I am concerned with actual human beings in actual historical settings, not with representations of human beings abstracted from their settings. These commitments mean that freedom and justice for historically situated individuals are measured from a first-person, practical perspective. No constraints on individual freedom and no sources of inequality are cat- egorically exempt from review, nor are any considered privileged under this view. Neither economy nor cultural heritage is given independent moral weight. A person whose life and relations are fully regimented by external forces is unfree, no matter whether the source of regimentation can be un- derstood as market-based, authoritarian, or traditional community values. This does not entail a radical anarchism or libertarianism. Organizations, communities, and other external structures are pervasively necessary for hu- man beings to flourish and to act freely and effectively. This does mean, however, that I think of these structures only from the perspective of their effects on human beings. Their value is purely derivative from their impor- tance to the actual human beings that inhabit them and are structured—for better or worse—by them. As a practical matter, this places concern with market structure and economic organization much closer to the core of questions of freedom than liberal theory usually is willing to do. Liberals have tended to leave the basic structure of property and markets either to libertarians—who, like Friedrich Hayek, accepted its present contours as “natural,” and a core constituent element of freedom—or to Marxists and neo-Marxists. I treat property and markets as just one domain of human action, with affordances and limitations. Their presence enhances freedom along some dimensions, but their institutional requirements can become sources of constraint when they squelch freedom of action in nonmarket contexts. Calibrating the reach of the market, then, becomes central not only to the shape of justice or welfare in a society, but also to freedom.
From the intro to The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, a book that grows on me more and more in proportion to the portion of it I’ve read to date.
