Schwartz on Freedom: Vacuity or Stirnerism?
Looking again at Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice, I’m struck by something Virginia Postrel picked up on in her Reason review, which is that Schwartz’s argument turns on a false opposition between freedom and commitment. I tripped up on the same passage Virginia noted:
In the context of this discussion of choice and autonomy, it is also important to note that, in many ways, social ties actually decrease freedom, choice, and autonomy. Marriage, for example, is a commitment to a particular other person that curtails freedom of choice of sexual and even emotional partners.
To which Virginia sensibly responds:
So gays who cannot legally marry their partners are somehow freer than heterosexuals who can? There’s something deeply wrong with this understanding of choice. Freedom to choose must include the freedom to commit.
But I think there is something even more deeply wrong with Schwartz’s opposition of freedom and commitment than Virginia brings out. It is either trivial, or commits what I will call the “Stirnerite fallacy.”
Most of the time, Schwartz seems to be operating under a notion of freedom as opportunity or ability. In this sense, if a new variety of jam comes on the market, then my freedom has increased, because now I have the opportunity to buy it. Conversely, any reduction in my feasible set of alternatives is a reduction of freedom. But this is a completely formal notion devoid of any real content. If I set out 5:00 pm to drive from DC to Indiana, then, by the time I make it to Ohio, the possibility of arriving at New York City by midnight has dropped out of my set of alternatives. It trivially follows that my “commitment” to get to Indiana requires that I forgo some alternatives. But, even so, it doesn’t follow that my feasible set is now diminished. By the time I get to Indiana, there will be a large number of places I could get to by midnight that I couldn’t have reached in that time had I stayed in place in DC. Or, if I get a new job, in a different building, my options for lunch will have changed. I can no longer go to the place I liked around the corner from my old building (too far away). But there may be two places I really like around the corner from my new building.
Now, marriage… If become married, I expect to forgo some opportunities for romance and sex. But the reason I am committing is precisely because the commitment, like getting to Ohio in order to get to Indiana, is a necessary step to other exciting opportunities. If I am NOT married, then, in this trivial sense of freedom, I am not free to experience the benefits of marriage. Conceiving a child with my wife, for example, is not now in my set of opportunities. A good commitment is precisely one in which the door you close behind you leads to several more that open.
Of course, to bring the trivial formality of this idea of freedom to the fore, it’s also true that conceiving a child with my slave isn’t in my set of opportunities, given the fact that I cannot own a slave. And every time a state strikes down an archaic law, like a law that says you can’t bring a chicken into a saloon, people there will no longer be free to break the law by carrying chickens into saloons. However, as compensation, they will be free to legally carry chickens into saloons.
So, if freedom is just an increase in the size of the feasible set, then it simply doesn’t follow that commitment diminishes freedom in this sense. So why say that “social ties actually decrease freedom, choice, and autonomy?”
This only makes sense, I think, if one commits the Stirnerite fallacy, which is the claim that any obligation whatsoever erodes freedom. The fallacy is named for Max Stirner, author of The Ego and It’s Own, who argued that even the rules of language and logic are intolerable constraints on the fully free self. If you make a promise today, and don’t want to keep it tomorrow, then DON’T! That would be self-enslavement!
Schwartz is the modus tollens to Harry Browne’s libertarian Stirnerist modus ponens. Both agree that if you assume an obligation, then you are unfree. Browne advises us to avoid falling into the “trap” of assuming obligations. Schwartz advises us to be wary of too much freedom. Schwartz tells us we’ll be less free if we’re married, but we’ll be miserable if we don’t forge this kind of deep social bond. Browne tells us to not get married.
But we can be smart, and just reject the common assumption and understand the assumption of obligation and commitment as an expression of freedom that can also enhance freedom. And thus we can resist the inference(a non-sequitur anyway) that if freedom in the Stirnerite sense is good or bad, then it’s good or bad for the political-economic system to offer us more or less of it.
October 4th, 2005 22:57
Hey Will,
I haven’t read Schwartz’s book, but isn’t there a more charitable take on what he’s getting at here? Viz. Not all choices and not all sets of alternatives are of equal scope and import. Going through with a big commitment like marriage does open up new choice situations, but the ones it forecloses are (maybe) comparatively more weighty, more fundamental to how our lives unfold. Maybe going from single to married isn’t much at all like the typical drive from DC to Indiana — since, in the marriage case, at one stage you have enormous latitude in choosing a course for your life, whereas at the other, an additional, significant part of that course has been set down, and acts as a powerful constraint. The more commitments you have the ~narrower~ (albeit, granted, not the fewer) your potential sets of alternatives. Not that that means we shouldn’t commit to things, but isn’t it a sense in which commitment restricts freedom?
Apologies if what I just said isn’t Schwartz’s line at all. Heh.
October 4th, 2005 23:33
I would note that what Schwartz actually said was that social ties decrease freedom “in many ways”…not necessarily in ALL ways. If freedom is, as you put it, “an increase in the size of the feasible set,” then whether a particular commitment increases freedom would hinge on whether, on net, it opens more doors than it closes.
I haven’t read the book, and know nothing of Schwartz, but the quoted blurb seems to be expressing the (I always thought non-controversial) notion that social ties tend to foreclose more potential feasible choices than they enable. Generally, this ought not matter, so long as a given actor considers the smaller set of choices available to him post-commitment to be more valuable than his prior options.
