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Sophisms of unfreedom

Intellectual sophistry: false definitions of freedom

Freedom as a Social Project

Intellectual sophistry: false definitions of freedom

  • Why sophisms matter
  • How the French liberals defined freedom
  • Montesquieu's dangerous definition
  • Negative freedom versus positive freedom

Why sophisms matter

We arrive at a fundamental question: why does unfreedom continue to dominate our societies, even though it is refuted by the facts and contradicts the historical movement toward greater freedom? The answer lies in the existence of tenacious sophisms that serve as the intellectual foundation for systems of unfreedom.
No thinker understood this more clearly than Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), the brilliant economist from Bayonne whose life was tragically cut short by tuberculosis before he could complete his greatest work. Bastiat devoted the full force of his polemical genius to identifying and dismantling these errors in his celebrated Sophismes économiques (1845). His conviction was that the socialists and interventionists of his day were mistaken, but with good intentions. As the common expression reminds us, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. For Bastiat, the adversary of liberalism is not the sophist himself, but the sophism: a reasoning error or a factual error that needs to be corrected by economic science.
We are assailed by sophisms. Good. Let us fight them. Let us not fall asleep in the presence of error, for error does not fall asleep in the presence of truth.
In other words, the intellectual battle against false ideas is not optional for the liberal: it is the precondition of any lasting political victory.
Indeed, Bastiat saw clearly that the most dangerous sophisms are not those of cynical manipulators but those of sincere believers. A malicious liar can be exposed; a sincere man who reasons badly cannot be answered by accusations of bad faith. He must be answered with better reasoning. This is the spirit in which the nineteenth-century French liberal tradition constructed its rigorous science of freedom.

How the French liberals defined freedom

The nineteenth-century French liberal tradition provides a solid conceptual framework for understanding what freedom really means. Let us examine three definitions that converge on the same essential insight.
Yves Guyot (1843-1928), the tireless economist and politician who directed the Journal des économistes for over three decades, states the matter with characteristic concision:
The rights of man consist in the free use of his will and his faculties. Any act which hinders this free use without being itself a defence against a prior aggression constitutes an injustice.
This corresponds to self-ownership and its materialisation within the limits of the rights of others. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (1843-1916), the great economist who occupied the chair of political economy at the Collège de France and whose encyclopedic work shaped an entire generation of liberal thought, adds an essential clarification:
Freedom does not consist in absolute security, in freedom from all risks; freedom is the faculty that man has of determining his own acts, and not the power of ensuring that the result of his acts always corresponds to his desires or his needs.
In other words, freedom is about the starting point of action, not the guarantee of its outcome. This distinction is decisive, for it separates the liberal conception of freedom from the socialist one at a single stroke. Finally, Charles Comte (1782-1837), the jurist and son-in-law of Jean-Baptiste Say, defines freedom as:
The state of a person who encounters in his fellows no obstacle to the regular development of his being or to the innocent exercise of his faculties.
These three definitions converge on a conception of freedom rooted in self-ownership and in the mutual respect of individual rights. They are not utopian visions: they are precise juridical concepts capable of being applied in law and in social organisation.

Montesquieu's dangerous definition

Against these rigorous definitions, political thought also harbours erroneous conceptions of freedom. The most famous is that of Montesquieu: "Freedom is the right to do whatever the laws allow." This seemingly innocent formula turns out to be extremely dangerous, for it permits any infringement of an individual's innocent freedoms provided it is authorised by law.
But does this definition hold up under scrutiny? Not at all. If freedom consists simply in doing what the law permits, then a society in which the law forbids everything except breathing would still count as free, provided citizens scrupulously obeyed their legislators. The formula evacuates all substantive content from the concept of freedom and replaces it with mere legality.
Nineteenth-century liberal thinkers criticised Montesquieu sharply on this point. Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), the former artillery officer turned philosopher of the Idéologue school, devoted an entire work to the correction of these errors. In his Commentaire sur l'Esprit des lois (1819), written at the request of Thomas Jefferson himself, Destutt de Tracy writes:
Montesquieu confounds the absence of legal prohibition with the presence of genuine liberty. But these are radically different things. A slave is permitted to do whatever his master does not forbid; this does not make him free. True freedom begins not with what the law allows, but with what the law has no right to touch.
Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), the great Swiss-French liberal who was born in Lausanne and became one of the most eloquent defenders of individual rights in the entire history of political thought, developed a theory clearly distinguishing the sphere of innocent, free individual action from the sphere of power. In his celebrated Principes de politique (1815), he writes:
The authority of society over its members extends only to those actions which harm others. Within the sphere of actions which concern only the individual himself, the independence of the individual is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
In other words, the sphere of individual freedom is not what the law fails to prohibit; it is what no law has the right to prohibit. The distinction is not merely semantic: it is the difference between despotism clothed in legality and genuine constitutional government.

Negative freedom versus positive freedom

A crucial distinction underlies the entire debate: that between negative and positive freedom. What exactly does this distinction mean, and why does it matter so much?
Negative freedom is defined as the absence of obstacles. The individual encounters no hindrance in the expression of his will, so long as he does not directly harm others. This concept is deeply rooted in the notion of property: it designates the freedom to make innocent use of one's own body, faculties, and legitimately possessed goods. Indeed, the entire liberal tradition from Locke to Bastiat rests on this conception. It is called "negative" not because it is inferior, but because it is defined by the absence of external constraint rather than the presence of external assistance.
Positive freedom, by contrast, is conceived as the capacity to do and to obtain. According to this vision, the individual is free when he can obtain the things he desires, regardless of whether others are obliged to provide them. This concept breaks with the notion of property and opens the door to socialist justifications of state intervention.
Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, in Le Collectivisme (1884), demonstrates that socialism, even with its different notion of freedom, prevents people from doing things without guaranteeing the promised results:
The collectivist state promises each citizen the freedom to develop his faculties to the fullest. But in suppressing private property and free enterprise, it destroys precisely the conditions under which such development is possible. It delivers neither the freedom conceived by liberals nor the freedom promised by its own theories. The individual, stripped of his autonomy, becomes a functionary of the collective will, which is to say, of whoever happens to wield political power.
In other words, positive freedom, pursued through state power, tends to destroy the very conditions of individual flourishing it claims to promote. Socialism thus fails doubly: it delivers neither the negative freedom of the liberal nor the positive freedom of its own promises. Understanding these fundamental distinctions enables us to grasp how initial conceptual errors in the definition of freedom give rise to sophisms in the economic, social, and international spheres.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
According to Bastiat, who or what is the true adversary of liberalism — the sophist, or the sophism?