Desire and coercion

In his Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire , William Cavanaugh offers an Augustinian critique of the notion of “freedom” as it appears in free market advocates. He notes that Augustine defines freedom not merely negatively (absence of external coercion) but positively (orientation of desires and life to proper ends). That means that “he does not assume that mere negative freedom of the will from interference is a good end in itself” and thus “he believes that the individual will can be moved from outside itself to re-examine its ways.” The point can be put this way: One experiences all correction and external discipline as coercive and oppressive only if one assumes an individualistic anthropology and a purely negative account of freedom.

He quotes this from Augustine: “Pharaoh oppressed the people of God by hard bondage; Moses afflicted the same people by severe correction when they were guilty of impiety: their actions were alike; but they were not alike in the motive of regard to the people’s welfare, – the one being inflamed by lust of power, the other inflamed by love.”

And that means that, for all their scorn of “liberal order,” most postmoderns remain liberals at heart, defining freedom as autonomy and therefore defining all external interference as violence.