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How freedom works

The eternal failure of unfreedom

Freedom as a Social Project

The eternal failure of unfreedom

  • The impossibility of planning, from the Physiocrats to the twentieth century
  • Leroy-Beaulieu's prophecy: "slavery without the nest egg"
  • The chain of lost freedoms
  • The twentieth century confirms the prophecy

The impossibility of planning, from the Physiocrats to the twentieth century

The failure of unfreedom has a long intellectual history. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, the Physiocrats opened a fundamental debate on the possibility of a society in which the state, by organising unfreedom, would take decisions in place of individuals to create a supposedly more harmonious economic and social order.
Louis-Paul Abeille (1719-1807), the Breton economist and administrator who played a key role in the Physiocratic movement before eventually serving as a financial administrator under the Ancien Régime and the early Revolution, expressed the core insight of the school in his Lettre d'un négociant sur la nature du commerce des grains (1763):
"There are a thousand circumstances that determine the price, the place, and the moment at which grain should be sold. The farmer who has produced it, and the merchant who wishes to purchase it, know these circumstances; the official who seeks to regulate the transaction knows none of them. He sees only the average; they see the particular. He acts on yesterday's information; they act on today's. He acts on general principle; they act on specific fact. The result of his intervention is therefore necessarily worse than the result of their free agreement, not because he is less intelligent, but because he is less informed."
In other words, the Physiocrats' argument against grain regulation was not fundamentally a moral argument, though they made moral arguments as well; it was an epistemic one. The information required to direct production efficiently is dispersed among millions of individuals and cannot be assembled by any central authority.
Indeed, this intellectual legacy of the Physiocrats was passed on to the French liberals and to all the liberal economists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their reflection crystallised around the great question of grain: wheat was the major food resource of the time, and its production and trade were debated throughout the century. The state fixed prices, prohibited transfers between regions, controlled economic agents, and attempted to organise the distribution of this essential commodity. The result, as the Physiocrats showed, was invariably the same: scarcity, famine, and social disorder.
Turgot, the most brilliant of the Physiocrats' allies in government, summarized the lesson in his famous letter to the young Louis XVI:
"Sire, the grain trade requires no regulation other than that which nature imposes through the play of individual interests. Leave it free, and it will feed France better than any edict can do. Regulate it, and you will produce the very scarcity you seek to prevent, for you will have destroyed the only mechanism capable of responding to scarcity: the self-interest of the merchant who seeks to buy where grain is cheap and sell where it is dear."

Leroy-Beaulieu's prophecy: "slavery without the nest egg"

The French liberal tradition extended this analysis into the nineteenth century, most notably through Paul Leroy-Beaulieu and his major work Le Collectivisme (1883). Leroy-Beaulieu set out to analyse in advance how a communist society would actually function, since the theorists of communism, Karl Marx foremost among them, had been remarkably sparing with details about the society that was to replace capitalism.
Leroy-Beaulieu's conclusion was devastating. Communism, he argued, would constitute a form of slavery worse than traditional slavery itself:
"It is slavery without the nest egg, without the possibility of redemption. The slave of antiquity could, in some systems, purchase his freedom; the industrious man could accumulate the price of his own liberation. The citizen of the communist state has no such prospect. He is deprived of freedom with no path to liberation, no prospect of self-ownership, individual autonomy, or the freedom to act according to his own ideas. He is, in the most literal sense, owned by the state; and unlike the slave-owner, the state is an owner without interest in the welfare of the owned."
Political freedom would necessarily be suppressed, since democratic functioning does not permit the sustainable management of production and distribution processes. A permanent tutelary power becomes indispensable. Leroy-Beaulieu stated this with prophetic clarity:
"The communist system, once established, cannot tolerate democratic opposition. For democracy implies the possibility that the opponents of the system will come to power; and if they come to power, they will restore private property and undo the collectivisation. The system must therefore abolish the democracy that brought it to power. This is not an accident of the Bolshevik revolution; it is a logical necessity of collectivism."
In other words, communism requires despotism, not because its founders are necessarily cruel, but because the logic of its own organisation demands the permanent suppression of the freedom that would otherwise destroy it.

The chain of lost freedoms

The principle of unfreedom in production and distribution has direct consequences for every dimension of individual existence. Let us trace this chain.
There is no freedom of domicile in a collectivist system, because there is no freedom of work: a superior decision dictates to individuals which branches of production they will participate in and how they will work. Since one lives near one's workplace, and cannot choose one's work, one cannot choose one's home.
There is no freedom of the press, for two fundamental reasons. Leroy-Beaulieu was explicit on this point:
"First, political freedom is severely restricted, since criticism of the system is incompatible with its perpetuation. Second, and more fundamentally, the state owns the means of production; it therefore owns the presses. Without private ownership of printing houses, there can be no private press; without a private press, there can be no freedom of expression, however many declarations may proclaim it. The freedom of the press in a communist society is like the freedom of the bird in a cage: perfectly real within the limits of the cage, and perfectly meaningless beyond them."
There is no freedom of consumption, since the state decides what will be produced and in what quantities. If the collectivist state decides that strawberry production is not worth the labour, there will simply be no strawberries to consume. In a liberal system, by contrast, the contract between willing buyers and willing producers, freely formed and mutually beneficial, would satisfy this demand without any need for central direction.
Indeed, Leroy-Beaulieu identified what he called the "cascade of suppressions": each suppression of one freedom logically entails the suppression of others, because freedoms are not a collection of separate privileges but a single, interconnected system:
"Remove freedom of work, and you remove freedom of domicile. Remove freedom of domicile, and you remove freedom of association. Remove freedom of association, and you remove freedom of the press. Remove freedom of the press, and you remove freedom of thought. Each link in the chain of freedom holds all the others; and the man who cuts one link has, whether he intended it or not, destroyed the entire chain."

The twentieth century confirms the prophecy

The twentieth century brought a striking confirmation to the predictions of the French liberals. The communist system, once it became a reality in Russia after 1917, demonstrated with terrible precision the accuracy of analyses that had been made three and four decades earlier.
Leroy-Beaulieu had written, in 1883:
"The communist experiment, when it is made, will not refute our analysis; it will confirm it. It will show that a society without private property cannot calculate, cannot innovate, and cannot govern itself democratically. It will show that the attempt to impose equality of condition necessarily produces, not equality, but a new hierarchy: the hierarchy of those who control the state against those who are controlled by it. And it will show that this new hierarchy will prove far more resistant to reform than the old hierarchies of birth and wealth, because it will be armed with all the power of the state and sanctified by the rhetoric of the common good."
In a liberal system, contracts are freely established between producers and consumers in a harmonious and peaceful relationship. The collectivist system organises, instead, a complete tutelage of the individual, replacing the free direction of oneself by oneself with the regulatory and arbitrary decisions of a political power, elected or unelected.
This intellectual and factual history of the failure of unfreedom is a fundamental lesson. The trajectory of human history pushes us to reject ever more decisively the communist idea and the idea of tutelage, in order to bring about freedom, autonomy, individual decision-making, and voluntary, peaceful exchange between people.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
According to the liberal analysis, why does democratic political functioning become impossible to maintain under a communist economic system?