blau- what would sartre say, and arendt's reply

What Would Sartre Say? And, Arendt’s Reply?

Blau, Judith Hope.

Social Forces, Volume 85, Number 3, March 2007, pp. 1063-1078 (Article)

Published by The University of North Carolina PressDOI: 10.1353/sof.2007.0032

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What Would Sartre Say? And, Arendt’s Reply?

Judith Blau, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In the liberal, western tradition, freedom means the absence of constraints, and liberty is considered to be self-determining. Nowhere is this tradition stronger than in the United States. Indeed, the First Amendment defends individual freedom from the government: “Congress shall make no law… prohibiting… abridging… [rights and freedoms].” In political theory, such a conception is defined as “negative rights,” because it presupposes that persons have wrestled their rights from the state (Orend 2002:54; also see Berlin 1969). As the American Civil Liberties Union reminds Americans, we must be vigilant lest those rights are taken away.

This liberal conception was advanced by prominent thinkers of the English Enlightenment, notably John Locke and Adam Smith, and by the 18th century, it expansively encompassed political and economic freedoms. We only need to recall the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to understand that freedom provides the rhetorical framework for political life as well as for competitive capitalism. As a social creature, the emblematic American is independent and self-made, free and autonomous. There is abundant sociological documentation describing how freedoms play out in American economic life: the competitive drive to be more successful, richer, better housed and better heeled than others; acquisitive consumption; and materialism. Freedom in the American context also has to do with our ideas about competitive personal gain: to best the others and best the past.

This is not the only conception of freedom. In some, if not most of the world, freedom is what lies beyond insecurities – beyond the constraints of hunger, beyond civil unrest, and beyond meager subsistence. At the end of the rainbow, beyond these constraints, there will be choice and freedom. Thus, we have two very different conceptions of freedom. It is useful to pose critical questions about how the American conception has evolved and how it may be reconciled with other conceptions.

American Exceptionalism

Michael Polanyi (1951) argues in The Logic of Liberty, that Americans lose sight of the distinction between individual freedoms and public freedoms, believing that the former suffice for the latter. For Polanyi, public freedoms are embodied in democracy and reflect the capacity to coordinate independent, individual actions spontaneously in the service of public tasks and projects. Public freedoms, for him, reshape those narrow self-interests that lurk behind individual freedoms.

Presidential Address, 69th Annual Meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, March 2006, New Orleans, Louisiana. The author thanks Andrew Perrin for his comments on an earlier draft and Alberto Moncada for his helpful critiques. Direct correspondence to Judith Blau, Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3210. E-mail: [email protected].

© The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, Volume 85, Number 3, March 2007

1064 • Social Forces Volume 85, Number 3 • March 2007

Although seemingly clumsy at first, I will recast what Polanyi described as public freedoms as public goods. We will see that it gains us some theoretical mileage. As public goods, freedoms benefit everyone because they provide a pool of freedoms that we can all enjoy without using them up, and we cannot exclude any from enjoying them. I will return to freedoms, but here it is useful to explore a bit more how Polanyi’s arguments resonate with those of others regarding American exceptionalism, a term that is employed both as critique and as self-congratulation.

American historiography is rich with examples. Just to illustrate, famous defender of the American experiment, Tocqueville (1991) praises American foreign policies and approves the exceptional clarity of the vision that early American leaders had for their new nation. He quotes Washington’s Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in this context: “[T]he Americans ought never to solicit any privileges from foreign nations, in order not to be obligated to grant similar privileges themselves” (Tocqueville 1991:233). Yet Jefferson’s own letters allow a less benevolent interpretation of his views about foreign allies. His downright contempt for Europeans is clear enough in a letter to George Washington. He churlishly writes, “There is not a single crowned head in Europe whose talents or merit would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the people of any parish in America” (Jefferson 1788) Whereas Tocqueville understood Jefferson as the confidant spokesman of the fledging democracy, respectful of European powers, Jefferson’s own views reflect downright arrogance. America, for Jefferson was superior. This helps us to understand the roots of American exceptionalism.

