Last Straw

Cos­tas Douz­i­nas on free­dom and equal­ity:

Let me start with a social­ist axiom … : free­dom can­not flour­ish without equal­ity and equal­ity does not exist without freedom.

While logic­ally and philo­soph­ic­ally insep­ar­able, equal­ity and liberty have fol­lowed dif­fer­ent and even opposed tra­ject­or­ies. For lib­er­al­ism, free­dom in its neg­at­ive and pos­it­ive forms is primary. Neg­at­ive free­dom is cap­tured in Hobbes’s state­ment that liberty is the absence of “external imped­i­ments”. The pos­it­ive “free­dom to”, on the other hand, was clas­sic­ally defined by Isaiah Ber­lin: “I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind … to be the instru­ment of my own, not of other men’s acts of will.”

Or as I once put on a t-shirt:

Anarch­ism, the name given to a struggle for a soci­ety char­ac­ter­ised by the abil­ity of each actor to have a say in out­comes pro­por­tion­ate to the degree they are affected by them.