Abstract
What does it mean to be a free person? Consider an answer given by someone who experienced chattel slavery. Garrison Frazier was the spokesperson for a delegation of former slaves called “freedmen (although many were women) who met with General Sherman on January 12, 1865, before the end of the US Civil War.2 When asked what he understood by slavery, Frazier replied, “Slavery is, receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. He defined freedom as, “taking us from under the yoke of bondage, and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor [and] take care of ourselves. Asked how best to secure their freedom, Frazier said, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.3
This whole program is voluntary.… The men don’t have to…if they don’t want to. But we need you to starve them to death if they don’t.
—“Milo Minderbinder, Joseph Heller, Catch-221
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Notes
J. Heller, Catch-22 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
E. Foner and J. Brown, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 2005).
E.D. Townsend, “Minutes of an Interview Between the Colored Ministers and Church Officers at Savannah with the Secretary of War and Major-Gen. Sherman, in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ed. Steven F Miller (College Park, MD: Department of History, University of Maryland, 2007), (emphasis original).
Status freedom of some sort has been a concern of Elizabeth S. Anderson, “What is the Point of Equality?, Ethics 109, no. 2 (January 1999): 287–337
Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)
Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
But it has been largely absent from works as diverse as Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969)
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974)
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971)
John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005)
Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty, in Four Essays on Liberty, ed. Isaiah Berlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 122.
Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
J. Locke, “Draft of a Representation Containing a Scheme of Methods for the Employment of the Poor, in John Locke: Political Writings Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993)
Karl Widerquist, “Lockean Theories of Property: Justifications for Unilateral Appropriation, Public Reason 2, no. 3 (2010): 3–26.
G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 67.
Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia; S. Wheeler, “Natural Property Rights as Body Rights, in Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate, ed. P. Vallentyne and H. Steiner (New York: Palgrave, 2000).
John Christman, The Myth of Property: Toward an Egalitarian Theory of Ownership (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Tony Honoré, Making Law Bind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 166–75.
John Christman, “Self-Ownership, Equality, and the Structure of Property Rights, Political Theory 19, no. 1 (February 1991): 29.
Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, pp. 14–15; Michael Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 30–32.
A few examples include: Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality; John Cunliffe and Guido Erreygers, “The Enigmatic Legacy of Fourier: Joseph Charlier and Basic Income, History of Political Economy 33, no. 3 (2001): 459–84
John Cunliffe and Guido Erreygers, “’Basic Income? Basic Capital!’ Origins and Issues of a Debate, Journal of Political Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2003): 89–110
John Cunliffe, Guido Erreygers, and Walter Van Trier, “Basic Income: Pedigree and Problems, in Real Libertarianism Assessed, ed. Andrew Reeve and Andrew Williams (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003)
Magnus Jedenheim-Edling, “The Compatibility of Effective Self-Ownership and Joint World Ownership, Journal of Political Philosophy 13, no. 3 (September 2005): 284–304
T. Paine, “Agrarian Justice, in The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings, ed. P. Vallentyne and H. Steiner (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000)
Robert L. Hale, “Coercion and Distribution in Supposedly Non-Coercive State, Political Science Quarterly 38 (1923): 470–94
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality; Senera Olsaretti, “Freedom, Force and Choice: Against the Rights-Based Definition of Voluntariness, Journal of Political Philosophy 6, no. 1 (1998): 53–78
Senera Olsaretti, Liberty, Desert and the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, 1st ed. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1872)
Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000)
Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Palgrave, 2000)
Van Parijs, Real Ereedom for All; Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)
Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
G.A. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 245, emphasis original.
Stuart White, The Civic Minimum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 46.
Ibid.; Kadri Vihvelin and Terrance Tomkow, “The Dif, Journal of Philosophy 102, no. 4 (2005): 183–205.
Jeremy Waldron, “Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom, in Liberal Rights, ed. Jeremy Waldron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
G.A. Cohen, “Once More into the Breach of Self-Ownership: Reply to Narveson and Brenkert, The Journal of Ethics 2, no. 1 (1998): 74.
Gerald C. Jr. McCallum, “Negative and Positive Freedom, in Liberty, ed. David Leslie Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
T. Severin, In Search of Robinson Crusoe (New York: Perseus Publishing, 2003).
Nurit Bird-David, “Sociality and Immediacy: Or, Past and Present Conversations on Bands, Man 29, no. 3 (1994): 583–603.
Tim Ingold, David Riches, and James Woodburn, eds., Hunters and Gatherers 1: History, Evolution and Social Change (Oxford: Berg Publishing, 1988)
Tim Ingold, David Riches, and James Woodburn, eds., Hunters and Gatherers 2: Property, Power and Ideology (Oxford: Berg Publishing, 1988)
Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)
James Woodburn, “Stability and Flexibility in Hadza Residential Groupings, in Man the Hunter, ed. Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore (New York: Aline, 1968)
James Woodburn, “Egalitarian Societies, Man 17, no. 3 (1982): 431–51.
Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming); Ingold, Riches, and Woodburn, Hunters and Gatherers 1; Ingold, Riches, and Woodburn, Hunters and Gatherers 2; Johnson and Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies; Robert L. Kelly, The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
H.D. Thoreau, Walden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
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Widerquist, K. (2013). Status Freedom as Effective Control Self-Ownership. In: Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income. Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313096_3
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