Modern Liberty: And the Limits of Government

by Charles Fried

Book Overview

Arguing that equality is often the most potent rival of liberty, this work demonstrates how the dense tangle of government regulations both supports and threatens our personal freedoms. It is illustrated with examples from contemporary life.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393060004
• ISBN13: 9780393060003
• Release Date: November 2006
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

"We may all enjoy a full measure of liberty without subtracting from the liberty of anyone else."

So states (p.66) Charles Fried in "Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government." He presents his case for the validity of this premise in a gentlemanly manner but displays a somewhat loose and circuitous form of argumentation. Fried actually begins by accentuating "modern liberty" as "individual liberty made normative" and by distinguishing it from the "the liberty of the ancients" which dealt with self-rule by states, not individuals. He then relates three situations of individual liberty overstepped: 1) The language police in Quebec, 2) lock-in universal health care, also in Quebec, and 3) Vermont small-town heritage vs. Wal-Mart. Having established a tentative platform of his own viewpoint on liberty, Fried engages other scholarly opinions on the limits of liberty and governmental interference in individuals' lives. Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, the authors of "The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice" provide some of those. They concern themselves with distributive justice and, according to Fried, insist that pretax ownership is nonexistent. They allow for "'individuals...retain[ing] a certain degree of sovereignty over themselves,'" (including "the right to speak one's mind" and "a minimal form of economic freedom") but government is seen as the seat of most authority and their focus is on striving for forms of economic equality or at least equivalency rather than liberty. Fried presents their contentions without irony or mockery -- most welcome -- but he may confuse readers by not clearly and on-the-spot elucidating where he and this pair philosophically diverge. He does note tellingly on p. 112: "[With the New Deal], government was set free intellectually and politically to remake society on whatever terms the public could be persuaded it wanted." Could be persuaded. By government. Two pages later he comments, "So if all there is to liberty of the mind is the liberty of the ancients, the liberty to refect on, discuss, and choose one's government, it is too little." Fried wants liberty in all avenues of life. Although Fried clearly believes in the legitimacy of government as a necessary means for organizing humanity on a scale beyond that of individual and family, he considers the individual to be the prime seat of determination. He edges beyond the generally acknowledged definition of liberty -- freedom from undue restraint -- to claim, "Liberty is self-ownership." (p.180). He finds objectionable any action (from individual or collective body) that infringes on someone's freedom. So, when he returns to his Quebec and Vermont cases, he rejects the premise that the majority (the voters, the government) is entitled to impose language, health care, and shopping limitations on all within the civic borders. He states that just as the U.S. Constitution directs that "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without compensation," those who dissent from a decision being implemented should be compensated when they absolutely cannot be

An interesting examination of liberty in the modern world, if a bit too lawerly.

I found this to be a very interesting book even though I increasingly found myself out of sympathy with the author's argument from about halfway through this extended examination of what Liberty might mean in Modern times. Charles Fried is noted as a conservative and did serve in the Reagan administration as solicitor general and on the Massachusetts Supreme Court. However, as I read the book, he seemed more like a pre-Reagan era although his appeal to and admiration fro Justice Stephen Breyer's notion of "active liberty" gives me pause. Even so, this is a book very much worth reading if you would like to experience an extended philosophical argument. We get so little of it anymore that it is quite pleasant to read someone who cares to put energy into thinking rather than appealing to emotion and manipulation to win arguments. Mr. Fried begins with a brief examination of the notions of what comprised liberty through the course of human history. He notes that in ancient times liberty referred to the city state being free from subjugation by a neighbor whether or not the individual lived under a tyranny within the walls of their city. This is contrasted to the personal aspects of liberty we expect and experience today. The author then considers the competitors to liberty and the implications they imply to the limitation of liberty as a good. Obviously, I cannot recount everything here. When Fried is discussing the individual and contrasting these arguments with other notions, he is quite compelling. However, about halfway through the book he considers some arguments from those who deny that there is any such thing as pre-tax income, who raise issues about what property rights could be, who reject the idea of natural rights as ridiculous because they have to be defined, who offer ideas about different color money and restrictions of what it can be used for, and even about the possibility and impossibility of real free speech. After considering the notion of a state that imposes taxes (since we need some entity to define what our "rights" are - he says), the book from that point forward - prestodigereedoo - we are compelled to accept the existence of the modern and centralized superstate as the only possible form of government. No appeal to history (this is a short book, after all), or consideration of other models of government. Nor do we get a comparison of the weak Federal government models that Jefferson and Hamilton fought over and the shift to the centralized overpowering Federal Government of FDR (that began with Lincoln). Nor is there any consideration of how governments might naturally arise between small groups of people in an isolated area. Fried wants a state that would force, for example the Old Order Amish to educate their children according to his lights of what is acceptable. He is willing to trust the state to decide for children what the acceptable level of information is so they can make up their own minds about li

Elegant and essential

In this book, Harvard professor and former Solicitor General (Reagan-era) Charles Fried mounts an elegant defense of "modern" liberty. "Modern" liberty, in Fried's lexicon indicates the freedom associated with natural rights tradition of the English/Scottish Enlightenment, and is to be contrasted with the "ancient" liberty of Rousseau and Sparta. While ancient liberty was about political participation, the essence of Fried's modern liberty is the absence of coercion. This is an idiosyncratic book for a contemporary conservative thinker, since the ancient/modern dichotomy is today primarily shop talk among Straussians, who seem to come down against "modern" liberty. But then, Fried is not really a conservative, he is a consistent and principled libertarian. Like J.S. Mill or Kant, he is clearly in love with the modern age and he has no time for tradition, status, or organic hierarchies. "Modern Liberty" is an easy read, but it is dense with ideas. Fried never mentions names but it is clear that, beneath the surface, he is engaged in point-by-point debate with the entire pantheon of modern political philosophy. He takes on Rawls and Walzer and Cohen, but you don't need to know these names to enjoy the book. (Most thrillingly for me, he utterly demolishes the "capabilities" theory of freedom, advanced by Amartya Sen.) He knows all of these arguments by heart and engages them vigorously. There are no strawmen here. Fried's entire theory is built upon the value of individual rationality, and his argument fully engages the rationality of his interlocutors. He does not belittle or insult anyone's ideas. He presents their arguments in good faith and in the best light possible, and then demonstrates what is wrong in them. This is a brief but serious book, intended for a popular audience. Libertarians will find a goldmine of intellectual ammunition here, but this book would also make a great text for a beginner's course in political philosophy (especially when used in contrast with something like Sen's "Development as Freedom").