"Freedom" by Zygmunt Bauman

Many books have been written about how unfreedom is “made”: many social researchers from the textbook Arendt to van Creveld describe in detail the process of how the state “eats” the space of personal choice, personal independence of an individual - as a rule, with the consent and assistance of the majority of the governed, - how and why control over every aspect of life and activity, even the thoughts of subjects, is expanding and becoming more and more detailed, subtle and inevitable. Unfortunately, as it turned out, this knowledge does not help resist coercion as well as one might expect: there is no trick against crowbars, knowledge, of course, is power, but not in cases where a smart head can, at worst, simply be broken with impunity . If freedom is a simple absence of violence, a natural state until an aggressor appears from somewhere, as if out of non-existence, who ruins everything, then it does not have much of a chance against organizations that monopolize violence in the controlled territory and endow themselves with immunity when using it. And in the absence of such organizations - against anyone who wants to encroach on it.

However, it's not that simple. A somewhat more complex picture of the world is offered by Zygmunt Bauman’s book “Freedom” [1] . Its main idea is that freedom is also “made.” The freedom of the individual is not a natural state, not even to the extent that a sociologist can talk about anything natural in social life. Simply put, freedom is not what happens when external coercion—state oppression, police surveillance—somehow ceases to exist. “The free individual is by no means a universal condition of the human race, but a product of history and society.” Bauman considers personal freedom as a certain social relationship, which is part of a historically unique social structure; This approach allows us to ask questions: what are the mechanisms that ensure the freedom of an individual? We all know very well that freedom is productive (the invisible hand of the market and all that) - but how, at least in some cases, is this productivity transformed into the effective protection of the actor from external coercion, from unlawful claims to the fruits of this productivity on the part of those who steal someone else's freedom? is not going to respect simply for ideological reasons - and this is not only the state, but also a neighbor with a gun, and a small group (community) with its tendency to encroach on the personal space of its members.

After all, productivity and efficiency in themselves do not protect anyone or anything, as there are numerous examples in history.

In order to be able to talk about freedom at all, writes Bauman, we must contrast it with something existing: dependence, power relations, social pressure. To talk about freedom means to notice the presence of lack of freedom, asymmetry of power, to record the state of someone’s dependence, and to demand the absence of this specific dependence for someone and from someone - and no one promised that for everyone at once, and from all types of coercion . Quite the contrary. In Freedom, Bauman traces the history of this concept and the social practices behind it. First of all, a free person is not a slave; This idea corresponded to the ancient practice of liberation, release from slavery. In the Middle Ages, freedom was understood as a privilege given to the few: liberation from the need to obey a ruler, to bow before authority; a greater or lesser degree of freedom was thus given to a person by status; subsequently, privileges also began to extend to urban communities or corporations. In modern times, the freedom of an individual is protected by a law common “to all”; and only then is it realized as an inalienable right of everyone - with the caveat that on the question of who can be considered the same “everyone” and “everyone”, and who is completely optional, the political struggle still does not subside. For modern society, freedom is closely connected with identity, individualism and the capitalist way of life. The diffuse, intersubjective nature of power - when virtually every member of society, including the least privileged, participates in the exercise of power over others - requires, in order to protect freedom, social mechanisms that protect a person not from a single supreme authority, supported by custom and tradition, but from many heterogeneous attacks , none of which, at first glance, has final coercive power.

Thus, either freedom again becomes the privilege of the minority, which is unacceptable for modern egalitarian consciousness (at least at the level of declarations), or everyone needs to be protected from everyone, thereby making a condition of freedom for a person his own lack of freedom to encroach on someone else’s freedom - in certain borders.

And here a clear line arises between the private sphere of each person and the rest of the social world. Privacy here is understood as a privileged, allocated space around each individual - an area where a person should be autonomous from social pressure (read - power) and protected from it. In the modern world, freedom is “made” by outlining around each member of society (with exceptions, which are discussed below) a zone within which he is inviolable, and his freedom of choice is sacred - as long as he remains a full-fledged, from the point of view of modern culture, member of this society and does not violate certain rules of the game. The space of choice becomes the sphere of consumption, personal life and self-expression, the construction of one’s own identity - primarily, from Bauman’s point of view, with the help of the same consumption and its symbolic meanings. Success is defined through a successfully constructed identity of a successful person; The “parts” for constructing such an identity—an infinite range of such identities—are provided by the consumer market. What “details” are useful and what result is considered suitable are determined by advertising and the mass media.

A prosperous member of society should be surrounded by beautiful, expensive things, he eats right, and dresses with taste.

