What is a "free" society? With relation to the thoughts of Emile Durkheim and the concept of "Negative Liberty"

From the dawn of our consciousness of the world, we become aware of our dwelling within the world as a condition of our existence as unique beings discernible according to our own shared properties, that is, as human beings. In contemporary politics, the valuation is further drawn that the political essence of the human being is that of a free being. Within the "social-contract" tradition of political theory, this claim situates the natural predisposition of human beings to be "free" in both their undertakings towards each other, and their undertakings towards the world, without a limit defined by an established social or political order. By the institution of this social order, a fundamental transformation accrues to the nature of "freedom" and "action" in the sphere of human intercourse. To this point, political theory, including that beyond social-contract theory, is practically unanimous. Yet in spite of this, a precise outline of the mechanisms concerning "freedom" and "action" and its relation to the political have yet to be clearly defined. Attempts have of course been made; in sociological theory many such attempts have become foundational to the birth of the discipline. Amongst these, Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life is a particularly noteworthy example, one which transformed the question of theology into the problem of sociology, resolved in the formula that the soul of religion is the idea of society. In this conception, the elevation of the concept, and its binding character as law, begins not with a "recollection" of the characteristics of the soul, as Plato conceived, but rather as a sui generis born from the very principle of social interaction. From this view, it is the very conduct of social action, itself occurring within determinate conditions of economic, social, environmental and other exogenous conditions, that comes to articulate itself in structured modalities tending towards reproduction. These social modalities, natural interlocutors with the exogenous conditions that they reflexively interpret, constitute a wider system of reality, and the conditional social structure of the society appears to be the determinate condition of human life as such, being elevated to the stature of natural law. Hence, it follows from this reified conception of society as natural law, that the "soul" of social action, is in fact the "soul" of religious action, and "God" is the particular form of the manifestation of the social life of a given community.

By interiorising the elevation of the "concept", which is the objective mechanism of all social life, to the organisation of society as the effect of its regulative order, Durkheim in effect strives to resolve the question of the "freedom" of human action by making this questions own consideration posthumous to the notion of society. To this light, the consideration of "free" action, or a "free will" is oxymoronic in a hypothetical pre-social stage of living. This proceeds from the very logic of Durkheim's argument, for if it is the case that, in all instances, the conception of the concept is the elevation of the idea of society, and it is taken that "freedom" is best understood conceptually, then it follows that "freedom" itself cannot be conceived in either a pre-social, or a post-social setting, but only as a part of some social order. Extending this principle further, it suffices to state that wherever the general concept of "freedom" is taken to exist, its existence is a sufficient condition for the assertion of the existence of society, which is to state that the concept of freedom conditionally implies the existence of society. Against political theory, however, this view struggles to be resolved against a number of axioms grounding the very conceptions of modern political thought, particularly in what is termed the "West". An apparent counter position to this view of Durkheim's is popularised in Isaiah Berlin's 1958 lecture Two Concepts of Liberty, in which the definition of so-called "Negative Liberty" concerns the problem of freedom from society, and the freedom from interference by others in the accords of one's own individual life. This generates an apparent contradiction, if we aim to uphold the logics of each side by side, one that may be expressed in the following two ways:

According to the logic of Durkheim, the existence of "freedom" as a concept implies the existence of society in all instances. However, it does not therefore follow that the existence of "society" implies the existence of "freedom" as a concept in all instances. In this position, however, the contradiction in reflection of the view of Negative Liberty is that a definite concept of "freedom" exists that is not the elevation of the concept of society, but is rather antagonistic towards it. From this, it follows that a concept exists that is not the elevation of social action as considered by Durkheim, yet according to the proposition that the soul of religion is the idea of society all instances of the concept are an elevation of this social action. This resolves into a contradiction between the existence of the concept, and the non-elevation of social action.
In the first instance, we assumed the possibility that a society could exist that did not implicate the following existence of "freedom", and then, taking the view of negative liberty, demonstrated a contradiction follows from the possibility of having a conception of "freedom from society" in an instance in which the conception of "freedom" was not an implicature of that given society. This can be considered an instance of a "strong" contradiction, for it appears to follow definitively from the meanings of "Negative Liberty" and Durkheim's sociological theory respectively taken together. In this example, we can consider a "weak" contradiction, namely, one that does not so much follow from the meanings of these two factors at a deductive level, but rather as resolving from inference. In this case, consider the example of a society in which the concept of "freedom" occurs as an elevation of social action within that society, satisfying Durkheim's sociological view. Furthermore, "freedom" existing as a concept implicature of this society does not derivatively necessitate that "freedom" is bound to the consideration of matters within that society. For sufficient proof of this, consider the concept of God in Durkheim's text in relation to society. "God" is a particular instance of the elevation of the concept of social action in which this action principally occurs in an anthropocentric context. That is, the concept of "God" is derived as an elevation of the concept of society's image of itself. Yet, in such communities which believe in "God", the limits on God's power outlined in these views is not limited to action upon society, but rather upon the universe as such. That is, God is a metaphysical creator. Similarly, the elevation of "freedom" as a concept deriving from social action does not necessitate that the conceptual usage of "freedom" is confined to being within society's limits. Therefore, it follows that a "freedom" from society could be envisaged without any formal contradiction. Nevertheless, in this instance the conception of a freedom from society would articulate a desire to be free from the condition of freedom, that is, in effect, the desire to not be "free". Inferentially, this causes a contradiction in light of the implied meaning of the term "freedom", whilst not causing a formal contradiction from the presence of two jointly-insufficient statements. Hence, it is a "weak" contradiction.

