Alternatives to “Freedom”
In a discussion of his method, Marx once wrote “the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations”. What he meant by this is that everything in the world - phenomena, events, people, personalities - are the product of a dialectic between antecedent, unchangeable things and a form of agency that is only conceivably within those necessary constraints. These antecedent, unchangeable events are what constitute history which, no matter how open or contingent a given moment may be, becomes a necessary element of the next moment once the current moment has passed. For Marx, “freedom” can only be understood in this dialectical way: as the working out over time of the contradictions between necessary constraint and limited agency. There is no such thing as absolute freedom for any thing or person that exists within the flow of history.
Marx constructed this alternative view to challenge the predominant liberal view of individual freedom which developed along with early capitalism. For the social contract theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau, human beings were free because they were not constrained either by history or by necessary social relations. Marx shows that neither of these is the case: we are born into existing social relations which determine the limits of our agency just as much as we are born into history. There is no moment - in contrast to the views of the social contract theorists - when an individual is outside social relationships or outside history itself.
And yet, the liberalism which developed out of social contract theory (the liberalism of Madison, Jefferson, Mill, and Habermas - all touchstones of Intellectual Freedom) continues to adhere to the fiction of the absolutely free individual, free from social relations (unless he [and it is always he] chooses to enter into them), free from history, free from any kind of constraint or necessity. This is a powerful ideological concept because, as one political science textbook notes, liberalism’s hegemony is such that it is simply “the air that we breathe”. It is a popular idea bred into children in schools, via the media, through cultural products, and political discourse. It is hard to dislodge, even given the prevalence of various explanations of social construction which developed out of Marxism in the various queer, feminist, and anti-racist critical theories.
This free individualism remains the central tenet of the dominant conception of Intellectual Freedom. Intellectual Freedom, beholden to Madison, Jefferson, and Mill, continues to understand freedom as the freedom of an unconstrained individual, freedom from social responsibilities, free in the face of historical necessity. Marx dismissed these individuals as fictions along the lines of Robinson Crusoe. Out of this fictitious, free, unconstrained individual comes everything else in Intellectual Freedom: the idea that intellectual activity owes nothing to culture and society, the idea that power has no hold on the rights and freedoms of the self-sufficient individual, the idea that an individual’s vote is both necessary and sufficient for what we call democracy. In good times, when despite liberal individualism, a certain social solidarity is manifest, a certain nuanced understanding of the responsibilities that go along with rights still holds, this is not such a dangerous idea. But in the current conjuncture, the free individualism of Intellectual Freedom cannot be separated from other, more dangerous, aspects of liberal individualism, particularly in the form of anti-vaccination and anti-mask positions, both of which tend to rely on a notion of individual freedom unchanged since the days of the contractarians.
There are legitimate aspects of anti-mask and anti-vaccination positions, especially when the power of the state or capital lies behind enforcement. But what lies behind its most rabid expressions is the same kind of spurious individualism that underpins other neoliberal phenomena: the sovereign citizen movement, the personal choice/responsibility narrative of populist governments, the “small-state” unwillingness of Western governments to act, except to sacrifice everything they can in the interests of business-owners.
Adherents of the dominant view of Intellectual Freedom must understand their position as deeply complicit in these other tendencies. This view is not only outmoded and incoherent (IF’s championing of pluralism does not extend to alternative views of freedom and individual agency), but is now actively dangerous. Besides being deeply implicated in a worldwide moral panic* around trans people, IF is the watchword of every ivermectin-guzzling conspiratorial fantasist on the internet.
Defender of hegemonic Intellectual Freedom cannot simply repeat, ad nauseam and ad infinitum, the same tired and trite dogmas as if there were not well thought-out, deep, and sophisticated alternatives to them. They must engage with these alternatives, or else they will be tarred by history with the same brush as the COVID-19 deniers and transphobes they enable.
In the early 1970s, just as Intellectual Freedom began to contend with Social Responsibility, social contract individualism was renewed by John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. It is no accident that the 1970s also witness the turn towards individualistic, small-state, “no such thing as society” neoliberalism. The COVID pandemic has shown the results of that political and theoretical turn: the inability of so many to conceive of social solidarity and responsibility towards others, to deny their own “individual freedom” (even to the trivial extent of wearing a mask) for a greater good. IF, which took on new contours in the early neoliberal period, continues to hew to a social contract individualism which no longer appears quaint - let alone self-evident - but has now been shown to be actively dangerous on a world-historical scale.
I have not even touched on the internal incoherence of so much of Intellectual Freedom here. Its absolute individualism and its bourgeois, settler-colonial conception of freedom is enough, in an era of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and Land Back, to damn the hegemonic project of IF. The library profession, like civil society at large, needs to understand and embrace alternatives to the ideological constructions of patriarchal and racial capitalism. Such alternatives exist. Many in the profession understand them deeply. We are here to help, but such help can only be accepted if the defenders of IF recognize the reality of historical necessity, the reality of power, and come to terms with the loss of power they have spent so long protecting.
*”Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons, emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests…” Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972).