Social and Political Theory: Comparing Marx, Mill, Rousseau and Durkheim on Liberty (word limit: 2500)
‘Was Durkheim correct to think that too much liberty is as bad as too little? If so, does his criticism apply only to liberal, individualist theories like Mill’s, or does it also apply to Rousseau and Marx?’
I argue that Durkheim is correct in believing that having too much liberty alienates individuals and causes instability while having too little liberty robs people of their will for self-protection and for progress. Mill’s works argue for individuality and the breakdown of traditions and norms, especially for achieving human flourishing and ingenuity. However, having too much liberty to express individualism could lead to a breakdown in discipline, rendering it counterintuitive in achieving this ideal. In the case of Marx, he focused on liberating the working class from a Capitalist state through diminishing the class system and allowing self-sustenance. However, uprooting a familiar economic system threatens to bring forth Durkheim’s theory of anomie. As for Rousseau, he perceived liberty to be achieved through individuals surrendering themselves to the Social Contract where everyone is committed to mutual preservation and thereby have their natural liberty protected. This reinforces Durkheim’s argument of striking a balance between too much and too little liberty. We should be able to see, then, that Durkheim’s views, as with Rousseau’s, offers a more thorough perspective on liberty while Mill and Marx argue for liberty in certain dimensions that could potentially give rise to oppression or alienation in others. Additionally, I will look at liberty as a paradoxical ideal, and offer to explain how Durkheim’s views could be effective despite this paradox.
Durkheim outlines how too little liberty can be detrimental in ‘Suicide’ (2002). He explains how excessive societal integration can lead to altruistic suicide (p. 175-201). When individuals are tightly-knitted to each other in a community of shared beliefs and goals, ideas of honour, duty and sacrifice arise. As this manifests itself to an extreme end, individuals could completely lose their individual sense of identity, making them willing to sacrifice their mortality. Such an individual would only be concerned with upholding the shared vision of their community, often at the expense of what can protect and benefit them personally. We see this happening with suicide terrorism, where terrorists sacrifice themselves for the sake of the community (Pape, 2006). Pape argues that suicide terrorism, although often associated with religious ideologies, is part of a wider problem concerning shared ideologies and the idea of sacrificing for honour. These are all traits outlining Durkheim’s theory of societal integration, where the individual identifies himself with the collective he belongs to. When that identification grows to an excessive level, the power of unified passion can compel the individual to see himself as less important than the goal of the collective gaining power. Thus, to achieve that, the individual carries out acts of violence with an expectation of death. The public spectacle of suicide terrorism helps to draw attention to the ideological cause of the attacker. We can thus see how individuals who, in being excessively integrated into their community, lose their sense of individual liberty and thus fall into harm as they seek to uphold the interests of their community over their personal ones.
The lack of liberty as a result of excessive societal regulation could also lead to fatalistic suicide. In such a society, individuals are compelled to live in a certain way. This could create a sense of despair and helplessness for those with aspirations not endorsed by their community. This could explain the directly proportional relationship between the social control and the suicide rate of women in Iran (Aliverdinia and Pridemore, 2009). The social control of women in a patriarchal society, including being confined to her domestic role in a marriage and facing restrictions on her educational and employment opportunities, could generate feelings of dysphoria. As such, women may feel that they are doomed to lead an unfulfilling life which they have no control or say over and suicide becomes an attractive alternative. Thus, too little liberty harms by contributing to the possibility of fatalistic suicides.
However, Durkheim recognises the detrimental effects of too much liberty as well. A lack of societal integration where a person is free to be on his or her own is what Durkheim believes to be the cause of ‘egoistic suicide’ (p. 105-175). This individual loses a sense of belonging and meaning in being connected with the rest of society, causing a sense of depressive ennui. Findings show that depressed patients are more likely to lack a religious affiliation (American Journal of Psychiatry, 2004). People who are part of a religious group can rely on a community of peers who practise and share the same beliefs collectively. This communal bond helps to provide a reassuring sense of belonging and meaning. Those without a religion are deprived of this bond, thus finding life to be a lonely and bleak existence. Therefore, too much liberty can harm: without the attachment to and meaning provided by community, people may see life not worth living.