Does the country radiate exceptional virtue or exceptional arrogance? Seymour Martin Lipset would admit both interpretations. In his American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1996), he focuses on why Americans have always thought themselves exceptionally great, as individuals and as a nation, yet without a coherent sense of themselves or a coherent sense of their country. Lipset ends on a pessimistic note. Drawing from opinion surveys, he describes Americans’ political apathy, cynicism about national leadership and their pessimism about social institutions. Self-indulgent and preoccupied with success, Americans, Lipset concludes, opt out of genuine nation-building and the collective efforts it takes to nurture society. Yet incongruously Americans are exceptionally patriotic. Chauvinistic nationalism is the recourse of a people who believe they are exceptional. If anything, these tendencies have been exaggerated since 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. In its global polls the Pew Research Center (especially 2002, 2003, 2005) finds that Americans are far more likely than others around the globe to feel their own culture and society are superior. The 2002 Pew Center’s Global Attitudes Report (p. 6) concludes that, “Americans are among the most patriotic and nationalistic of the world’s people, whereas their own opinion of themselves outstrips the opinions that others have of them.”

Historian Henry Steele Commanger’s (1950) interpretation of American exceptionalism is useful because he captures how chauvinism might be related to other core American values: “[The] American… knew that… he could continue to flout both [tradition and authority] with impunity. At the same time, he thought his government and his Constitution the best in the world. Individualism, too,

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required nonconformity and paid dividends: the American was always taking a short cut to freedom, a short cut to fortune, a short cut to learning, and a short cut to heaven.” (Commager 1950:20-21) Is American individualism an obstacle to creating society? An obstacle to Polanyi’s public freedoms?

Visitors to America with such diverse views as Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, Beatrice Webb and Frederick Engels have highlighted the distinctive role that individualism and individual competition have played in America. For Tocqueville this accompanied Americans’ disregard of differences in status and rank; for Max Weber, it helped to explain Americans’ easy embrace of capitalism; for Beatrice Webb, it helped to explain the weak union movement; and for Frederick Engels (1890:467) it helped to account for why America was saturated with “bourgeois culture, bourgeois institutions, and bourgeois manners.”

Society as a Public Good

The conception of public goods emerged first in economics (Starrett 1988; see also Schelling 1978). The thesis in economics was that the commons – parks, recreational areas and public spaces – will be devoured by greedy individualists. It is a capitalist society, after all. This view was tempered by political scientists who recast public goods as “collective goods,” and when protected by a state’s constitution and laws, can be collectively shared without diminishment (Dahl 2001). The very conception of public goods is alien to capitalism as well as to American institutions and the U.S. constitutional tradition in which individual rights and interests trump notions of the public interest, shared resources, and the collective good (Blau and Moncada 2005). By contrast, examples of collectivization of interests, rights and freedoms can be found in international agreements, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Kyoto Protocol, in which all are considered stakeholders as well as beneficiaries. Rule breakers spoil it for everyone. Is a society whose members embrace individual freedoms more than the sum of its parts?

One way of thinking about this, as an intellectual exercise, is to consider societies that are totalized, frozen and sapped of vitality. This is a foil for considering a healthy and viable society. José Ortega y Gassett describes the fascist state:

In such times human life does not flow freely and easily through institutional channels built with its approval and made to measure for it… Life is converted into the opposite of all this, into spiritless adaptation of each individual existence to the iron mold of the state. This is what I call “life as adaptation.” (Gassett 1946:35, italics in original)

His analysis highlights what happens when there is abandonment of all principles bearing on the collectivization of rights and freedoms. Fascism, for Gassett, is possible when organic and interdependent connections among individuals, among communities, and among locales are severed and there is no longer a sense of a collective, empowered, interdependent whole. (Yet, we know that


societies can turn around with remarkable rapidity. Spain is a lively multi-party democratic state that espouses pluralism. Likewise, Italy and Germany.)

Many nation-states, if not most, have revised their constitutions within the past decade (Blau and Moncada 2006) to provide a shield for their populations against the forces of globalization. All of these constitutions include the political and civil rights that originated in the western liberal tradition, yet they also advance principles of security such as universal rights to healthcare and housing, as well as principles about the coherence of the collectivity. Paraguay’s Constitution serves here as an example of how a nation-state promotes society in much the terms that we would describe public goods and collectively. I quote from its Preamble:

The Paraguayan people, through their legitimate representatives convening at the National Constituent Assembly, pleading to God, recognizing human dignity for the purpose of ensuring freedom, equality and justice, reaffirming the principles of a representative, participatory, pluralistic republican democracy, upholding national sovereignty and independence and joining the international community, hereby approve and promulgate this Constitution. (Paraguay Constitution 1992)

Certainly constitutional preambles do not map practices, but they are the basis of laws and national programs, and are held up to citizens and their leaders as ideals that inspire and shape societal undertakings and help guide national undertakings. In contrast, the liberal principles that underlie Americans conceptions of freedoms are about individual rights that are wrestled from the state and guarded by each who possesses them with fierce determination (much like private property).

