Freedom, Isaiah Berlin, and Don Quixote de la Mancha

By Emiliano Ruiz Parra

Introduction

The debate on the relation between freedom and property is not only of intellectual interest:

ideologies and regimes are built upon particular accounts of property systems in which

freedom is exercised, or constrained1. This essay argues that a lack of property entails a

lack of effective freedom and, furthermore, that public property enables freedom to be

exercised without interferences. First, this work acknowledges the contribution of Isaiah

Berlin to the understanding of freedom. Drawing on G. A. Cohen’s argument that the

protection to private property interferes with the enjoyment of freedom, this essay however,

opposes Berlin’s principle that a lack of money is mere inability or incapacity, not an

imposition on ‘negative freedom’. Then I will discuss three arguments from the philosopher

Jonathan Wolff against Cohen’s analysis. The legitimacy of private property is thus the

topic that I focus on through a summary of both Liberal and Marxist positions. The essay

ends with a reflection on Don Quixote de la Mancha and his famous statement on freedom.

I discuss the Mario Vargas Llosa’s interpretation and employ Don Quixote as an instance of

the enjoyment of freedom in public property.

Berlin revisited

It would be miserly to discuss Isaiah Berlin without acknowledging his enormous

intellectual appeal and his contribution to the understanding of freedom, particularly after a

1
The rights-based view of property and freedom, such as the Libertarianism of Robert
Nozick (Wolff, 2006, 134), gave the philosophical ground for the neoliberal
governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
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painful victory over Nazism and Fascism—“Two Concepts of Liberty” was written in 1958

—and with freedom trodden by the totalitarianism of the Union of Soviet Socialist

Republics and the Stalinist regimes. Equally as profound as his critique of authoritarianism,

is his analysis of Liberalism. Berlin identifies the shared fallacy of some Liberal and

authoritarian ideologies: the belief that reason is a scarce good owned by a few wise people

who are meant to rule and mold society in order to prepare the masses to be free, even if

their freedom is constrained during the transition. That fallacy leads to the principle that, if

laws are based on reason, to obey the law and to be free are synonyms. In a civilisation like

ours, founded on the faith in reason (with a lineage traced from God as supreme reason,

through the rediscovery of the Greek tradition to Rationalism and the Enlightenment, and

eventually Positivism and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century) reason was, precisely, an

appealing justification for the rule of various would-be Platonic Guardians. Any critique of

Berlin should start by appreciating this contribution, among many contained in his “Two

Concepts of Liberty”. However, like all the powerful texts, Berlin’s must be revised and

criticised, especially when his words have had a decisive influence on the Liberal regimes

and decision-makers of our times.

Negative freedom and property

Berlin defines ‘negative freedom’ as follows: ‘I am normally said to be free to the degree to

which no man or body of men interferes with my activity […] coercion implies the

deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise

act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are preventing from attaining a goal

from human beings. Mere incapacity to attain a goal is not lack of political freedom’. On

the relation between freedom and poverty, Berlin asserts: ‘if my poverty were a kind of
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disease […] this inability would not naturally be described as a lack of freedom, least of all

political freedom’ (Berlin, p. 34-35, emphasis added). It is very important to note that

Berlin distinguishes between the interference of an agent against the exercise of freedom,

and the ‘mere incapacity’ to do something. If I want to travel around the world but I lack

the money to do it, my freedom is not constrained since there is no legal system or external

force to impede me: incapacity and inability are inherent to the individual, not external

obstacles put up by some other agent.

G. A. Cohen refutes this view with the simple argument that this inability, or

incapacity, is not inherent to the subject, but established by a third part, namely, the state or

the police (Cohen, ‘Freedom and money’, p. 3). He gives the following example. Suppose I

want to pitch a tent in your large back garden. Regardless of whether I do it because I want

to annoy you or because I have no place to live, ‘the chances are that the state will

intervene on your behalf. If it does, I shall suffer a constraint on my freedom’ (Cohen,

2006, p. 167). This intervention would be an objective and physical constraint, Cohen

argues.

Jonathan Wolff responds with three objections. The first one is conceptual: we

should discriminate between liberty and freedom. The former ‘concerns the permissibility

of types of action’, whereas the latter ‘depends on considerations about the possibility of

particular actions’ (Wolff, 1997, pp. 352-353). For that conceptual distinction, taken here

into account, this essay only deals with ‘freedom’ and disregards ‘liberty’.

Wolff’s second objection is factual, far relevant, and can be called ‘the cake-eating

objection’: ‘suppose you own a cake, but I eat it. I have not been physically prevented from

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eating it, and once I have eaten it no punishment can turn the clock back and stop me from

having eaten it [and, as long as I not be caught] no acts or act-combinations are rendered

impossible, so I suffer no loss of freedom’ (Wolff, 1997, p. 351). Prima facie, this

argument seems logical and blunt. But let’s take it further: imagine an authoritarian state

where freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are forbidden by law. I disregard the

law and meet secretly with my comrades to publish a pamphlet that calls for rebellion and

we distribute it, all the while hiding from police persecution. Could we say that we have

been free from constraints because we haven’t been caught? Following Wolff’s argument,

we have had the effective freedoms of assembly and speech. Maybe we will never be

captured, but does it mean that we were free to do what we did? No2. If the police were to

catch us, after all, we would be tortured and killed. The fact that we live in a world of

‘imperfect enforcement’ (Wolff, 1997, p. 351) only speaks to the objective difficulties of

the Capitalist system to impose constraints on freedom, not about an effective enjoyment of

it.

