My Dissertation In Plain English
People ask me about my dissertation. I’ll put down the moves in plain English.
Property is not a relationship between a person and her stuff; it’s a relationship between a person and the other people who may have designs on her stuff. Property is a relationship governed by recognition, when other people who want to use her stuff but recognize it as hers and forswear using it because it’s hers. In this way, property is a kind of interaction between persons. In order to enable this relationship, the owner has to have the capacity to mark her stuff in a way that other people know that it’s hers.
These are all natural capacities. Animals mark their territory. Property also happens to be a minimal condition of how freedom gets into the world. However, this property enabled by nature is merely a capacity, rather than an actuality. It’s not secured. In this natural state, I’m capable of having possession, but I don’t actually have any property because nobody else is forced to recognize it, and there is no real reason why they should hold to their recognition of it because everyone is free to do what they want. So it’s worthless. Theorists like Hobbes will use this to argue for why we need to institute a civil government that’ll be so mighty that it’ll force everyone to respect each other’s property rights.
At first that sounds like a good idea and a step forward for freedom, but a few bells should go off. 1) If property is merely an interaction between persons about stuff, aren’t there other kinds of interactions that are institutions of freedom? 2) If the only reason for government is to secure property rights, government that supports freedom can have all sorts of forms, from an authoritarian dictatorship to an oligarchy, as long as it secures property rights. 3) Since a civil government only comes into being to protect my property rights, there can be no rightful checks on how I dispose of my other institutional powers within the government, except regarding property. I should be able to break any promise because I want to or vote for anyone I want to because I want to, marry and divorce who I want to when I want to, etc.
The good news is that these concerns resolve once we acknowledge that property is merely a minimal form of freedom. It’s enabled by nature, but that’s it. It’s also one-sided because this free will is tied to an inert object with fixed determinations, leaving me the ability to do whatever I want with something that can only be what it is by nature. (It’s like buying dinner at a gas station. You have money, but the only thing you can buy is the crap that happens to be there.)
However, if we can figure out how to have free relationships with people directly, I can have my desires satisfied by externalizing myself in another person who can creatively and surprising find a way to satisfy my desires. And if it’s done with mutuality, then everyone wins. I suspect that this is at least one reason why sex is better between two people, rather than between a person and an inert object.
This interaction between two persons is institutional, not natural. It’s not a property relation, but it uses property relations. It happens in time and marks history. Our freedom now comes in how members create an institutional unity through the exercise of their will, not by nature but in time. Whether what separates us within this institutional unity is a thin piece of latex or Roberts Rules of Order. (note: property is a natural relation, but even property exchange comes under the institution of a market that’s freighted with all sorts of other baggage that we’ve put it.)
With institutional interactions of self-determination, freedom gets quite a bit more robust for a few reasons. Every institution ranges over a plurality of persons, that is, at least two different persons. In this way, institutions are universals. Institutional members are particulars, and since the particular members are distinct from each other, the members are also individuals. In this way, to be an individual is to be a unique member of a group.
Through institutional relations, freedom has the capacity for full realization if I am free at the level of the individual, particular, and the universal. That means that I get to choose how I’m a unique member of the group, and thereby attain my free individuality. I get to choose which group I’m a member of, and thereby attain my free particularity. And I get a say in the constitutive features of the group, and thereby positively attain my free universality.
What does this mean?
It means that if we are serious about self-determination, we need to enable meaningful and mutual participation in all of our institutional activities. This doesn’t mean that the institutions can’t be competitive. For example, meaningful and mutual participation in basketball means that the Warriors are trying to defeat the Lakers. Anything less would be collusion between the two teams, but the mutuality of this competitive game is built into the rules and conventions of the game. That’s why we have referees. The unity of the two competitors is governed and mediated by a third authority. However, freedom in intimate relationships does not admit of a juridical barrier. There is no umpire throwing flags and calling fouls in the bedroom. These are unmediated unities. At the end of a legitimate basketball game, one team can be crying with horror and the other team whooping with joy because the totality of the game was an institution of self-determination. However, intimate relationships are immediate unities, which means that after an intimate relation, if one person is cheering and the other person is horrified, then the whole endeavor was an abject failure because it suggests at least one person did not have full participation at one of the levels of self-determination.
What’s the fallout?
Liberal theories have such an impoverished account of freedom based on the capacity to secure property rights, that they don’t even get the one-sided freedom of property-rights correct (One-sided= the freedom of property is tied to the fixed nature of the object.) The result is that we are hapless at securing the conditions of real self-determination. However, if we understand the conditions of self-determination, we will come to understand that this freedom as self-determination is realized through institutional interactions, these interactions have different modes, e.g., family, civil society, politics, but at each one, we have to account for self-determination at the level of the individual, particular, and universal.
This will also account for why when people exercise their power as institutional actors, including as spouses, civilians, and citizens, they have to think about how the peculiar duties within each of those universals are normatively bound to will accordingly in action. This doesn’t mean that people will be good. However, it does open up the imperative to secure participation of all parties in governing the institution, because the institution is the universal, as well as securing people the ability to choose which institution they realize themselves through by becoming a particular member of, and lastly, people need a fair say in how they can be a unique member within that institution. This accounts for why if we are serious about self-determination, we need to get serious about labor law, family law, and all of the other measures that ensure equal participation within institutions at all levels so that people can be truly self-determining. The founders of the US got some of this right and a lot of it wrong. I’m setting it straight. (This also accounts for why if you are trying to make your life meaningful by buying stuff, that money would be better served funding institutions, but then if they are going to be meaningful institutions of freedom, you’ll have to learn how to share power.)
This is the Ted Talk version of the dissertation. The real version is shaping up to be a lot longer and have a zillion footnotes. Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that Richard Dien Winfield is one of the most important philosophers you’ve never heard of.