The Freest Man in Rome

There is a story about a Roman slave named Epictetus and his master. The master, for sport or for spite, took hold of the slave’s leg and began to twist it. Epictetus did not cry out. He looked up and said, calmly, that if the master kept twisting, the leg would break. The master kept twisting. The leg broke. And Epictetus, still calm, said only: “Did I not tell you that it would break?”

The story is almost certainly polished in the retelling. It comes down to us through a hostile source, and it has the too-neat shape of a lesson. But the man was real. Epictetus was born a slave in the first century, was owned, was crippled, and was eventually freed, and he became one of the most important teachers in the Roman world. Emperors read him. And the whole of what he taught can be folded into a single strange claim, one he made as a man who had spent years as another man’s property: that his master had never, for one day, owned the part of him that mattered. “You may fetter my leg,” he said, “but my will not even Zeus himself can overpower.”

Set that beside a second picture. A man sits on a throne. He can have anyone in the city killed on a word. He can take any object, any house, any person he wants. No law binds him. No one can tell him no. By every plain measure, he is the most powerful and least restricted human being for a thousand miles.

Now the question this whole essay turns on. Which of those two men is free?

Most of us answer without hesitating, and we answer wrong.

The Freedom We Think We Mean

Here is what nearly everyone means by “free,” and it is worth saying in its strongest form, because it is not a foolish thing to mean. It is one of the best ideas our species ever had.

To be free is to not be stopped. Freedom is the open road, the unlocked door, the absence of a hand on your shoulder. A free man is one who can do what he wants without someone else blocking him. Add up all the things you are able to do without interference, and that sum is your liberty. Take some away, and you have less. This is the freedom of “don’t tread on me.” It is the freedom people cross oceans for and die for. When the American colonists wrote that free and independent states may “do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do,” this is exactly what they meant. Freedom is room to move.

Thomas Hobbes gave this idea its cleanest, hardest statement. Liberty, he wrote, is simply “the absence of external impediments.” He meant that almost mechanically. A river is free when nothing dams it. A man is free in the same way a rolling ball is free, when nothing is in his path. “Liberty,” Hobbes said, “is not of the will, but of the man,” and it consists in this: “that he finds no stop in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do.” Whatever you happen to want, freedom is the clear space in front of that wanting.

That picture is yours, and it is about to cost you something to give up. On it, the slave with the broken leg is obviously not free. He is owned. He is fettered. And the man on the throne is the freest being in the story, because nothing stops him from doing anything at all.

Almost the entire tradition of the great books says you have it backwards. Not softened, not “it’s more complicated.” Backwards.

The Man Who Is Mastered

Start with the throne, because that is where the plain view feels safest, and it is where it breaks first.

The man who can do whatever he wants is doing whatever he wants. Everything hangs on that little word. Where do his wants come from? He did not sit down in the cool of the evening and reason out, from the ground up, that today he would crave this woman and that man’s vineyard and the death of the fellow who insulted him at dinner. The cravings arrive on their own. They wash in. He is carried by them. He is, in the most literal sense, driven.

Baruch Spinoza put the point about as sharply as it can be put. A man ruled by his passions, he wrote, “is not his own master, but is mastered by fortune, in whose power he is, so that he is often forced to follow the worse, although he sees the better before him.” You have lived that last part. Forced to follow the worse, although he sees the better before him. You knew the second helping was a bad idea. You reached for it anyway. You knew the cruel reply would cost you a friend. You sent it anyway. In that moment, what exactly was in charge? Not you, if by “you” we mean the part that saw the better and wanted it. Something else had your hands.

So now look again at the tyrant, the man who “can do anything.” Plato looked at him a long time, and what he saw was not a free man but the least free man alive. The tyrant, he wrote, is “drunken, lustful, passionate.” He can command a city, but he cannot command himself, and the second failure runs deeper than the first success. “The tyrant never tastes of true freedom.” Plato even asks the blunt question and answers it: will not the wickedest man “be also the most miserable?” The figure everyone envies is, on the inside, a slave with unusually large privileges. He has swapped a master he could see for one he cannot.

Hegel, coming more than two thousand years later, drew the same portrait of the absolute ruler and used the exact word. The despot’s so-called freedom, he wrote, “is only caprice, ferocity, brutal recklessness of passion.” Whatever floats up in him, he does. That is not the mark of a free agent. That is the mark of a leaf on a fast river. “That one,” Hegel concludes, “is therefore only a despot; not a free man.”