The third objection is moral. Wolff says that ‘a society in which anyone could pitch

her tent wherever she wants—where every action is possible—would not be a model of a

good, or even a free, society. It may not even be coherent’ (Wolff, 1997, p. 356). Wolff

focuses on the (il)legitimacy of the so-called invader. The reader is bound to support his

argument: no one wants a tramp claiming the right to set camp in the living room.

However, the question should be asked the other way round: is private property legitimate
2
Last October, The Guardian was banned by a judge to publish a report about toxic
wastes disposed of in a rubbish dump in Ivory Coast, an act that caused 15 fatal
victims, 69 in danger of death and 108,000 people demanding medical attention.
Nevertheless, the report was posted on wikileaks.com; later, one of the publishers
denounced the censorship on Twitter on October 12 (Zamarripa, p. 19). If we concede
to Wolff’s argument, there was no censorship against The Guardian as a print
newspaper because they effectively published the report on the Internet.
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or moral? Principally if we are talking not about small property holdings, but the extensive

ones, not about the flat purchased with a 30 year-loan by a member of the middle or the

working classes, but about the mass accumulation of property, especially if we live in a

Capitalist system based on the ‘endless accumulation of capital’ (Wallerstein, p. 31).

The legitimacy of private property

It is not uncommon to argue that private property, for the Marxist, is a violent process of

appropriation, a transition from the public domain to private ownership morally and

physically defined as a ‘theft’ (Cohen, 1988, p. 302). Marx describes the process as a

‘robbery of the common lands’ through ‘reckless terrorism’, exerted by a class of owners

against feudal and clan properties (cfr. Marx, ch. XXVI). Wallerstein explains that

Capitalism, as a historical system, needs to expand its territory constantly in order to

incorporate zones and people into the ‘commodification chain’ as means of production or

proletariats (Wallerstein, 28-31). This course of action, Wallerstein says, may occur by

either manu militari or different state and political interventions, many of them violent or

imposed.

For the Marxist, the transformation of public property to private property is the

‘original sin’ of Capitalism, and the moral legitimacy of private property is thus ever under

question. What is surprising is that Liberalism has been incapable of giving a convincing

defense of private property. As Wolff explains, the Lockean account is not strong enough to

provide a moral justification for the appropriation of public goods. For Locke, privatisation

is valid under two ‘provisos’. First, we must not take more than we can use and, second, we

must leave ‘enough and as good’ of whatever we take for others. Locke also gives one

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more principle to make the transition morally valid, ‘added value’. Locke says that you can

keep the property if and only if you have added value to it by labour, but even here just the

added value may be legitimately held, not the means of production themselves. Wolff

recognizes the limit of this argument for justifying the possession of land once you have

taken the ‘added value’ and, thus, the indefensibility of inheritance rights. Then Wolff gives

up: ‘Why should anything I do to an object overturn your previous liberty to use it? It is

very hard o find an answer: thus it is very hard to find a satisfactory principle, of justice in

acquisition. Perhaps it is impossible’. After this surrender, Wolff demands to overlook the

question: ‘A more modest response is to suppose that there may be something wrong with

the schema we set up at the beginning. That is, perhaps it is wrong to focus on the issue of

justice in acquisition as a separable element in a theory of distributive justice’ (Wolff, 2006,

p. 139-143, emphasis in the original). At this point, it is fair to respond to Wolff: No, the

fact that you cannot present a moral theory of appropriation does not mean that we are

asking the wrong question, it only means that you have yet to provide a convincing answer.

And it is not a naïve discussion, as long as private property is the backbone that supports

not only Capitalism as an economic system, but also the political philosophy of Liberalism,

and it serves as one of the justifications for the normative existence of the state, that is,

precisely the protection of property rights.

On the other hand, it is very important, for the purposes of this essay, to stop for a

moment with Wolff’s concept of ‘public goods’. Wolff says that these goods benefit all,

‘whether or not the recipient has contributed to the production’. At the same time, these

goods might be affected by ‘negative externalities’ rendered by producers to dump their

costs on others. The examples given by Wolff are very important: the street lights—as a

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public good given by a positive externality—and a silent environment affected by a noisy

production process: ‘other people are inadvertently ‘subsidizing’ my use of the noisy

process by bearing the cost of being disturbed by the noise’ (Wolff, 2006, p. 147-148).