Additionally, during periods of social upheavals and transitions, societal regulation grows weaker and the increased liberty for individuals can lead to anomic suicide. As discussed by Durkheim, in a society where systematic flow and normative regulation are broken, people are unable to properly regulate their desires (p. 207-208). People in these societies tend to fight for goals with no end in sight, or might be unclear about their societal role in the first place. This results in a kind of existential anxiety where individuals start to question who they are, what they should be doing and what the meaning of their actions in society is. This, in turn, relates to what Durkheim terms ‘anomie’ (p. 219), where social norms are broken down and citizens become unclear about the way they should behave. This is since society is under change and the tacit agreement on what is considered acceptable has come undone. We might look to China in the 1990s, where suicide rates and mental health issues showed a great increase (Graham, 2015). At the same time, China was met with rapid and unprecedented rates of economic growth, partly owed to the free market taking over. This, in turn, opened up job opportunities for people in the rural areas who migrated to the urban areas, causing changes in social welfare structures and inequality pertaining to skillset demands and rewards. These unregulated changes all point towards insecurity. We might imagine that people from urban areas became anxious about losing job opportunities while people from rural areas worried about the many others vying for the same opportunities. This is in contrast to a society where people are sure of what rewards to expect in exchange for whatever skills or services they are expected to provide, even if it keeps them confined to certain classes. Additionally, such competition in an economically booming market led to longer working hours and increase in the pressure to succeed. Thus, we see how being left with too many unregulated and liberated possibilities in society lead to anxiety and low life satisfaction.
Here, we see how Durkheim deconstructs liberty as having different effects under different dimensions, as opposed to it being a single, unifying idea.
Mill is particularly concerned about how too little liberty can stifle human flourishing, which in turn stifles the progress of society (1869). With the oppressive presence of social norms, new research, experimentation and theories cannot be easily presented, devised, challenged and studied. Individuals are expected to act in certain ways that are appropriate to tradition, discouraging the flow of new ideas and thus, ingenuity and progress. For Mill, allowing more liberty promotes intellectual autonomy and enhances diversity of thought. Here, we see how Mill’s argument reinforces Durkheim’s view that having too much societal regulation and integration would constrain an individual from pursuing progress, since they are pressurised to act in a way that fits a familiar pattern of social conformity.
However, Mill seems to lack a wider perspective on liberty. Having too much freedom might deprive an individual of the discipline he or she needs to formulate their ideas, and having an amount of pressure from the community could in fact aid in the progress of innovation. In order for Mill’s argument to work, an individual must be trusted with the sense and ability to utilise his or her liberty in appropriate ways that can keep them focused on their work. However, self-discipline is a volatile ideal that usually works better with external factors to keep the individual accountable.
As opposed to being isolated, an individual who is connected to a larger community would feel a sense of responsibility for its progress. Even though identifying oneself as a member of a community would require attachment and thus a certain level of confinement to its shared norms and beliefs, the aforementioned sense of purpose could motivate a genius to realise his or her ideas for the betterment of mankind. We have seen prominent thinkers coming together to formulate their theories in schools, such as in the case of the Frankfurt School (Held, 1980). Thinkers such as Horkheimer, Adorno and several others gathered together in a singular, regulated setting with a common interest in Marxist studies and shared goals. From there, they shared and developed ideas that led to Critical Theory, an influential school of thought. With their will to gather and to be integrated into a regulated environment, they were able to develop, compile and publish their idea successfully. Coming together as the Frankfurt school evidently created a space for diversity, social bonding and progress as the thinkers shared their ideas with one another. These are ideals desired by Mill himself, which shows that liberty, unlike what Mill proposed, does not necessarily have to be absolute for achieving these very goals. One might also say that the Frankfurt School theorists had the liberty in the first place to gather in such a space. This brings us back to Durkheim’s argument that a balance of liberty and constraint is crucial for individuals to find their place in society.
Here, we might start to see the inklings of liberty being a complex ideal that can be counterintuitive if not administered in the appropriate dimensions at right levels. According to Bertram (2004), there has been debate surrounding the distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedom. Negative libertarianism defines liberty as ‘an absence of constraint’, while positive libertarianism ‘focuses on an agent’s achievement of self-rule or autonomy’ (p. 83). We might then classify Mill’s brand of liberty as ‘negative’ liberty, since it focuses on dissolving the bearings that social norms have on creative thought.
