We can here begin to see why the measure of value in the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity are two sides of the same coin. It is because I positively value my own free time that I can count it as a negative cost when I have to spend time on something that is merely a means to an end. The same is true of you, since otherwise you would be happy to serve as my slave. The reason the division of labor can be an issue between us is that you value your ability to lead your own life, which is inseparable from your ability to decide what you should do with your time. Thus, when we discuss who should walk to the well to retrieve the water we need, we are discussing how we should divide our time between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. This discussion—and the economic arrangements that follow from it—is only intelligible because we value our own free time.
Accordingly, when I say that the rational aim is to increase the realm of freedom and decrease the realm of necessity, I am not imposing an external standard of rationality. Anyone who is committed to being an agent is committed to increasing her realm of freedom and decreasing her realm of necessity. Even someone who claims that she wants to devote her life to servitude can do so only by invoking servitude as her free choice and thus defining servitude as belonging to her realm of freedom.
In this fundamental sense, we are all spiritually free just by virtue of leading a life. The distinctive promise that I will trace in the modern idea of freedom, however, is to recognize each one of us as an end in ourselves and thereby to recognize our spiritual freedom as an unconditional value. Spiritual freedom is an unconditional value because it makes possible for us to value anything and hold ourselves to any commitment in the first place. Spiritual freedom has always been the implicit condition of leading a life, but the modern idea of freedom makes it explicit. By the lights of a modern conception of freedom, we should not be defined once and for all by a given social role (family, profession, religion, nationality, ethnicity, gender). Rather, we should be free to transform the normative conception of ourselves and our institutions should reflect that freedom.
The commitment to spiritual freedom as an unconditional value is crucial for all of Marx’s thinking. His critique of capitalism makes sense only in light of his commitment to the freedom of social individuals to lead their own lives. This is why his critique of liberal democracy is an immanent critique. An immanent critique does not criticize an institution or an ideology in the name of an ideal that is imposed from the outside. Rather, an immanent critique locates a contradiction between the avowed ideals of an institution or an ideology and the actual practical form it legislates for itself. Such a contradiction is immanent because it is intrinsic to the institution or the ideology itself.
In the case of liberal democracy, what matters the most to Marx is the avowed ideal that each one of us should be able to lead our own life. While the different forms of liberalism have become ever more various since the time of Marx, a core commitment of all liberal thought is to the equal worth of each individual, not in the sense that we are all the same but in the sense that each individual’s life is of ultimate worth, rather than relative to another life. In short, the core commitment of liberalism is to recognize each one of us as an end in ourselves.
It is worth pausing to consider the remarkable and demanding character of the liberal commitment to individual freedom. Christianity is often credited for the idea that each individual is of equal and ultimate worth, but that is demonstrably a false attribution. In Christianity, our infinite value as individuals depends on the assumption that we have immortal souls and are the objects of God’s love. Our value as individuals is not intrinsic to our finite lives but requires the horizon of salvation. Indeed, Christian discourses are full of reminders that our lives would be nothing but worthless, transient dust without the love of God and the salvation of immortality.
The idea that we can be utterly finite and still of ultimate value—an end in ourselves—is unthinkable in Christianity. Yet that is precisely the idea at the heart of liberal thought. The liberal commitment to the ultimate worth of each individual is not dependent on any assumption about the immortality of our souls or the inherent goodness of our nature. Liberalism can acknowledge our finitude, our fallibility, and our corruptibility without regarding these traits as testifying to an original sin or a fallen condition. Rather, our corruptibility and our perfectibility go together. This is why everything is at stake—for better and for worse—in how we lead our lives individually and collectively. Our lives are of ultimate worth not because we are immortal or destined to do good, but because we are capable of leading our lives, which always comes with the risk of doing harm or failing in our pursuits. These risks cannot and should not be eliminated, since they are part of what it means to lead a free life.
The liberal commitment to individual freedom can be seen as an explicit form of secular faith. The idea that our capacity to lead our own finite lives is of ultimate worth cannot be derived either from any empirical fact about the world or from any religious revelation. Rather, the idea expresses a normative commitment to which we hold ourselves and with which we have to keep faith. The commitment opens a space of reasons—since it binds us to a set of implications regarding how we ought to treat one another—but the reasons only have binding force insofar as we keep faith with the commitment. As always, secular reason and secular faith are two sides of the same coin. We must keep faith with our commitment to individual freedom as normative, since it only lives in and through us.
