Liberty and government: Hindess and the history of liberalism

This article investigates Barry Hindess's distinctive interpretation of liberal political thought, and especially his analysis of liberalism's emphasis on the normative priority of liberty. For Hindess, drawing on Foucault's lectures on the history of early modern political thought and liberalism, liberty is an important aspect of liberal thought but so too is "government," understood in the broadest sense. Any genealogy of the liberal conception of freedom must, therefore, also deal with the nature of liberal government, understood as a distinctive "rationality" of government. Hindess' "realist" approach to political thought, his focus on the relationship between freedom and government and the extent to which liberalism governs not only through freedom but also in determining which agents and/or groups could not be governed in this way, offers a rich and unusual perspective on the nature of liberal freedom. The article concludes with an attempt to provide an account of liberty as a distinctly political value that incorporates aspects of Hindess' analysis and yet challenges it in other ways, especially with regard to the importance liberty plays in the way we conceive of the legitimate exercise of political power.