Freedom for All: Freedom and its Conditions of Exercise
The great work of the Scottish Enlightenment tradition was the discovery of society as a spontaneous order. However, this tradition did not meditate sufficiently on the political dimension of the aforementioned process of recognizing and liberation.
The thinkers of this tradition did not make sufficient effort to acknowledge that such a process could not be developed without a substantial role devoted to the state. The liberation of action, or the integration of the diversity of labours in the space of freedom, requires a complex process of recognition: recognition of the fundamental equality of individuals. The development of the division of labour, the formation of what Smith calls the “Great society”, supposes the liberation of individual actions, hence the freedom of all individuals. However, men do not acquire freedom through a natural evolution, by virtue of the trial and error principle. Such an acquisition supposes a real and deep spiritual, economic and political mutation which definitively abolishes personal dependences, that is, the possibility of the submission of some to the will of others. Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx and, later, Rawls and Sen could be considered as theoreticians who attempted to conceptualize the significance of this form of freedom and thus who contributed to this mutation.The access to freedom for all requires an intervention. On the one hand, Rousseau and, on the other, Kant, the most rigorous follower of the French philosopher in political philosophy, through their concept of will, might allow the identification of the signification of such an intervention. Only the awareness of the equality of all and its implementation by specific laws can explain the advent of a modality of social existence as freedom for all. The transition from freedom for some to freedom for all presumes a resolution, a political act. Such a political act cannot but be the result of the “general will” in the case of Rousseau and the “good will” (Kant 1785 [1949]: 12) in the case of Kant. In this context one could claim that these two philosophers are the thinkers of the discontinuity in so far as the advent of the awareness of the equality of all cannot be conceived as the result of an evolutionary, a simple trial and error process.