There is yet another way of capturing what a society is, and that is through social and economic indicators. These indicators are useful if we consider society from a public goods perspective, even though they are aggregated measures. How is the richest, most powerful country in the world doing as a collectivity, as a society? In 2005 among OECD (most industrialized) countries, Eastern European and Independent Commonwealth States, the United States ranked highest on poverty, when poverty is defined as the percentage below 50 percent of median income (UNDP 2005a, Table 4). In a comparison of the world’s 28 wealthiest countries, only Singapore has a higher percentage in the top category that divides 10 percent of total incomes, and only Singapore and Hong Kong have a higher Gini coefficient (UNDP 2005b, Table 15). A recent report on children published by UNICEF (2005) reveals that the United States and Mexico have the highest rates of child poverty among the 38 OECD countries. Sociologists know these are troubling indications of the overall health of a society.

I propose considering society as a bundle of public goods that are unconditionally available to all. Sharing such goods is not a matter of access to opportunities, but a right. There are efficiencies to public goods. Supplying healthcare to all children is more efficient than supplying healthcare to some children. Taxpayers


are happier paying for healthcare that benefits all than healthcare that benefits only a few. Universal provision makes healthcare a true public good so that those who benefit from it do not reduce others’ chances to benefit from it, and none can be excluded from benefiting. There are also multiplier effects. A healthy population contributes to the vitality and productivity of the society in the present generation and in those to come.

Thus the public goods argument is one that binds the individual to society and to the nation-state, and we can, in these terms, think about universal healthcare, good highways and communications systems, a sustainable environment, transparent governance, support for science, schools and so forth. The provision of public goods amplifies a society as such provision embeds social forms and institutions, and promotes, through shared interests, a collective identity. We can also think about peace, democracy, equality and pluralism as public goods. Again, reconsider the properties of public goods: none can be excluded and one’s own indulgences do not detract from the ability of others to indulge. None can free ride on peace, democracy, equality or pluralism. They are indivisible.

Public Goods and American Exceptionalism

Public goods receive scant interest and attention in a society that values individualism as much as Americans do. On the other hand, social scientists are increasingly critical of the consequences and correlates of individualism, especially as it creates economic inequalities and poverty both domestically and worldwide (Tabb 2002; Berberoglu 2003; Derber 2003; Robinson 2004).

The point I am making is somewhat different. American individualism becomes a stumbling block for the advance of society, social solidarities and collective welfare because it is entangled with capitalism and privatization of public goods. National parks are sold to lumber companies ocean harbors to casinos and community green spaces to developers. Moreover, schools are privatized; pharmaceutical companies benefit shareholders at the expense of public health; migrants are denied access to public programs; neglect of the wetlands that surround New Orleans cost lives when Katrina struck while governments had fully protected the rights of off-shore drilling companies. Corporations have become the stewards of our natural resources, while they also benefit immensely from development projects, war and weak labor protections. Individual Americans cannot be blamed for this, of course, and yet we might see this as part and parcel of the American zeitgeist that downplays the importance of collective interests and public goods, a consequence of how Americans view their rights and freedoms as being individuated.

American individualism is reinforced by and, in turn, reinforces national programs and institutions. Unlike other industrialized states that have developed and preserve integrative and inclusive welfare programs, the welfare programs in America are skimpy and divisive, following the contours of race and class, rather than cutting across them. Social security is not the exception to this, as Jill Quadagno (2005) shows. Nor are schools, which presumably embody universal and democratic principles (Willie et al. 1991). Nor is the penal system (Krysan and Lewis 2004), established presumably in the interests of justice.


It is not inconsistent with my analysis so far that the United States became the main instigator and defender of neoliberal capitalism, which is antithetical to societal interference and societal lumpiness. Such interference and societal lumpiness accompany the provision of public goods but they slow markets.

