Resources for Freedom

Democracy has won in the world while losing the attachment of the people. This is not the fault of citizens grown careless of exercising their rights. 'The citizens are sophisticated, and their democracies are wanting.'(Stein Ringen, 2007)

There is a case for renewing democracy. The main burden of the argument concerns the way in which freedom can be ensured for those who live under its conditions - with negative liberty. Freedom must have resources to be free: to be free to do or choose a thing, but lack the means to do or choose, is not to be free. The provider of the means must generally be the state: the state has a great deal to do to ensure freedom. The classic liberals' difficulty with this - the more the state has to do, the larger it becomes and the greater its temptation to constrain liberty - is largely dismissed, usually tacitly.

The need to insure people against destitute old age through pension reform that will be at least state backed; to combat poverty through, first, an understanding that it cannot be tolerated in a wealthy society; to provide for increasingly better education - all these are needed to ensure real freedom. Family being a social unit, and thus one in whose continued existence the state should take an active hand.

Full freedom needs reason as well as resources. Where a political leadership removes from you your ability to act freely, a psychological dictatorship removes from you the ability to decide freely why to act.

Stein Ringen (Prof. Oxford Univ.); What Democracy is For, On freedom and moral government; Princeton, 2007
cited in FT, John Lloyd, 22 Oct, p. 8