In reading Rawls, especially section 32, I kept being reminded of parts of Marx’s argument. In part, Rawls was responding to Marx and attempting to defend a system like ours in face of the Marxist critique, so the comparison seems apt.
Rawls explicitly defines liberty though three items (177):
• The agents who are free
• What they are free from
• What they are free to do (or not)
He then says that we can say someone is free to do something if: “they are free from certain constraints either to do it or not to do it and when their doing it or not doing it is protected from interference by other persons.” (177) This is a relatively low bar for liberty, which he augments by then adding an element of value. He says that: “the inability to take advantage of one’s rights and opportunities as a result of poverty and […] a lack of means generally […] [affect] the worth of liberty, the value to individuals of the rights that the first principle defines.” (177) The difference principle is invoked to account for the differing value of certain freedoms to different people, in effect by maximising the freedom available to the least advantaged.
Marx on the other hand only accepts liberty if people actually have the means to act upon their freedoms: “Only in community {communism} [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.” (197) For Marx, it is not enough to nominally have a freedom, or even for some segment of society to be able to act on that freedom. Instead, every person must in reality have the daily, unencumbered option to explore whatever their heart leads them to explore.
To me, this differing conception of liberty underpins the wildly divergent evolutions of both philosophies. Both aim to achieve freedom, but because of their different definitions of freedom call for drastically different solutions. Marx condemns all solutions that are anything less than absolute freedom as a means of oppression, whereas Rawls attempts to pragmatically prescribe the most radical version of freedom that is still attainable.
Would you say then Thomas, that you are using liberty and freedom defined along the same lines? I would argue against this notion, and I think the distinction between the two words sheds light on the differences in Marx's and Rawls' arguments. A very interesting NYTimes article (can be found at this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/23/weekinreview/nation-freedom-vs-liberty-more-than-just-another-word-for-nothing-left-lose.html ) comments, "Liberty and freedom are distinct, as well. As the political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has observed, liberty implies a system of rules, a ''network of restraint and order,'' hence the word's close association with political life. Freedom has a more general meaning, which ranges from an opposition to slavery to the absence of psychological or personal encumbrances." Liberty is a value within a system of political rights, whereas freedom has more to do with general human rights. Rawls' seems to focus on liberty, whereas Marx is more concerned with freedom. This expresses a critical difference in their philosophies, as is evident by Marx's ideas going much further to criticize free markets, whereas Rawls' system included provisos for a free market economy. Marx seems to think that freedom is not possible within this system, and maybe Rawls isn't so different in this regard: he argues for the protection of liberty, but freedom still seems less than perfectly achieved in his system.
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