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Taking Liberties with Freedom: a Reply to Professor Flew1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
Professor Flew interprets my book Freedom and Liberation as a defence of a sort of radical authoritarianism disguised as a theory of freedom. He supposes me to be looking for a ‘Guardian élite’, a group of ‘new philosopher kings who will … create, and impose their own values upon, what Gibbs wants to honour as “a free society”’. In the title of his lecture Flew suggests that the message of the book might accurately be summed up in the Orwellian slogan ‘Freedom is Slavery’.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1983
Footnotes
1
I should like to express my gratitude to Professor Flew for providing me with a typescript of his lecture in advance of its delivery, and for keeping me informed of subsequent revisions. I should like to thank also the Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Professor Phillips Griffiths, for inviting me to reply both in person and in print.
References
2 I shall refer to it as F&L. The present distributor (Harvester Press) has no connection with the original publishers.
3 I think the conflict between my ‘Platonism’ and Flew's empiricism underlies some of the deeper differences between us.
4 Flew wonders why it does not occur to me to doubt that persons he describes as my ‘fellow revolutionaries’ will agree that the traditional liberties are essential to justice and freedom; for, he says, this has been denied ‘by every Jacobin from Robespierre and Saint-Just, through Lenin and Trotsky, right up to Castro and Ho Chi Minh’. But why does he take for granted that Gibbsians (none of whom I know, apart from myself) would sympathize with the policies of these ‘Jacobins’ (none of whom is mentioned in my book)? It would not be more ludicrous if I were to respond by arguing that the traditional liberties are in as much danger of being abrogated by Flew's fellow conservatives, on the ground that every reactionary from Critias and Diocletian to Philip II, Metternich, Franco and the Ayatollah Khomeini has imposed severe restrictions on the liberty of his subjects in the name of a higher freedom.
5 If anyone is inclined to take seriously Flew's jovial insinuation that I would like to ban performances of Madame Butterfly, forbid the public sale of keg beer, and force philosophers to take strenuous physical exercise, I would beg him or her to look at what I actually wrote (Flew gives references).
6 A fuller discussion of the concept of autonomy is undertaken in my later article ‘Autonomy and Authority in Education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education 13 (1979).Google Scholar