.”
There is, second, scattered throughout the Laws, the behavioral meaning of “freedom,” according to which the citizens of Magnesia, who are free in the sense that they are free men, are supposed to behave as such and to be educated accordingly, that is, as “gentlemen.” One important aspect here is that a free education will appeal to rationality, which amounts to teaching argumentatively rather than exercising constraint or even persuading rhetorically. The striking and philosophically interesting fact, however, is that there appear to be no intrinsic or substantial links for Plato between freedom and rationality, as we might expect on the basis of philosophical assumptions whereby freedom is grounded on rationality. Rather, freedom is the condition for exercising rationality, because this exercise takes time, and thus requires leisure (skhole) from all other tasks, and this is precisely because the exercise of rationality is such a time-consuming task.36
Hence, it is not quite true to say, as Christopher Bobonich does in his “Persuasion, Compulsion, and Freedom in Plato's Laws,” Classical Quarterly 41 (1991): 365–88, that Plato in the Laws “does not give us a characterization of what a ‘free man’ is or an explanation of why freedom has … [a] connection to rational understanding and virtue” (387), although one can see why Bobonich says this.
Finally, there is in the Laws at least a hint of yet another conception of “freedom”—freedom as “liberty”—according to which one is free when one's reason masters one's desires. In the Laws, Plato does on one occasion [T26] use the word eleutheros to describe self-mastery—something he never did in the Republic, although he seemed to be on the verge of doing it.37
Myles Burnyeat argues for this in the paper referred to in note 11 above.
