A Functional Theory Of Liberty

Liberty as a possession we share, as the bond we have with each other as Americans, has been misunderstood.  It has been understood as a possession.  Libertarians, as those who have done the most to stand up for our liberty, have often been those most responsible for distorting it.  We should forgive them for this, despite the monopoly they have pretended to exercise over the meaning of our liberty.  They at least attempted to honor liberty.  Liberty isn't a property of individuals in and of themselves, it is what demarcates the functional difference between individuals.  It is also the boundary limiting the state's exercise of power.  As long as we forget this, and that liberty is shared between us as a relationship, then the rigid lines drawn by ideologues cannot be far off.  It is only when you conceive of liberty in a vacuum that you are able to confuse it for a property.  If it is to have any meaning at all, it must be one that is functional.  William James understood Pragmatism as the demand that a difference, in order to be a difference, must make a difference.  It is ironic that it is here in the States, where pragmatism was born on the backs of pioneers, that we have forgotten this about liberty.  Liberty must function as a reality of potential within our freedom.  To the degree that it loses that functional measure, and is reduced to an ideological conception that no longer makes a difference, it is meaningless.  Should it be understood as a property then it loses its meaning in relationship to other individuals and states.  As I've mentioned in a previous post, the Ninth Amendment is revealing of the way the framers of the Constituition conceived of liberty.  It declares that we have all of those rights not listed explicitly within the Constitution.  It is something left open for each generation to complete.  It is something that exists in a functional relationship between individuals or the institutions governing them.  The genius of those who gave our nation's first draft of liberty is both subtle and layered.  One facet of its expression within the Constitution was a functional theory of liberty.  Liberty was carved out between the state and individuals to create the space necessary for them.  They understood that society as a whole must work collectively, but that those collective efforts are served better by the contributions of individuals exercising their freedom.  The framers understood that the success of the collective represented in the state and the success of the individual could not only find common purpose but were inseparable.  It was an understanding that an individual must have an inalienable relationship between other individuals and the state in order to have the distance necessary to not be overrun by them.  An understanding that didn't see the state as an enemy of individual liberty, but rather as a distinct entity marking out the boundaries of that liberty.  While the overreach of many states is always a danger, the successful state even serves to preserve liberty.  The individual is served best by a state that works to guard this boundary, so that an individual can fulfill themselves through the exercise of that liberty.  The only meaning liberty can have is one given a functional definition.  If we are unable to reasonably expect that we could exercise our liberty, in principle, as it currently exists between individuals and institutions then the space separating an individual from an institution is under threat.  That is also to say that the distance between individuals carved out by liberty are under threat.  If the institutional structures in place undermine the functional exercise of liberty then it isn't a liberty, and the space created for individuals collapses.  Any ideological understanding of liberty will only serve to set up a legal phantom without meaning in place of a functional reality between individuals and the institutions with with which they share a boundary.  The notion that the exercise of our liberty is never constrained by economic interests, or institutions in the market place that represent them, is absurd in the face of a functional theory of liberty.  The notion that access to healthcare is irrelevant to the exercise of our liberty collapses when you recognize that the spaces created for individuals within an economic region of our society are left unstable.  An economic institution is just as capable as a state of crushing the space for an individual to remain distinct in the boundary it shares with it.  The only question here is whether an institution threatens spaces created for an individual separate from it.  This is the only measure of any significance for our liberty.  Is there any real space between individuals and other institutions being created?  Does a specific conception of liberty threaten or promote the functional distance between them?  This is why the framers of the Constitution gave us a document that demanded that each generation grapple with its meaning.  The Ninth Amendment is one example of how our liberty is a boundary left open, that we must come to terms with as a generation responsible for it.  A boundary that only respects the functional space that is created by liberties, rather than any ideological conception of them.  It ought not concern us whether the oppressive institution collapsing that space is a government, or an entirely different one, bent on absorbing the individual.  This is why our founding fathers gave us a functional theory of liberty, because whatever meaning it has ever had has been in the actual exercise of our liberty.