“With responsibilities like that, who needs rights?” Consensus in society is supported by common ideas about the value of diversity, on the one hand, models of success, on the other, and incentives to work, which are created by an endless variety of opportunities to spend what one earns, on the third. The state in such a society ceases to play its role as a “producer of consent”—one who maintains relative consensus in society, forcing everyone to play by the same rules. The consumer market copes well with the task of coordination, ensuring the loyalty of active participants and creating incentives for work on its own.

This mechanism, however, comes at a price. Firstly, the freedom of modern man turns out, as a result, to be local, limited to certain areas of activity and, in some way, narrow - but, however, it is truly almost universal property. The price of such an understanding of freedom is a sharp increase in pressure on a person outside the private area; first of all, according to Bauman, this concerns the sphere of production and distribution of power; success in modern society presupposes almost limitless “conformity in relation to institutionally established goals, rules and patterns of behavior,” and consensus is harsh punishment for non-participants, up to a kind of ostracism. Human autonomy in the workplace in general is falling - one of the results of the trade union struggle for better contract conditions was that, while gaining in pay and working conditions, hired workers simultaneously lost the individual opportunity to set these and other conditions of employment for themselves (this is delegated to professional organizations ), and the opportunity to resist the power of the employer, to claim a voice in management. Surprisingly, the struggle for workers' rights only increased their alienation from the labor process, and the development of personal freedom destroyed many incentives to participate in politics.

At the same time, politics goes into the background, real relationships regarding power and money are lost behind the media noise, and the state, losing its role as a coordinator, becomes more autonomous from its subjects, retaining only the distribution function and the apparatus of violence.

As a result, those who do not have consumer choice - that is, first of all, the resources to choose a diverse and consumer-attractive private product instead of goods distributed by the state - remain in the sight of the state - and this is the second element of the price of the modern understanding of freedom. Instead of a situation where almost everyone enjoyed some benefits of the distribution system (no matter what we thought about how expensive and ineffective these benefits were and how unfair the redistribution was arranged), and had reasons to participate in politics in order to at least influence the process, now those who remain in the public sector “who cannot afford to ‘exit’” from it; those who have neither the resources nor the freedom to influence politics - this is how the state gains an obedient clientele, and the active part of society increasingly perceives the government as an annoying nuisance, an outdated system, from which it is simpler, as Bauman puts it, “ buy out” (by transferring as much of your consumption to the private sector as possible) than to influence it. “In a consumer society, bureaucratically managed oppression is the only alternative to consumer freedom.” A side function of state welfare, according to Bauman, is to ensure that the alternative to participation in production does not look too attractive. By providing means for consumption to people who do not participate in production, social services simultaneously invade their privacy and limit their freedom of choice.

In order for new institutions of freedom to be built, Bauman concludes, it will be necessary to create a new, even more inclusive type of freedom and overcome the problems described above. From his point of view - the book was published in 1988 - new freedom should grow where the exclusion of non-participants and the alienation of ordinary participants from power is almost impossible: in the self-government of small local communities. He speaks primarily about local self-government, distinguishing these new features there, but a reader of the Internet era can easily think about other types of such communities, where people’s activities are built along network lines, the logic of the free market is intertwined with the logic of solidarity, and is not opposed to it by artificial the separation of “labor” from other elements of human activity, and the role of the state is less noticeable than at the level of macropolitics. Is this forecast coming true? It's hard to say. First of all, Bauman failed to predict what is obvious now: that the aggressor state, “detached” from its social functions to the more or less capable part of the population and thereby achieved significant autonomy from society, as well as consolidated the dependent clientele and In this case, having retained the full potential of violence and resources, it will be able to launch a counter-offensive. In any case, if we trust Bauman in his main thesis - “doing” freedom, defining its new contours and building institutions that protect it from unscrupulous attacks is a continuous creative and conscious process in which everyone can join - the situation will no longer seem so hopeless .

What institutions will be suitable to provide more freedom in the new round of development?

And what kind of freedom will this freedom be - from what types of coercion will people protect each other at any cost, and what positions will they give up practically without a fight? Time and our own decisions will tell. As Bauman rightly notes: “Sociology cannot tell us what the future will be... On the other hand, sociology can inform our choice (between this or that action, between action and inaction), informing us about trends already obvious in the present, about the appearance the things to which they will lead if left unchecked, and the forces within society that cause these tendencies to work in their present direction. Sociology can also inform our choices by clarifying the consequences and relationships of our normal everyday behavior that are virtually invisible in the narrow perspective of our “private”, individual experience. Moreover, sociology can inform our choices by making us aware that choice is possible.”