1/ Freedom is not only a personal power. It needs a social field to exercise itself. That is why one could not be satisfied with the definition figuring in Article 4 of the Declaration of Rights of 1789: ‘Freedom consists in being able to do anything which does not harm others’.
2/ On the one hand, individual autonomy & the free expression of capacities & merits are not subjective rights but correspond, on the contrary, to an imperious political & social necessity. (Public education, for example, is not at all the result of some ‘right to education’
3/ without which it would be free, but optional. What makes it obligatory is the recognition that instruction constitutes a social good.) On the other hand, individual freedom is never accomplished in a society that is not free,
4/ which comes back to saying that there is no private freedom without public freedom. ‘The aim of the ancients was the sharing of social power among the citizens of the same fatherland’, writes Benjamin Constant.
5/ That means that freedom is also, first, a political problem—and not a problem of ‘rights’. Such a freedom precedes and conditions justice, instead of being a result of it. #Benoist
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