Why is this mention of public goods here so crucial for my argument? Because within this

concept is hidden the idea of public property: the environment belongs to everyone, as do

the streets, and as does the river. When a construction company disposes of its rubble in the

highway, it is actually offending my freedom to go through that piece of land. When a

nuclear plant dumps its toxic waste into the river, it is harming my and other’s freedom to

drink that water. Such ‘public goods’ are not only a ‘material stock’ whose existence is

noticed when it becomes polluted: they constitute the public property that belongs to

everyone and upon which freedom may be exercised through public appropriations.

The Don Quixote and the ‘public goods’

Never before—and certainly never again—did Don Quixote spend such a satisfying time as

when staying in the houses of the Duke and the Duchess. He and Sancho had been guests

of honour, getting pleasure from the best meals and the most comfortable beds. Indeed,

Sancho had been given his longed-for island, Barataria, where he became governor

(Cervantes, chs. XXX-LVIII). Nevertheless, Don Quixote feels uneasy and asks the Duke’s

permission to leave. As soon as he finds himself again in open country, he tells Sancho:

‘Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts bestowed by heaven on man; no

treasures that the earth contains and the sea conceals can compare with it […] in contrast,

captivity is the worst evil that can befall them’. Then Don Quixote adds that, although he

was receiving the most ‘delectable banquets’, he could not enjoy them ‘with the same

freedom as if they had been my own’ (Cervantes, 2001, p. 873).

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 The novelist and liberal thinker Mario Vargas Llosa argues that Don Quixote shares

with the liberals the same idea of freedom: ‘which, centuries later, Isaiah Berlin defines as

negative freedom, to be free of interferences and constraints to think, express and behave’. I

agree with the Peruvian-Spanish writer so far, however, he adds: ‘the assumption of his

affirmation (the one quoted above) is that private property is the foundation of freedom’

(Vargas Llosa, p. XIX, emphasis added). I disagree; the novel describes the very opposite:

Don Quixote has left behind him his own belongings in that village whose name Cervantes

(or Cide Hamete Benengeli) ‘has no desire to call to mind’: his house, land, books and

possessions. To achieve his goal of being a knight-errant he acquires only those items

strictly needed for chivalry: a horse, armor, arms. The panniers of Sancho, frequently

empty, carry bread and cheese only—when he has money it is because it has been given to

him or found by chance. It is true that Don Quixote says about the gifts given by the

aristocrats that he could not enjoy them ‘as if they had been my own’ (si fueran míos, in the

original). Nevertheless, Don Quixote does not care about his private possessions and,

indeed, he chooses to exercise his freedom apart from them. He is freer in those places

where the territory belongs to no one individual but to all and, therefore, to him as well: the

woods where he can behave as a madman to remember Dulcinea, but, specially, the vast

plains of La Mancha. They (the knight and the squire) drink the water of the rivers, sleep

over the soil and their animals eat the pasture without constraints, and they never need

private property to exercise their freedom. They are enjoying public property: those

stretches of land not yet seized by the ‘primitive accumulation’ (Marx) or the

‘commodification of everything’ (Wallerstein).

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 Let me, at this point, retake the concept of ‘public goods’ and ask a question: Are

‘public goods’ equivalent to public property? Let me assert that ‘public goods’ is just a

term preferred by economists, but speaks of the same domains: the land, air, water, and

highways we share. Following Berlin’s argument, that ‘the wider area of non-interference,

the wider my freedom’ (Berlin, p. 35), and given Cohen’s account of money and freedom,

could we say that in the public property—or let’s call it the public goods—is freedom more

fully exercised? Don Quixote gives us a clue, and, I think, an opportunity to wonder if we

have a freer space to exercise freedom and, at the same time, we lack a moral justification

to private property, don’t we have good reasons to reflect about our property system?

Bibliography:

Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in David Miller (ed), Liberty. Oxford Readings

in Politics and Government, 1991.

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Real Academia Española y Santillana

Ediciones Generales. Edición del IV Centenario, 2004.

Cervantes, Miguel de. The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, translated with

an introduction and notes by John Rutherford, Penguin Books, Penguin Classics,

2001.

Cohen, G. A., ‘Freedom and Money’, in

http://www.utdt.edu/Upload/_115634753114776100.pdf

Cohen, G. A., ‘Capitalism, Freedom and the Proletariat’ in David Miller (ed), The Liberty

Reader. Edinburgh: Paradigm Publishers, 2006.

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Cohen, G. A., ‘Freedom, Justice, and Capital’, in his History, Labour and Freedom,

Themes from Marx. Oxford University Press, 1988.

Marx, Karl. Capital. New York: International Publishers, 1939.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. ‘Una novela para el siglo XXI’ in Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote

de la Mancha. Real Academia Española y Santillana Ediciones Generales. Edición

del IV Centenario, Madrid: 2004.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization. London: Verso,

1996.

Wolff, Jonathan, ‘Freedom, Liberty and Property’. Critical Review 11 (1997), 345-357.

Wolff, Jonathan, ‘The distribution of property’, in his An Introduction to Political

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