Freedom in Our Times

It has been many decades since anthropologists and sociologists wrote about cultures and societies as entities, and now we are even more certain that societies are not cohesive entities, owing to capital mobility, high rates of migration, cultural sharing and global communications. We run into great difficulty if we think of societies as static, territorialized entities. With precisely this understanding, transnational corporations and financial investors exploit the fluidity of boundaries, social and political entities, with increasing ease owing to electronic communications and satellite technology. These transnational corporations and financial investors have unlimited freedoms.

In this context, it is useful to understand how political language accompanies this celebration of market freedoms. President Bush speaks often about the nation of freedom-loving people. He tells us that we have our shopping freedoms, that we are fighting for the freedoms of Iraqis, that we are spreading freedoms, that freedom is on the march and in our hearts and in one particularly odd circumlocution, “freedom is on a war with fear itself.” All this, and more, at: www.whitehouse.gov. But “freedom” used in these senses seems to me to be an inappropriate term when we live in a country with extreme economic inequalities and with child poverty rates that exceed those of most industrialized countries. I quote the impassioned statement that was posted on the website of the Children’s Defense Fund:

Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist, fervently condemned slavery in the 1840s as a “moral outrage,” even when his cause seemed hopeless. A friend asked him after a speech, “Wendell, why are you so on fire?” Phillips replied: “I am on fire because I have mountains of ice before me to melt.” Child poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth is unjust, immoral, and preventable. But the nearly twelve million American children who live in poverty and the one million Black children growing up right now in families with annual incomes of $7,000 or less need fired-up adults who will stand up and say so. We are facing mountains of ice in our struggle today too, but fire is still more powerful. (Children’s Defense Fund, n.d.)

From the perspective of sociology we could say that the Children’s Defense Fund is drawing on a language of social mobilization in the tradition of the abolitionist movement and Civil Rights. Yet from the perspective argued here, the Fund is also drawing from the conception of public goods. All children should be spared poverty. It ought to be a law, the Fund argues, that all children grow


up in households that can provide adequate housing, nutrition, healthcare and education. Another way of putting this is in the terms of human rights: all people are entitled to food, education, water, shelter, a job, health care and a cultural identity. This captures one of the meanings of freedom famously argued by Theodore Roosevelt in his “Four Freedoms” speech. He said, “necessitous men are not free men,” because those who are hungry and jobless, “are the stuff out of which dictatorships are made.” (Roosevelt 1941; see Sunstein 2004:12)

Freedom

The American citizen might ask, “How free are Americans when so many of our children live in poverty?” Since Bush has made freedom a hot button issue, we social scientists ought to understand how it draws from American traditions and values. It is interesting that poll studies show that most Americans believe that the income distribution is unfair (Public Agenda 1983; Pew 2003). This seems to suggest there is a shift away from an unqualified embrace of competitive individualism that Polanyi (1951), Lipset (1996) and others have highlighted, and that I have described elsewhere (Blau and Moncada 2005). These poll results support a preliminary conjecture that Americans embrace individual freedoms and collective welfare simultaneously.

This is where the public goods argument comes in. Both freedom and equity are public goods because they are both relational. To be treated equitably and to have equal freedom one must receive it from others. That is, freedom and equity are non-rival in consumption and each have non-excludable benefits. Furthermore, freedom and equity are inclusive with no options of monopoly and no options of exit (Kaul and Mendoza 2003). Equity and equality of freedom are like other public goods, such as a free press, clean air, public health, safe food and unpolluted water.

In this new era of globalization it is important for sociologists to critique the master narrative of individual freedoms because politicians manipulatively use it to justify the dismantlement of domestic programs, the invasion of other countries, and the sabotaging of multinational and international agreements. Perhaps we American sociologists have fallen into the trap of accepting the arguments of the early exceptionalists, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe, but sobered now when George W. Bush draws from this same tradition. Perhaps we have exaggerated our originality. After all, the “first new nation” relied on the talents of European immigrants, the land and other resources appropriated from indigenous peoples, and, as slaves, Africa’s human populations. But what about the American liberal political tradition? Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence comes straight from John Locke; the Bill of Rights is an extension of British Common Law – including the Magna Charta (1215), the Habeas Corpus Act (1679), and the Bill of Rights (1689) – while the system of checks and balances is Hobbesian.

