DSJ: The major argument of your book is that the liberty of the ancients was eclipsed in the early 19th century by a new modern conception of freedom. What is this new understanding of freedom, and how did it come to pass?
AD: In the 19th century, political thinkers in Europe and the United States began to reject this ancient democratic conception of freedom in favor of a different way of thinking. Freedom, many came to argue, was not a matter of who governed. Instead, what determined whether you were free or not was the extent to which you were governed. The smaller the government, the freer you were—regardless of who was in control.
This new way of thinking was triggered by a conservative backlash. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the democratizing movement booked increasing successes, as rule by traditional elites was replaced with more broadly popular governments in both Europe and North America. In the longer run, the promise of democracy also came to be extended to hitherto marginalized groups, such as women and Black men.
But the victories of these democratizing movements also created a powerful counterreaction that would lead to a major shift in thinking about freedom. Democracy, conservatives argued again and again, would not bring freedom for all. After all, even in the most democratic states, power was never exercised by common consent. Rather, in a democracy, the majority of the community ruled over everyone else. If you really cared about freedom, conservatives continued to argue, extending popular control over government was therefore superfluous and even counterproductive—it would lead to majority tyranny. Hence, the only way to preserve freedom was by limiting the sphere of government as much as possible and by empowering countermajoritarian institutions, such as an independent judiciary, to protect individuals against majoritarian overreach.
When they talked about the tyranny of the majority, it is important to note, conservatives were not primarily thinking about the oppression of vulnerable minorities, such as religious or ethnic minorities. Rather, the majoritarian tyranny they feared above all was that of the poor over the rich; they dreaded democracy’s redistributive potential. Writing in the wake of 1848—when revolutionaries attempted to introduce manhood suffrage in continental Europe—the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay spoke for many conservatives when he warned that democracy was incompatible with liberty, as “the poor would plunder the rich.” Democracy, he thought, would “destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.”
Similarly, the countermajoritarian institutions that conservatives put so much stock in were primarily meant to protect property rights against popular politics. William Howard Taft, for instance, the Supreme Court’s chief justice from 1921 to 1930, spoke for many of his colleagues when he explained that it was up to the federal judiciary, the “bulwark of the liberty of the individual,” to protect individuals against “the aggression of a majority of the electorate”—notably by zealously defending their property rights.
In short, the idea that freedom depends on the limitation of state power was invented by conservatives to defend elite interests against the rise of democracy. And liberals in the US today tend to be in favor of measures that would enhance ordinary people’s control over their political and economic lives—but they rarely talk about that in terms of freedom. That’s because they have bought into the conservative definition of freedom as an absence of state intervention.