In either of these outlines, definite problems arise between the joint-sufficiency of contemporary mainstays of political theory and the apparent necessary relationship between social action and conceptual thought considered by Durkheim. In the remainder of this essay, I will attempt to chart a possible path resolving these contradictions from the perspective of political and social theory.

A major problem encountered by Durkheim's account of social action arises from considering "society" to refer to a singular social-polity in any given instance. The extent to which Durkheim is actually "guilty" of this is non-apparent, after all in the Elementary Forms it is Durkheim's expressed interest to consider the most "elementary" of social-types. Assuming that a feature of such "elementary" societies is relative social uniformity, and a lack of heterogeneity found in more "complex" social structures, it would follow that methodologically society could be analysed as a uniform, or single polity. Attempting to extrapolate this to more "complex" social formations, however, results in the contradictions referred to above, in which a multiplicity of causal social factors occurs at any given time in affecting social action. As the German political theorist and sociologist Max Weber remarked, we live today in a "polytheistic" world, constituted not only by a variety of differing ways of articulating value-judgments, but also distinct value-judgments themselves. Furthermore, these distinct value-judgments are principally embodied by distinct social-actors, and instituted in a multiplicity of social institutions that occur at once in a given "society".

Reintegrating this back into Durkheim's original thesis, the logical structure remains largely unchanged, to the degree that we make the following qualification. "Society" itself has become a "concept", that is an effect of a multiplicity of disparate logics of social action. The common veil that integrates these disparate logics of social action is a final instituting body/polity in the last instance, which maintains the formal right to institute and legitimate the resulting, nominally disparate bodies. In Weber's vocabulary, this final instituting body is the figure of the state, and the institutions which constitute it; these bodies ultimately are then defined by their ability to "lay claim" to the sole use of legitimate violence within a given territory (M. Weber, 1919). To the extent then that we can jointly satisfy Durkheim's social theory alongside mainstay contemporary ideas in political thought, e.g. the notion of Negative Liberty referred to in this essay, we must in all instances add the qualification and understanding that "society" itself, rather than simply referring to a causal mechanism of social actions, is to the contrary an effect of such actions. The apparent unanimity, then, which occurs when we speak of a single "social life" is a consequence of the operation of a polity that performs a particular function in the legitimation, and disciplining of, all the disparate social actions in a given territory that is subject to a given law. This polity, then, is what we call the state. Articulated in this way, Berlin's account of Negative Liberty, indeed, all accounts of negative liberty in assessing the interaction of social actors with the state, can be effectively reintegrated into Durkheim's theoretical account of the essential relationship of the concept to social life. "Freedom", understood with this qualification, arises out of the social implicatures in which particular value-judgments are invested. The "free society", then, nothing other than the effectual realisation of the value-judgments of a particular social group, and its corresponding social actions, in structuring a shared way of life. The state, as a polity that constitutes the limit-experience of social actions, thereby constructs the limits to which any singular value-judgment can affect any other by the use of the means of violence, which the state retains as its sole right and as the condition for the independence of all other groups. In a meaningful sense, then, we can resolve the problem of Negative Liberty, that is, freedom from state interference in a social community, with the proposition that the soul of religion is the idea of society.

I'm aware of the colonial, and racial implications of Durkheim's considerations on what "elementary" societies are, as well as the extensive scholarship critiquing Durkheim's expression of this concept. On this, I'd recommend Gurminder K. Bhambra's work on Connected Sociologies, and wider literature on the "Imperial Episteme". For the purpose of this work, it would be superfluous to critique the concept itself on these grounds, for the critique is inhered in the argument as a whole.