All contemporary state constitutions embrace individual freedoms, and civil and political rights, and the theme of many an international conference these days centers on “the choice society.” (For example, see the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 2005.) The ethos of individualism – that


freedoms are individual not public, and the belief in American exceptionalism – justifies the privatization of public goods, while Americans themselves, (such as those in the Pew survey) say that they prefer a fairer society to one dominated by intense, competitive and individualistic struggles.

Freedoms and Development

With more specificity, a society that is organized in terms of public goods is one where there is universality of fundamental rights (such as education, jobs, health care, housing, food, security) and inclusivity with respect to public goods that are, by definition, collective, such as democratic institutions, information access, and clean air and water. Fairness and equity are the underpinnings of such a society. I must go further than that. Specifically, I argue that society itself is a public good.

Although Amartya Sen (1999) does not frame his arguments from a public goods perspective, his arguments in Development as Freedom are consistent with it. He poses development as a process of expanding substantive human freedoms, and thereby, humans’ capabilities that drive social and economic development. But I can make explicit what the underlying assumptions are in Sen’s arguments. The expansion of human freedoms is a public good because this promotes development, a tangible public good, and that development, in turn, promotes human freedoms. This is a virtuous circle.

Ontological Freedoms

Economist Amartya Sen helps us to understand what freedom does, while philosophers help us understand what freedom is. This is an ontological question, but it has interesting sociological implications. I draw from Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt. For Sartre, freedom is the raison-d’être – the reason for existence. Americans can feel comfortable with that. He further contends that humans are what they will themselves to be: “Man is nothing else but which he makes of himself.” (Sartre 1946:28) So far, so good (again, from an American perspective). But then he elaborates in terms at odds with an American sensibility: “When I say that man chooses himself, I do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that I also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men… What I choose is always the better and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all… Our responsibility is thus much greater than I had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole.” (Sartre 1946: 29) Sartre elaborates in ways that are not inconsistent with Durkheim’s notion of collective representations or collective conscience when he elaborates with an example: when someone decides to marry they are committing themselves to monogamy but also fashioning an image, or a norm, for all. Yet for Sartre, human freedom is the broadest ontological category there is. His argument, as we will see, takes another turn, but for now let me elaborate on this first part.

The core of his argument for our purposes is this: “I will freedom for freedom’s sake… And in thus willing freedom, I discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own… I


cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.”(Sartre 1946:51-52) Thereby, freedom is at the core of Sartre’s ethics, which has the universalistic scope as Kant’s categorical imperative does, which is also concerned with all of humanity. Kant’s ethical precept is, “Act so that you treat humanity… always as an end and never as a means.” (Kant 1959:47) or, “Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” (1959:48) Yet Kant’s categorical imperative is rooted in the problematic assumption that intention matters, and I say problematic because intentionality is impossible to really nail down. Kant’s imperative also depends on the assumption that moral intention is compelled by obligation, an unnecessary assumption for Sartre.

There are interesting comparisons to make between Sen’s idea about the freedom to develop and Sartre’s idea about freedom. Sen provides us with an understanding of how individual freedoms allow humans and societies to develop, yet Sen does not make human relations the motor of society as Sartre does. Sartre asks us to understand that freedoms are radically rooted deep within all relationships, the very core of society. It is, for him, a matter of joint interest that you are free and, I, in turn am free. I will fight for your freedom, as you will fight for mine. This amazing paradox makes the freedom of the other one’s own objective and, by definition, one’s own freedom the objective of the other. Individual freedom is not competitive after all; it is reciprocal.

Thus, we can draw from Sartre’s freedom paradox very exciting conclusions that are at odds with the liberal conception of freedom. First, freedom must be a universal human right. Second, in and through their freedoms people generate social and societal cohesion and solidarities. Third, for people to exercise their freedoms by giving others their freedoms, society must provide public goods, such as decent jobs, education and a healthy environment. Sartre and Sen would agree that inequalities corrode society. For both, inequalities produce specious handicaps.