This is the turn, and it is worth seeing plainly before we go on. You started by thinking freedom was having no one to stop you. But the man with no one to stop him turns out to be the most enslaved person in the story, because the thing that runs him lives on the inside, where no revolution can reach it and no law can forbid it. Removing every external chain from a man ruled by appetite does not free him. It just removes the last thing that was slowing him down.

Then the tradition takes the second step, the one that names the alternative. If the outer chain is not the real chain, what is the real freedom? The answer is the one hiding inside the old line everyone has heard and no one examines: the truth shall make you free. Not the truth as a comfort. The truth as a ruler. You are free, this tradition says, exactly to the degree that the reasoning part of you, the part that sees the better, actually governs the wanting part. Augustine said it in four words that reverse Hobbes completely: “The will is then truly free, when it is not the slave of vices and sins.” Freedom is not the absence of a master. It is having the right master, and the right master is your own reason.

That is the whole thesis in one sentence: freedom is the rule of reason over the passions. And stated that baldly, it is not only the noblest claim in this tradition. It is also, word for word, one of the most dangerous sentences in the history of politics. We will get to why. First we have to see why it is true, because it is, and then we have to see exactly where it turns into a lie, because it does, and the gap between the two is thinner than a razor.

Which of Your Wants Is You

The plain view of freedom has a hidden assumption, and once you see it, the view falls apart in your hands. It assumes that “what you want” is one clear thing, sitting there, waiting for the road to be cleared so you can go get it. It is not one thing. It is a mob.

Lucretius, the Roman poet of atoms and appetites, watched the mob at work and wrote the truest four lines ever written about wanting. What we do not have, he said, “seems better than everything else in all the world. But should we get it, we want something else.” That is the engine. Desire is not a destination you are being blocked from reaching. It is a treadmill that speeds up the moment you step on it. Socrates had already caught the same thing in a stricter form: desire is always desire for what you lack. “Love is of something which a man wants and has not.” The instant you have it, that particular desire is dead, and the wanting simply relocates to the next thing you lack. A being made entirely of desires is never full. It is a hole that reports itself as a person.

So “give me the freedom to do what I want” turns out to be an incoherent request, because the wants do not agree with each other and do not stay still. You want the drink and you want to be sober. You want to tell him off and you want the friendship. You want the easy afternoon and you want the finished work. Clear the road, remove every external impediment, and you have not freed a person. You have just declared open season among the warring wants, and the loudest, most immediate, most animal one usually wins. That is not liberation. Anyone who has watched a person “finally free of all restrictions” destroy himself knows it is not liberation.

Which is why the tradition insists that freedom cannot mean satisfying the wants. It has to mean ordering them. And that requires that something in you be able to stand above the wants and rank them, to say this one and not that one, the better and not merely the loudest. That something is reason. Freedom starts to look less like an open field and more like a household with someone competent finally in charge of it.

But the moment you say “in charge,” you have smuggled in a political idea. And political ideas have a history of going very badly.

Two Ways to Rule a Household

Here is where the essay stops being comfortable, and it should. Because we have just agreed that reason must rule the passions, and “rule” is exactly the word that should worry you. There is more than one way to rule. There is the way a tyrant rules, and there is the way a free constitution rules, and the difference between them is the difference between the two men we started with.

Aristotle drew the line precisely. A king, he said, “rules according to law over voluntary subjects.” A tyrant rules “over involuntary” ones, by his own fancy, for his own advantage, against their will. Same throne, opposite thing. One governs free people who consent and are ruled for their own good. The other governs slaves who are ruled as tools, and would throw off the yoke the instant they could. Now apply that inside a single human soul, which is exactly what Plato and Aristotle intended, because for them the soul really is a little city.

There are two ways reason can rule the passions. It can rule them the way a tyrant rules slaves: crush them, silence them, treat every desire as an enemy to be beaten down and, if possible, killed. Or it can rule them the way a good constitution rules free citizens: govern them, direct them, give each its proper place and let it do its proper work, for the good of the whole.

The Stoics and, much later, Immanuel Kant took the first road, the hard one. The passions are the problem, so the answer is to starve them. Marcus Aurelius trained himself “not to yield to the persuasions of the body.” Kant went further and colder: a good man renounces desire not just in line with duty but from duty, and the ideal is a will so ruled by reason that feeling has no vote at all. On this view the passions are a rebellion to be put down, and the freest soul is the one where they have been beaten into silence. Reason as absolute monarch. The inner throne, occupied by a king who tolerates no other voice.

