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Before one can debate on liberty, one must possess an understanding of the history of liberty. There is no rigorous philosophy built piece-by-piece on logical grounds; rather a rag-bag of ifs, but-thens and alsos. This is Wilson’s raison d’écrire. He suggests we are too willing to give up hard-fought liberties such as personal information and habeas corpus partly because we do not realise how difficult they were to obtain in the first place. How quickly we forget it seems.

There is no debate that the richness of Wilson’s writing makes this book simply a pleasure to read. He possesses great skill in getting the reader to think through each side of an historical argument. Wilson quotes many thinkers on liberty and while some of the antiquated language can make these, at times, opaque, Wilson is always there to neatly interpret into plain English and sustain the narrative pace.

Free Thought

The 19th Century was the golden age of liberal thought in Britain before the twilight of the World Wars and today’s dark age. John Stuart Mill, a prominent thinker of the time, seemed to foresee that the economic liberalism of the 20th Century would degrade personal liberty when he said:

The private money-getting occupation of almost everyone is more or less a mechanical routine, it brings but few faculties into action, while its exclusive pursuit tends to fasten his attention and interest exclusively upon himself, and upon his family as an appendage of himself; making him indifferent to the public, to the more generous objects and nobler interests, and, in his inordinate regard for his personal comforts, selfish and cowardly.
J. S. Mill, Democracy in America

Can education overcome this tendency to fasten our interest exclusively upon ourselves? Is the purpose of education to prepare a person for a successful career in society or to give them the character to resist the influences of society? (p. 157, What Price Liberty?)

To think freely one has to withdraw from society; to close one’s ears and listen in the quiet. But you must come back, because to forget about society completely would mean reneging on your responsibilities as a citizen and would question the entire purpose of wanting to think freely in the first place.

True freedom consists in the continual active consciousness of the position and responsibilities of a Free Person, a Member of the State, and a positive Item in it. The Free Person will feel that he has something to live for beyond the attainment of mere personal ease and comfort.
T. Smith, Local Self-government

Living in a self-autonomous community is a lesson in citizenship. To make Citizenship part of the formal education syllabus seems to me an acknowledgement that we have stumbled somewhere (which often happens in the dark).

But what if social prejudices prevent you from active participation in the community? Take someone who cannot read, the classical liberal might argue that this illiterate person is not strictly unfree because no one is deliberately preventing them from learning (p. 180, WPL?). However, T. H. Green would say, the illiterate person is not free because some outside force (such as social prejudice) is hindering the full realisation of his potential. Society has a duty to maximise the liberty of this man by teaching him to read. To overcome our local failings (e.g. prejudices, selfishness), the state organises formal education for all regardless of ethnicity, gender or age.

Ultimately, the individual cannot resist all of society’s influences because the individual must live in society:

No man can be a collectivist alone or an individualist alone. He must be both… The nature of man is a dual nature. The character of the organisation of human society is dull. Man is at once a unique being and a gregarious animal. For some purposes he must be a collectivist, for others he is, and will for all time remain, an individualist.
W. Churchill at St. Andrew’s Hall in Glasgow, October 11, 1906

Economic and personal liberties are not mutally exclusive but exist symbiotically:

Without an ordered economic life the individual frustrates himself in a morass of fears and insecurities. Without personal liberty an ordered economic life is like the plant that never flowers.
A. Bevan quoted from M. Foot, Aneurin Bevan

The career of Mill’s educated person grants them an ordered economic life which calms their fears and insecurities so that they can enjoy their personal freedoms. Time and again we come across the paradoxes of liberty in Wilson’s book: freedom requires order; the human is an individual and a social animal; formal education is needed to think freely.

The Premium of Liberty

The book particularly fascinates me when Wilson develops his thesis on risk management in the 20th century. Wilson says our:

Former faith in liberty has been overtaken by cynicism, mistrust and above all the defining characteristic of our age, fear. Just as the possibility of more freedom became a reality the desire for security, reassurance and control gripped the peoples of countries who had scored so many gains for freedom.
p. 287, WPL?

Wilson discusses, all too briefly in my opinion, the collection of data and use of statistical methods to measure risk:

In the realm of data there are three essential facts: everything is calculable, everything is a risk and everybody has a stake in reducing risk because everyone pays… Spontaneity and unpredictability, give richness to a normal life, [but] add cost to society as a whole.
p. 310, WPL?

Wilson acknowledges that while risk management is a “good thing”, he argues that “the thought behind [it] is non-ideological and apolitical; [it is] preventative not positive, protective not liberating” (p. 311, WPL?). We yearn for a kind of “managed freedom”.

If we are content with this “health and safety utopia” governed by “risk management angels”, is there any need for politicians? Perhaps not as Walter Wriston, chairman of Citicorp (1967-1984) and Ronald Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board (1982-1989) suggests:

One new rule which is becoming more and more manifest is that technology has begun, in many instances, to bypass politics. As we have seen, the global financial markets have become the transmission belt for conveying the world’s judgements about national economic policies. In a similar manner, the information technology that touches all of us each day has become the conduit for the myriad demands of citizens and consumers made to corporations and governments… We are witness to a true revolution: power really is moving to the people.
W. Wriston, The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution is Transforming the World

The data may be cold and objective but the questions asked by actuaries, risk modellers and scientists are not. Calculating risk may seem cold and objective but the interpretation of data requires theory which is dependent on the culture we foster and language we use. Therefore the act of risk management is deeply political.

A greater concern is when people use pseudo-science and miscalculation to support their decisions, and nobody scrutinises it.

Alastair Clarke
24th November, 2018