The decisive question is what is entailed by the commitment to individual freedom. The entailments are not specified by the commitment itself. A first example is the commitment to equality before the law and the protection of constitutional rights. Virtually every liberal thinker has endorsed these principles, but who should enjoy equality before the law and constitutional rights remains the subject of ongoing debate. As early as his classic treatise On Liberty, John Stuart Mill appeals to liberal principles in order to argue that “wives should have the same rights and should receive the protection of the law in the same manner as all other persons,” while noting that “on this subject, the defenders of established injustice do not avail themselves of the plea of liberty but stand forth openly as the champions of power.”9 Mill is here pursuing an immanent critique—a critique of the liberal tradition on its own terms—since he is calling attention to how avowed liberals fail to apply their own principles by denying married women the legal status that is granted to men. The same logic of immanent critique underlies all the extension of rights that we have witnessed in the past 150 years, from the emancipation of women to other excluded groups identified by race, class, and sexual orientation. However partial the work of emancipation remains—and however hypocritical it may be that formally egalitarian societies tolerate so much actual unfreedom—no progress would have been possible without the appeal to individual freedom. The reason that actual unfreedom is even intelligible to us as hypocrisy—as an opportunity for critique—is our collective commitment to freedom. It is easy to forget that such a commitment is a fragile and unprecedented historical achievement. In previous periods of human history, there was no such commitment but only forms of reigning tribal norms, according to which there are “natural” slaves or “naturally” subordinated groups who have no claims on those in power.
A second form of immanent critique that is characteristic of the liberal tradition concerns the status of rights themselves. Classical liberal theories that are committed merely to a formal or legal notion of freedom—a mere right to freedom—have long been criticized for depriving the idea of freedom of any real content. My legal right to liberty is of little value if I do not have the means to lead my life and make use of my freedom. These means include an education that opens me to a range of possible ways of leading my life, as well as sufficient material resources to reduce the time I have to spend on securing my survival and allow me time to engage the questi
on of what I should do with my freedom. As the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin points out, the value of freedom depends on “adequate conditions for the use of freedom.”10 Exactly what should count as adequate conditions for the use of freedom is widely debated, but the general commitment to providing adequate conditions is captured by the effective freedoms principle, which is a fundamental tenet of liberal egalitarian justice.11 The principle holds that all citizens have a legitimate claim to a fair share of the resources that enable them to make effective—actual—use of their freedoms. This principle is the foundation for brands of liberalism that go beyond a formal focus on individual liberty, in favor of redistribution of wealth and social democratic reform.
A third—and deeply related—form of immanent critique is focused on the liberal conception of the individual herself. Classical liberal theories are charged with having an “abstract” notion of the individual, which disregards how our individuality is dependent on a social context and the recognition of others. I cannot be anyone or do anything in isolation. Even when I am all alone, my sense of who I can be and what I can do is informed by social norms that shaped me before I had any choice in the matter. This is not to say that I am completely determined by a given social norm (in that case there would be no freedom), but my sense of being an independent individual requires that others recognize and treat me as an independent individual. The sense of independence—of leading a free, spiritual life—cannot be achieved independently (e.g., by someone who grew up in the wild with no one to take care of her). The sense of independence depends on being recognized as independent by others, as well as on having the material resources that allow for a sufficient degree of independence from the activity of merely securing the means of subsistence for one’s life.
Marx pursues all three forms of immanent critique of liberalism and in fact he was one of the first to give them a rigorous formulation. Marx, however, goes much further and deeper in his immanent critique of liberalism than anyone in the liberal tradition. Marx regards the basic social form that provides the framework for all liberal reflections on freedom—capitalism—as itself inimical to the actualization of freedom. Liberal theories may advocate various forms of restrictions on capitalism, but they never call into question the social form of capitalism itself. In contrast, Marx argues that the commitment to freedom is betrayed by the social organization and division of labor that is enforced by capitalism. Most fundamentally—I will show—the measure of value and social wealth under capitalism directly contradicts the value of free time.
To grasp the stakes of Marx’s critique of capitalism, it is helpful to draw on the notion of freedom that is articulated by his most important philosophical predecessor: G. W. F. Hegel. According to Hegel’s philosophy of history, all historical peoples have always been free “in themselves” (in their actions), but only in Ancient Greece did the freedom of a historical people become explicit “for themselves” (in their own understanding of their actions). Nevertheless, the Greeks did not achieve what Hegel calls the Idea of freedom, which requires institutional practices that embody the commitment that “all are free.” The actual commitment of Ancient Greece was instead that “only some are free,” since the free lives of some were dependent on the slave labor of others. The contradictions inherent in this view are on display in Aristotle, who both defends the idea that there are “natural” slaves and concedes that “since slaves are people and share in rational principle, it seems absurd to say they have no virtue.”12 For Hegel, such an explicit self-contradiction is itself a form of progress, since it enables one to see the denial of freedom through slavery as a contestable contradiction rather than as something that is naturally justified. Yet the Idea of freedom (“all are free”) was achieved neither in Ancient Greece nor in the Roman Empire nor in medieval feudalism, since all these forms of life maintained the legitimacy of the institution of slavery and/or the notion of “natural” subordination.
