Liberty

The entry begins by refusing the usual premise. Coercion, responsibility and dependency are part of all human existence, so liberty cannot mean their absence and any account defining it that way is describing something impossible. What can be produced instead is an illusion, and Marsh names the mechanism. Liberty for a few is created through dissociation and enabled by the trade economy, which is the same pair that produces the appearance of independence, currency abstracting the dependency and the arrangement denying the labour it rests on. So one person's apparent freedom is other people's unacknowledged work. Against that she sets exosocial liberty, defined by two clauses that must both hold. Freedom from involuntary interactions of unequal force, which is freedom from sublation and violation, and freedom to continue exosocial expansion through connection. The first is negative and the second positive, and the second is why liberty in her sense cannot be achieved by withdrawal. A person alone is free from unequal force and has nothing to expand through, which fails the definition as badly as coercion does. This is what separates her position from the libertarian one and from the ascetic one at the same time, since both attempt liberty by reducing entanglement, and her account requires connection as a component of freedom rather than as a price paid for it.

Isaiah Berlin's two concepts of liberty set freedom from interference against freedom to act, and the republican tradition after Philip Pettit adds a third, freedom as non-domination, which is close to Marsh's first clause since it concerns the capacity of others to interfere arbitrarily rather than actual interference. Amartya Sen's capabilities approach holds that freedom requires the real ability to do things and not merely the absence of prohibition. Marsh's version combines the negative and positive senses and adds a requirement neither contains, that the positive freedom must be exercised through connection, which makes solitude a failure of liberty rather than its purest form.