Freedom – Feeling Free in an (Un)Free World

This chapter explores what it means and how feels like to be free in social life. Despite current collectivist backlashes from both the political right (neo-nationalism) and left (identity-politics), individual freedom is still probably the ‘ultimate value’ (Talcott Parsons) of contemporary liberal democracies. Whereas economists, political scientists and political philosophers discuss freedom in the context of markets, the state and legal rights, and whilst philosophers discuss the metaphysical question of ‘free will’, in what follows we take a different approach and look at freedom from a social and sociological perspective, that is, freedom as a social phenomenon, social relation and a social emotion. Our basic idea is that individual freedom to a large extent is created, sustained, obstructed, destroyed and experienced in social relations. The first part of the chapter explores what it means to be free and examines different conceptions of freedom in social theory and sociology. The second part of the chapter brings in the social dimension. Starting from Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between ‘negative freedom’ and ‘positive freedom’ and Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of ‘freedom as a social relation’, we look at important ways in which social relations both enable and constrain freedom. In the final part of the chapter, we address the topic of this book, namely how it feels to be free. In this connection, we show that in addition to its many positive emotional consequences (such as happiness, joy and emotional surplus), freedom also causes much emotional frustration and distress – both when we are allowed to choose freely but cannot decide what to choose, and also when we sense that our freedom is limited and unable to live up to its potential. A basic overall lesson from the chapter is that to be free is to be pulled in many directions at the same time: from the competing and sometimes incompatible dimensions of freedom; from the enabling and constraining mechanisms of society; and from the positive and negative emotional consequences of freedom.