Hegel’s radical philosophical claim is that the Idea of freedom is inseparable from material and social practices. The Idea of freedom is not abstract but must be embodied in concrete institutional practices in order to be an Idea of freedom. To use Hegel’s favorite word, the Idea of freedom must be wirklich—actual, real, effective, at work—which requires that we sustain institutions that recognize the freedom of everyone to lead their own lives. For Hegel, the freedom to lead our own lives is not a matter of being free to follow our supposedly natural inclinations. Rather, the freedom to lead our own lives is itself a social-historical achievement, which requires that we are formed as free subjects by the institutional practices through which we come to understand ourselves and our inclinations in the first place.
As living beings, we seek self-satisfaction, but since we are spiritually living beings it is not naturally given what counts as self-satisfaction for us. The fatal philosophical mistake is to conflate the constitutive form of striving for self-satisfaction with the specific content of striving for egoistic enjoyment. When that conflation is made—as it is in our dominant traditions of political and economic theory—the purpose of egoistic enjoyment is treated as the natural cause of our actions, which is antecedent to our social formation. Rather than understand ourselves as originally social beings, we are seen as naturally egoistic creatures who are driven to cooperate and form a state for purely instrumental reasons.
It is question begging, however, to posit what we would be committed to independently of the social form of life in which we find ourselves. There has never been an agent who did not find herself already shaped by the social world through which she makes sense of herself and her actions. As a spiritual being, I can understand myself to be someone or do something only if I have a practical identity that is recognized by others. For my actions to be taken as an expression of who I am—including the expression of myself as an egoist—what I do must be subject to norms that are socially instituted and in relation to which I can succeed or fail. Being an egoist is not a natural fact but a practical identity that I have to sustain.
Our practical identities are inseparable from the society to which we belong. If we live and work in a society in which the dominant way of relating to one another is to compete for resources, we will understand ourselves primarily as creatures who are competing for resources. Our apparently natural egoism is itself a matter of our social formation. If we see ourselves as atomistic individuals who form an aggregate in society—with each of us driven to pursue an egoistic end—it is not because we are an aggregate of atomistic individuals as a matter of natural fact, but because we are socialized into a world where we treat and acknowledge one another as though we were atomistic individuals who are naturally driven to pursue an egoistic end.
The conflation of the form of self-satisfaction with the content of egoistic enjoyment is a category mistake, with a clear provenance in the religious notion of original sin. The problem is not that we are committed to self-satisfaction. All of us deserve to lead satisfying lives. The decisive issue is what counts as self-satisfaction for us. By virtue of our spiritual freedom, what counts as self-satisfaction for us is never given once and for all. To find self-satisfaction in egoistic enjoyment is a particular and limited content of self-satisfaction, not the form of self-satisfaction in general. For example, finding fulfillment in helping others to flourish is a form of self-satisfaction, but the form of self-satisfaction does not make my helping others a matter of egoistic enjoyment. On the contrary, the form of self-satisfaction makes it possible for the activity of helping others to be something that I find fulfilling rather than alienating, to be an activity with which I identify and in which I recognize my own commitments.
For Hegel, an actual free society is one in which we can recognize our commitment to the common good as the condition of possibility for our own freedom. Rather than seeing the laws of the state as imposed on us and as coercively restricting our self-interest, we should be able to see ourselv
es as bound to the laws of the state by virtue of our own commitment to lead a free life, which requires that the laws of the state in turn are seen as contestable and transformable by us. This mutual recognition of the state and the individual is the condition for actual freedom. As Hegel emphasizes, “the Idea of freedom is truly present only as the state.”13 To grasp the truth of this point, we do not have to accept Hegel’s historically specific conception of the state. We only have to grasp the necessity of some form of collective self-legislation for any exercise of individual freedom to be possible. The question is not if we should have a state. Participation in a state—in the sense of a collective form of life—is not optional; it is an originary and irreducible condition for all spiritually free beings, who are constituted by socially instituted norms from the beginning. The question is which kind of state is required for actual freedom and mutual recognition. For Hegel, mutual recognition is not a psychological issue. The point is not to ensure that everyone as a matter of psychological fact identifies with the laws of the state. Rather, mutual recognition is a matter of the rational institutional structures of the state, which must be such that it is possible in principle for everyone to recognize the formation and cultivation of the common good as enabling the formation and cultivation of their own freedom.14
For the same reason, the institutional formation of freedom is not a matter of imposing externally motivated laws and rules on subjects in order to make them obedient citizens. On the contrary, it is matter of providing forms of education—and other institutional practices—that enable persons to be citizens who can understand the norms to which they are subjected as ones to which they have bound themselves; to be citizens who are internally motivated in their actions and who can justify what they are doing to themselves as well as to others.
This Life Page 26