Marx’s works revolve around the idea that the way one is bound to the economic state dictates their social and private lifestyles, as well as people’s relations with one another (Marx and Engels, 1848). Thus, under a Capitalist state where profit is made off of the labour of the working class (Marx, 1867), Marx believes it leaves the working class oppressed under the ruling classes. As such, he seems to be an advocate for liberty, but with a clear emphasis on liberating the working class. He sees this mainly through dissolving the Capitalist system and achieving a classless state (1867). This might remind us of Durkheim’s views on the way excessive societal regulation could interfere with the aspirations and hopes of individuals. We might look to radical political uprisings that have occurred in history, for example, the Cultural Revolution in China. Although the more immediate cause of this event would arguably be Mao Ze Dong’s intention of eradicating his enemies (1999), we might argue that the reason why anybody had interest in forming or supporting the Chinese Communist Party in the first place stemmed from dissatisfaction of the societal regulation dictated by class struggle. Together with other factors, it eventually culminated in the aggression that the Chinese Communist Party carried out in the Cultural Revolution (Yang, 2011). Thus, we see how a lack of liberty to live outside the confinements of societal regulation is detrimental.
Here, I would argue that Marx’s brand of liberty would qualify as ‘positive’ liberty. This is because it does not simply fight for the working class to be free from oppression. More than that, it stands that a revolution would be achieved by the collective will of the proletariat (1848) and naturally, by association of changing the entire economic system, the rest of society would follow suit. In the case of the Cultural Revolution, we might consider that there could have been people from the working class who wanted to be part of the status quo but who were forced to submit to Mao’s idea of liberty, contradicting the general idea of liberty, that is, to be free from constraint. Thus, the Cultural Revolution could also be used as an example of how an excess of positive libertarianism could backfire and contradict the ideal of liberty in itself.
Dissolving the class system might also have potential bearings of Durkheim’s theory of anomie. Capitalism is a system that is familiar in most states and affects the ebb and flow of jobs and the economy. Uprooting this would be a drastic change for society, resulting in unrest as predicted by Durkheim and as we have previously explored. We would imagine that as social norms break down in a classless state and people lose their foothold in society as labourers and capitalists, desires and ambitions get lost in a state of confusion and chaos. All in all, with Marx’s theories, we might conclude that too much liberty in one area could cause too little liberty in another, and through the examples, we see that too much liberty is just as bad as too little.
Rousseau stood for individuals to submit to the General Will and in turn, receive civil liberty (1762). By being committed to this Social Contract, individuals would protect the interests of the group, since they are a part of it and would be affected by whatever benefit or harm that fall upon it. This was Rousseau’s way of mediating inequality amongst individuals, which was causing competition and destruction in the name of self-interest. We can see here that Rousseau’s argument stands with Durkheim’s theory that the right amount of societal integration could serve the interests of the individual and protect him or her from alienation in the form of isolation or, in this case, external harm. More importantly, I contend that Rousseau’s theories best reflect Durkheim’s idea that the right amount of both liberty and constraint is crucial. To be integrated into the Social Contract, one has to allow themselves to adhere to the regulations of the group—this acts as a constraint. However, without such constraint, the individual might fall to harm as they face external forces of antagonism without protection from collective power. These external forces would have worked for, instead of against, the individual should all citizens have been part of the Social Contract. Having been harmed, the individual would then be robbed of a larger portion of his or her natural liberty than if they had submitted to the Social Contract. Therefore, by requesting people to give up a portion of their natural liberty to gain civil liberty and in turn, be guaranteed of the security to practise their remaining natural liberty, Rosseau’s views reinforce Durkheim’s stand that both society’s constraint and an individual’s liberty should be equally important in considering the bearings of liberty.
We thus see that liberty is a complex paradox that does not work in an absolute way. Thus, I reinstate that Durkheim’s views provide a more thorough perspective of liberty than that of Mill’s and Marx’s. Durkheim does this firstly by recognising the distinctions in the different ways liberty can take effect in different dimensions of an individual’s social and private lives. However, for Mill and Marx, they focused on either how ‘negative’ libertarianism benefits ingenuity or how ‘positive’ libertarianism liberates the working class. As with Rousseau’s theory of liberating civilians as a collective in part of protecting their natural liberty, we might look to Durkheim’s views on how ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ liberty work hand in hand, with an excess of either causing detriment. If we consider how ‘positive’ liberty can contradict the basic ideal of liberty by extending to a level of constraint, we might then agree with Durkheim that too much liberty is just as bad as too little, and thus constraint and freedom should work hand in hand.
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