On Liberty and Its Enemies: Essays of Kenneth Minogue (Encounter Classics) - Hardcover

Timothy Fuller is Professor of Political Science at Colorado College where he teaches political philosophy. He is a leading authority on the thought of Michael Oakeshott, and a friend and collaborator with Kenneth Minogue for nearly forty years.

The Conditions of Freedom and the Condition of Freedom
Liberty as an idea begins in political practice, and to political practice it must be returned. If there were no danger of being dominated and subdued, then liberty would never have been worth valuing in the first place. Hence an idea of liberty, which has narrowed its focus to a point where it is purely concerned with the abstract question of removing more and more restraints from human actions, will move towards absurdity because it forgets that men live in societies in which the question of domination periodically arises. To say this is not to commit oneself to the absurd view that all life is struggle or that the striving to dominate is the central feature of human existence. The whole point of a free society is to release us from such tendencies and to allow us to associate freely as equals. But in the end, liberty is not merely a situation to be en- joyed, but a capacity to be exercised. Those who lose this capacity will soon have no freedom left to them. Perhaps the best way to sum up this argument is to say that we must not put all our evaluative eggs in one basket. There may come a point with liberty―as there certainly has come a point with democracy―at which it is really better to abandon the grandiose and to explore what we value in less pretentious terms. This is what Hobbes did, and he remains our best guide to the project. So far as self-realization is concerned, his argument that we may discover a summum malum in human affairs, but not a summum bonum, remains the most economical way of invalidating the errors in the positive conception of liberty. Hobbes grasped one of the important points in the positive conception of liberty by saying that laws are like hedges which help us on our way. This is why the laws we have adapted to are usually less onerous (because our imaginations have adapted to them) than new laws, or the laws of other communities. Hobbes dealt with liberty in the context of his whole civil philosophy. There is no other way of dealing with it adequately.