“Freedom is About Authority”
“We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do,” – Rudy Giuliani, March 1994.
Via Sully.
That’s certainly the Catholic/Islamic interpretation of freedom.
If I were to make a generous reading of that statement, I’d say Rudy was making the same point that Locke made; that total freedom, in the anarchic sense, is incompatible with the enjoyment of functional liberty, which needs at least SOME security as a baseline from which to operate. And that hence, people have to subordinate certain of their preferences to a lawful authority.
It sure does read a bit nasty, though, removed from context. I’d like to see the entire speech from which it comes.
Comment by Rojas — 3/21/2007 @ 2:02 pm
Huh. A quick google search for the quote reveals a variety of permutations, attributed variously to a New York Times interview in 1994 and to a speech in March 1994 in reference to community policing strategies. Here we have an article from City Journal which seems to suggest that Giuliani meant what I implied above; that total personal freedom is inconsistent with the functioning of the social contract. Specifically, he meant that people can’t run around NYC breaking windows and spraying grafitti.
I can live with that.
Comment by Rojas — 3/21/2007 @ 2:07 pm
And here’s the original NYT article that Sullivan references.
After reading the context, Giuliani is pretty clearly trying to make an essentially communitarian point about the idea of total personal freedom. The statement he makes about “liberty” being entirely subordinate to authority is untrue, but I think it’s more poorly phrased than it is indicitive of a genuine totalitarian impulse. His larger point about people not being able to run around doing what they want all the time is pretty legitimate, even to a civil libertarian like myself.
Comment by Rojas — 3/21/2007 @ 2:20 pm
Please dear god…create categories/labels for your authors. Pleeease.
Comment by weltschmerz — 3/21/2007 @ 2:46 pm
No. Write yourself a script to parse your RSS output.
Comment by Adam — 3/21/2007 @ 2:50 pm
Wow! I posted this quote at my own blog, DailyKos, and the Libertarian Republicans mailing list just a day ago. And it’s already made it’s way to Andrew Sullivan. Man I love the Internet.
Comment by LoganFerree — 3/21/2007 @ 6:46 pm
I read this quote a week or two ago in some context (I don’t remember where), and wondered at the time what kind of a response it would get when it hit the larger public square. In listening to other Giuliani speeches and such, I don’t think his impulses are particularly totalitarian or authoritarian (although political psychologists would probably assess him in that way). I read it as a “traditional conservative” statement, Hobbesian, if you will, with the underlying understanding that life with nothing but liberty/freedom (the state of nature) is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In other words, the communitarian point that Rojas makes, I think, that in order to live a life in a community, not in a constant state of war against all, we need to make some concessions of our freedom, and live by a “social contract” (I’m mixing my political philosophers, I know, by adding Rousseau) in which we give some of our autonomy to the community, in exchange for the protection of other freedoms. I suspect that was what he was getting at, however awkwardly.
Comment by Laura — 3/21/2007 @ 10:33 pm
#
No. Write yourself a script to parse your RSS output.
Comment by Adam — 3/21/2007 @ 2:50 pm
A script where? I use Google reader, and I don’t see any way to throw perl or anything like that in there.
Comment by weltschmerz — 3/22/2007 @ 1:29 am
follow-up…
So why don’t you just label your posts, for ease to the readers? You post like 6 posts in a row that seem completely cheeky and irrelevant to me, and I have to weed through all that just to read brad’s blog. That sucks. Think about your reader base more than yourself.
Comment by weltschmerz — 3/22/2007 @ 1:30 am
Freedom is about hair.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=2AE847UXu3Q
Comment by weltschmerz — 3/22/2007 @ 4:02 am
Oh, and freedom is about breast cancer too.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/22/america/web-0322edwards.php
Comment by weltschmerz — 3/22/2007 @ 4:02 am