Nonetheless, I think of the Larry David line:
“Who do you think has more freedom — the married man in America, or the single guy in Communist China? I gotta go with the Chinese guy. Yes, I can leave the country…but I can’t leave the house. He can leave the house, but he can’t leave the country. I’ll take his deal.”
October 5th, 2005 01:18
Wait. A. Moment. I went to read some of the reviews of the Browne book that you link to. He advocates open marriage in it?
N-I-C-E.
I am now prouder than ever to have voted for the man in 1996 and 2000.
(Also, Will, did you actually read that book?? And did you actually read Stirner’s book?? Just curious.)
October 5th, 2005 09:40
Luka,
Yeah, I read Browne’s book back in college, and remember him telling me not to get married or have kids, because they’ll weigh down my free spirit with all their damn demands. Am I remembering wrong? (I voted for him twice, too!)
I just read Stirner, in order to write an encyclopedia entry on him. What a ridiculously weird book! I think it’s important to understand Stirner in order to understand the history of American libertarianism. His first American publisher, Benjamin Tucker, the individualist anarchist and founder/publisher of Liberty magazine was deeply influenced by him. The dialectic between antinomian Stirnerite “subjectivist” anarchism and natural law “intrinsicist” anarchism, set up in the pages of Tucker’s Liberty has been with us for over a century.
I think of Browne as a hybrid between Stirnerite expression of the unconstrained will and Randian rationalism. (The mix, I think, is toxic. The way Browne applies the law of identity to other people tends to depersonalize them. He encourages us to see other people as objects, more or less, whose natures have to be discovered and respected, so that we can more ably maniupulate them. Sociopathy as a guide to life.)
But more importantly, Luka, WHY DO YOU DOUBT ME!!!???
October 5th, 2005 10:32
>> Not that that means we shouldn’t commit to things, but isn’t it a sense in which commitment restricts freedom? <
I think Will’s point is that commitment does not necessarily decrease the simple *size* of the feasible set.
Seems to me that many commitments may actually increase the size of the F.S. In addition to the opportunities availed by the commitment itself, once committed now you have a bunch of opportunities to *break* that commitment that you didn’t have before. (E.g. you can’t cheat on your spouse if you’re not married; you can’t betray your best friend if you don’t have any friends.)
That said, off-the-cuff I’d say it’s very difficult to measure the relative sizes of the F.S. for two otherwise-identical people where one is married and the other is not. That seems like it would devolve pretty quickly into a contest of wits, not a robust methodology.
October 5th, 2005 15:42
Will,
I promise, I wasn’t doubting you!! I would NEVER do such a thing!
I was actually wondering if you read the books b/c of how weird they seem, not b/c I think you were incorrectly reporting the view of the authors or anything like that. The open marriage thing I got from on of the reviews on Amazon. Don’t know if it’s true that HB is an advocate. I just thought it was funny.
Stirner seems insane to me. I bought _The Ego and Its Own_ awhile ago, when I was more seriously interested in egoism, and tried reading a little of it. What the hell is he talking about?? I honestly have little idea. (Although it might be my fault. I have real trouble getting into texts that aren’t written in, or translated into, contemparary English…)
October 5th, 2005 15:47
Correction:
I have trouble getting into PHILOSOPHICAL texts that aren’t written in or tranlated into contemporary English OR that aren’t written in the style of analytic philosophy.
I just looked through my copy of Stirner’s book and the language doesn’t seem inaccesible (in terms of what dialect of Egnlish it’s written in). It’s the style and method that, at first glance, makes it difficult for me to get into…
Ok, there’s my correction.
The end.
October 5th, 2005 16:02
Luka, It’s not you… From David Leopold’s outstanding SEP entry on Stirner:
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Modern readers hoping to understand The Ego and Its Own are confronted by several obstacles, not least the form, structure, and argument, of Stirner’s book.
Much of Stirner’s prose—which is crowded with aphorisms, italicisation, and hyperbole—appears calculated to disconcert. Most striking, perhaps, is the use of word play. Rather than reach a conclusion through the conventional use of argument, Stirner often approaches a claim that he wishes to endorse by exploiting words with related etymologies or formal similarities. For example, he frequently associates words for property (such as ‘Eigentum’) with words connoting distinctive individual characteristics (such as ‘Eigenheit’) in order to promote the claim that property is expressive of selfhood. (Stirner’s account of egoistic property—see below—gives this apparently orthodox Hegelian claim a distinctive twist.)
This rejection of conventional forms of intellectual discussion is linked to Stirner’s substantive views about language and rationality. His unusual style reflects a conviction that both language and rationality are human products which have come to constrain and oppress their creators. Stirner maintains that accepted meanings and traditional standards of argumentation are underpinned by a conception of truth as a privileged realm beyond individual control. As a result, individuals who accept this conception are abandoning a potential area of creative self-expression in favour of adopting a subordinate role as servants of truth. In stark contrast, Stirner insists that the only legitimate restriction on the form of our language, or on the structure of our arguments, is that they should serve our individual ends. It is the frequent failure of ordinary meanings and standard forms of argument to satisfy his interpretation of this criterion which underpins Stirner’s remorselessly idiosyncratic style.
The Ego and Its Own has an intelligible, but scarcely transparent, structure. . .
October 5th, 2005 16:18
I see. Hmmm. I wonder if Stirner didn’t take it as one of his individual ends to communicate his thoughts to people reading his book…
October 28th, 2005 20:53
It sounds like identity = slavery for Stirner.