Elaboration

Thus, I have tried to link sociological research on inequalities with public goods, and at the same time ground this in philosophical assumptions about freedom, development, scarcity and abundance. There are several things to point out. First, economic inequalities threaten human freedoms. On this Sen and Sartre would agree, although their reasons would be different. For Sen, both capabilities and the realization of freedoms are unfairly jeopardized by an economic system that produces specious handicaps, and for Sartre, inequalities corrode all relationships because freedom is at the core of relationships. Second, the provision of public goods, for Sen, allows people to realize their freedoms. Third, Sartre provides an important, if counterintuitive, understanding of the ethical principles of human relations, namely, I fight for your freedoms, and you fight for mine.

In these ways, both Sen and Sartre provide us with an understanding of human freedoms that are compatible with social solidarity and the mutualism of ethical regard for others, which brings us full circle back to public goods. To be clear, I provide some additional examples. The protection of sources of


clean water allows us our freedoms and the freedoms of our children’s children (that is, future generations). When people do not have clean water they contract terrible illnesses and become vulnerable to many more. Clean water for everyone is a public good. Likewise, rainforests are public goods. About 40 percent of the earth’s oxygen supply comes from the rainforests, and they are home to about two-thirds of all living plant and animal species. The universal provision of clean water and the preservation of rain forests can be considered easily within the framework of Sen’s argument about developmental freedoms and Sartre’s arguments about the ethical underpinnings of ontological freedoms. By defining poverty as a “deprivation of basic capabilities, rather than merely as low income,” (Sen 1999:20) Sen makes it clear that first-worlders are denying third-worlders their fundamental human freedoms through egregiously flawed development schemes, and Sartre (1963) makes it clear that decolonization programs, like colonization, were carried out to advance the freedoms of the colonizers, not the freedoms of the colonized.1

Thus Sartre and Sen draw from a vocabulary of universal human needs and universal human values. Poverty and slavery, deprivation and oppression are condemned as unjust in every society, in Algeria and in France, and among Americans as well. Yet there is a difference. American liberalism is rooted in the idea that “my freedom has to do with my liberties, my property, my rights,” whereas the freedom that Sartre and Sen are defending has to do with, as Sartre puts it, “your freedom, first and foremost.”

As for the comparison between philosopher Sartre and economist Sen, it is good to have found common ground. Yet we are still left with a puzzle that neither can address: humans are not the same. People have different languages, customs, traditions, religions, genders, races and ethnicities; they have different moral codes and nationalities. Missing in their accounts is the significance of these human differences.

Culture as a Public Good

UNESCO states on its culture portal:

Development models produced since the 1970s have clearly failed, despite constant revision, to live up to the expectations they raised. Some would claim that this is because development has itself been defined far too exclusively in terms of tangibles, such as dams, factories, houses, food and water, although these are undeniably vital goods. UNESCO defends the case of indivisibility of culture and development, understood not simply in terms of economic growth, but also as a means of achieving a satisfactory intellectual, emotional, moral and spiritual existence. (UNESCO n.d.).

UNESCO thereby makes a case that culture, as human culture, is universal and should be ever as much the object of development that tangibles already are. Yet


culture in the sense of religious faith, traditions, languages, beliefs and values is infinitely varied and diverse. The 2001 UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity defines such diversity as essential for human life and societies, as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature (UNESCO 2001).

The concerns that underlie some of the thinking behind this document are that unimpeded free markets eradicate local cultures, identities and traditions. (For a summary, see Lechner and Boli 2005:30-59; Blau and Moncada 2005.) Cultural diversity – overlapping and multi-textured cultural identities – are public goods. Yet, as we know, they are public goods of a kind that is more complex than clean water or rainforests. I would like to briefly explore this before returning to freedom.

We need to draw from a framework other than those offered by Sen and Sartre to understand the rights to identity and culture. Legal scholar Abdullahi An-Na’im is helpful, and somewhat along the lines implicit in the UNESCO Declaration, he contends that colonists not only deprived Africans of their economic, political and social rights but also their rights to culture. People have rights to their individual and group identities, moral frameworks, tradition, and so forth, he believes, and this involves having a coherent understanding of the importance of sameness and difference (An-Na’im 2002:1-13).

He also makes the point that compared with socioeconomic rights, such as food security, the operationalization of cultural rights is exceedingly difficult because culture is dynamic and multilayered. It is easy to understand that while research questions in the domain of economic inequalities lend themselves to quantification, those pertaining to culture often require qualitative, ethnographic documentation. Culture is neither developmental nor universal. As Clifford Geertz warns, it is not the case that differences can be easily mapped: “the distant tribe” does not reveal itself in its “coherent difference…. Foreignness does not start at the water’s edge but at the skin’s.” (Geertz 1986:112) This is a realm fraught with moral hazards, posing dilemmas for ethics and ethical relations.