It sounds like victory. It is, in fact, a second kind of bondage, and the man who proved it was not a moralist at all.

The Cost of a Crushed Rebellion

Sigmund Freud spent his life looking at people who had, in a sense, done exactly what the Stoics recommended. They had taken the desires they judged unacceptable and driven them down out of sight. And Freud’s central discovery is that it does not work the way the Stoics hoped. A desire you refuse to satisfy does not politely die. A desire you refuse even to look at does something worse.

Freud pictured the mind as a house with a doorkeeper. Certain impulses press toward the door that leads to the lit rooms of consciousness, and the doorkeeper turns them back. But turned back is not destroyed. “Being repressed,” he wrote, means being shoved back into the dark and held there, still alive, still pushing. The energy does not dissipate. It pools. And the dammed-up wanting, denied any honest outlet, festers inward like a sore and comes back out sideways, as the phobia, the compulsion, the dread with no name, the paralysis that no doctor can find a cause for. The passion you thought you had executed was only buried, and it kept a grip on the wheel from underground.

This is the flaw in the tyrant model of the soul, and it is the same flaw as in the tyrant model of a state. A ruler who governs by pure suppression looks strong and is secretly weak, because he has not won his subjects over, he has only sat on them, and a lid is not the same as peace. Spinoza, who wanted reason to rule as much as anyone ever has, saw this clearly and called ungoverned passion a “bondage,” the “impotence of man to govern or restrain the affects.” But govern is his word, not crush. He did not think you could win freedom by declaring war on half of yourself.

So the tradition, at its best, chooses the second road. Aristotle’s road. Reason should rule the passions the way a good constitution rules free citizens, not the way a tyrant rules slaves. It should govern them, moderate them, aim them at good ends, and leave them alive and working. Aristotle even gives us the two grades of this. The man who wants the wrong thing badly but grits his teeth and does the right thing anyway, he called continent, and it is good, but it is not yet freedom. It is a soul still at war, reason winning by force each morning. The truly free man is the one further up, the one Aristotle called virtuous, in whom the passions themselves have come around, so that he no longer wants the second helping, no longer has to grit his teeth. His desire and his reason want the same thing. There is no rebellion to suppress because there is no rebellion. That is a free city. Not one where the citizens are in chains, but one where they would vote, freely, for the very laws they live under. Montesquieu caught it in a line: liberty is “the power of doing what we ought to will, and not being constrained to do what we ought not to will.” The free man is not the one with no rules. He is the one who has become the kind of person for whom the good rule no longer feels like a rule.

The Sentence That Frees You and the Sentence That Enslaves You

Now the razor. We have built up a genuinely beautiful idea, and it is time to notice that it is also a loaded gun, because the twentieth century learned what happens when you point it the wrong way.

The idea is: you are free when your reason rules your passions, even against what you momentarily “want.” Turned inward, on yourself, that sentence is liberation. It is Epictetus. It is the whole hard-won wisdom of self-command. But watch what happens when one person points it at another person.

“You are free when reason rules, even against what you want.” Whose reason? If the answer is your own, we have a philosophy of self-mastery. If the answer is mine, on your behalf, we have a philosophy of tyranny wearing the mask of liberation. Because now I can chain you, silence you, overrule everything you say you want, and call it freeing you. You only think you want to be left alone. Your real will, your rational will, the one you would have if you were wise enough, agrees with me. So when I force you, I am not crushing your freedom. I am delivering it.

Rousseau wrote the sentence that names this exactly: a man who resists the general will can be “forced to be free.” He meant it almost kindly. In his picture, when the vote goes against you, it merely “proves that I was mistaken” about what I truly wanted all along. But you can see the trapdoor. Mill saw it. He warned that “the will of the people” in practice “means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people,” dressed up as everyone’s true self. Tocqueville saw a softer version coming, a government that would keep men as perpetual children “for their own good.” And the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, writing in 1958 with the wreckage of two totalitarian systems in front of him, gave the two ideas their names and their warning. Negative liberty is the plain old open road, freedom from interference. Positive liberty is the deeper, richer thing we have been building all essay, freedom as self-mastery, as the rule of the higher self over the lower. And Berlin’s terrible point was that the positive idea, the better idea, the true one, is precisely the one that every tyrant of the modern age reached for. Every commissar and every strongman claimed to be liberating people from their false, lower wants into their true, higher ones. The most beautiful theory of freedom became the favorite alibi of the boot.

So which is it. Is the rule of reason the road to freedom or the road to the gulag?

It is both, and the fork is a single question: who holds the reason that rules. This is why the constitutional picture is not a nice metaphor but the whole answer. Reason may rule the passions as a free constitution rules free citizens, by their consent, for their good, leaving them alive. And reason may rule inside one soul only. The instant one man appoints himself the reason that shall rule another man’s passions, “for his own good,” he has not built a free city. He has become Plato’s tyrant exactly, the one who rules “involuntary subjects” by his own fancy and calls it their benefit. The doctrine that frees you when you turn it on yourself enslaves you the moment someone else turns it on you. Same sentence. Opposite direction. That is not a footnote to the idea. It is the idea’s built-in edge, and the tradition that forgets it produces monsters, and the tradition that remembers it produces Epictetus.

The safeguard, in the end, is the one both Locke and Kant reached for, from opposite temperaments. Make the law sovereign, not the man. Locke insisted that even good rule must be law, not one wise person’s improvised judgment about your true good, because “the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.” John Dewey, much later, put the same guard in plainer clothes: “the only freedom that is of enduring importance is freedom of intelligence,” your own, exercised on your own account. The higher self is allowed to rule. It is just never allowed to wear someone else’s face.

The Freedom That Has No Choices Left

There is one more step, and it is the strangest, and it takes us all the way back to where we started and shows that we misunderstood even the plain view at the very beginning.

Remember what you thought freedom was in the first paragraph. Options. The open door, and behind it more doors. To be free was to have alternatives, to be able to go this way or that. The more choices, the more free. Buried in that picture is a quiet assumption: that a being with only one possible path, who cannot do otherwise, is the opposite of free. A slave. A machine. That assumption feels like bedrock.

Augustine took a hammer to it, and to understand the blow you have to follow him up a ladder of three freedoms. The first freedom, he said, the kind we were made with, “consisted in an ability not to sin, but also in an ability to sin.” That is your beloved open door. You can go right, toward the good, or left, toward the bad, and the ability to go either way is the freedom. This is the freedom you have been defending all along.

But Augustine does not stop there, because he does not think that is the top of the ladder. He thinks it is the bottom. The highest freedom, the one he calls “the last freedom of will,” is a state in which a person is, in his words, “not able to sin.” With your first-paragraph eyes, that looks like a horror. Not able? No alternative? That is a cage. That is the machine, the slave, the leaf on the river. How on earth can fewer options be more freedom, when the whole idea of freedom was having options?

And yet you already know it is true, because you already live small pieces of it. Think of the thing you love most and would never, under any pressure, betray. A child. A friend. A conviction you would die before selling. Are you free to betray it? In the plain sense, sure, no one is stopping you, the door is right there. But in the sense that actually matters, you cannot. It is not in you. The option is technically open and utterly dead, and its deadness is not a chain on you. It is the very shape of your freedom. The person who is tempted, who has to stand at that door each day and wrestle the handle and talk himself out of it, is less free than you, not more, even though he has “more options.” His extra option is not a liberty. It is a leash he has not yet cut.

That is the summit the whole tradition has been climbing toward, and it turns the plain view completely inside out. At the bottom, freedom is having every door open, including the doors to your own ruin. At the top, freedom is having become the kind of person for whom the doors to ruin are simply not doors anymore, because you would never, could never, want to walk through them. The prisoner dreams of more doors. The free man has one, and has stopped counting the others, and does not feel the loss, because a door you would never use was never really an exit. It was just a wall you had mistaken for a choice.

Back to the Broken Leg

So return to the two men.

The one on the throne can do anything, and is dragged by everything, and rules a city he cannot rule himself in, and if you handed him a fourth and a fifth and a hundredth option he would only have a hundred more ways to be pulled apart. Every door in the palace is open to him. He is the least free man in the story, because the one door he cannot find is the door out of his own wanting.

And the slave with the broken leg, owned, crippled, fettered, looks up at the master who has just proven he can break the man’s body and says the thing that has outlived the master’s name by two thousand years. You can fetter the leg. The will, not even Zeus can overpower. Everything the plain view calls freedom, the master has, and Epictetus lacks. Everything that turned out to actually be freedom, Epictetus has, and the master, twisting a leg for sport because some passion told him to, does not.

The old line was never a comfort. It was a description, and a hard one. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Not free to do whatever you please. Free from the part of you that would.

Which leaves only the question worth carrying out of here, and it is not whether anyone is standing in your way. It is the one the throne could never answer and the slave answered with a broken leg: if every door swung open tomorrow and no one anywhere could stop you, would you have the faintest idea which way to walk?