A debate between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (2003) is useful in helping us conceptualize these different domains of micro-culture and the larger mappings that UNESCO describes and Geertz highlights as problematic. Honneth defends a position more or less in line with a principled defense of universalistic, distributive justice (in much the same vein as do Sartre and Sen), while Fraser argues that justice, or ethics, is a matter of interpersonal recognition. Her argument resonates with the point made by Clifford Geertz that we are dealing with the micro-worlds of people and their interactions with others.

It is Hannah Arendt who makes the most powerful argument about how human freedom and human difference are coupled at the micro-level of relations, and even in aggregated cultural realms. She contends that free human action is entirely dependent on the constant presence of others. That is, “I am unique because I am in your presence, and you are unique because you are in my presence. I am ethical in regards to you because you are ethical in regards to me.” Recognition of and respectful of difference lies in the realm of what Arendt described as the “in-betweeness” of humans (Arendt 1958:182). But she elaborates: these are pluralistic webs of social relations embedded not in fixed


categories but in ongoing processes, and they need not be face-to-face, but in the realm of imagination or understanding (1958:7-78). Unlike Geertz, for whom cultural borders are moral hazards, borders for Arendt are like active agents that spur humans to be both ethical and free.

Cultural Pluralism and Democracy

Cultural pluralism is a public good. In fact, it is one of the two most interesting, challenging and complex of all public goods. The other interesting public good is participatory (substantive) democracy (Green 1999). The two have much in common. As public goods, cultural pluralism and participatory democracy have collective benefits that are indivisible. Both cultural pluralism and participatory democracy depend on both Arendt’s recognition of the other and Sartre’s universalization of freedom. Sartre’s conception of freedom requires us to consider the other, but it is an undifferentiated other, whereas Arendt’s conception of the other requires us to consider the freedoms of specific others, in social relations, and mentally and emotionally through empathy. Both conceptions are useful for considering deeper forms of democracy, namely, participatory and substantive democracy, although I will not elaborate here.

As sociologists, we can appreciate Sartre more when we have considered Sen’s work on development and freedom, and we can appreciate Arendt more when we consider the UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity. Buried in the social sciences are powerful philosophical ideas, but as craft workers, we can easily overlook these ideas. Another lesson is that the assumptions we make as sociologists – here, about the nature of freedom – make all the difference in the world for the kinds of questions we ask and how we frame our research.

Conclusion

Only governments can ensure, through laws and policies, the provision of universal public goods, such as a safe supply of water, affordable health care and housing; they can regulate commerce and the private sector. However, governments cannot legislate Sartre’s radical freedoms, Sen’s developmental freedoms or Arendt’s recognition and respect for difference.

Sartre, Sen and Arendt are of interest to sociologists because their analyses are rooted in societal forms, practices and processes. They are of particular interest to us now because we see that modernist forms, practices and processes are not up to the new challenges of what Peter Singer (2002) describes as our living in “One World.” Sartre and Sen offer sociologists an epistemological foundation for evaluating political and economic freedoms, and Arendt offers a foundation for understanding complex social relations. Sartre poses the biggest challenge to the deep and complex American ethos of freedom because he radically decenters self-interest. That is, I must fight for others’ freedoms, and they will fight for mine. It is a win-win dialectic, not one that gives rise to inequalities and continually reinforces inequalities.


Giving each their due in closing, first, Sartre who writes of freedom as the elementary social fact, and second, Arendt, who writes of difference as the elementary social fact. First Sartre:

“[It] is worth recalling… that the human relation really exists between all [humans] and that is no more than the relation of praxis to itself.” (Sartre 2004 [1960]:120) “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” (Arendt 1958:8)

Note

1. Frantz Fanon makes the same point, but more eloquently: The mass of the people struggle against the same poverty, flounder about making the same gestures and with their shrunken bellies outline what has been called the geography of hunger. It is an underdeveloped world, a world inhuman in its poverty; but also it is a world without doctors, without engineers, and without administrators…. European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves (Fanon 1963:96).

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blau- what would sartre say, and arendt's reply

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