'Jiyū' through a Republican Lens in Japan — Epoche C1
The prevailing view of liberty and its limitations In contemporary liberal thought, individual liberty is most often conceptualised as negative liberty . The canonical statement is Isaiah Berlin's 1958 Oxford lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty", which divided the field in two. Negative liberty is freedom from : I am free to the extent that no other person or institution actually interferes with what I do. Positive liberty is freedom to : self-mastery, the condition of being governed by one's own rational purposes rather than by impulse or circumstance. Berlin famously warned that the positive idea has a dangerous career — once freedom is identified with obedience to one's "true" or "higher" self, states can claim to force citizens to be free — and his warning helped make the negative conception the default in Anglophone political philosophy. On this default view, the legitimate scope of public authority is measured by a single yardstick: every law and regulation is an interference, and hence a subtraction from liberty, to be justified, if at all, by some competing value such as security or welfare. The state that governs least, interferes least, and so leaves its citizens most free. This paradigm is valuable but incomplete, and the incompleteness matters when the concept travels. The Japanese word for liberty, jiyū (自由), was pressed into service in the nineteenth century to translate a Western vocabulary, but it entered a political experience of its own — of feudal status hierarchy, of Meiji state-building, of corporate paternalism — and the aspiration it carries is not fully captured by "being left alone". To see what more it carries, we need a second theory of freedom, one that the recent revival of republican political thought has made precise: freedom as non-domination, which counts a person unfree when she is subject to another's arbitrary power, whether or not that power is ever actually used against her. Freedom as non-domination: the republican alternative Philip Pettit's Republicanism (1997) and Quentin Skinner's Liberty before Liberalism (1998) recovered, from different directions, this conception of freedom, older than liberalism. Skinner, a historian of political thought, traced it to what he calls the neo-Roman writers of the seventeenth century — English republicans such as Harrington, Milton and Sidney — who in turn took it from Roman law. The Roman jurists' Digest divides all persons into the free and the slaves, and defines the slave as one who lives in the power of another (in potestate domini). The crucial feature of this definition is what it does not mention: interference. A slave with an indulgent, absent-minded master may go for years without being interfered with at all. He remains a slave — and, the neo-Romans insisted, unfree — because everything he does he does by leave, subject to a will that could descend on him at any moment. His safety is a fact about his master's mood, not about his own status. Pettit turns this observation into an analytical theory. Freedom, he argues, is non-domination : the absence not of interference but of arbitrary power — of any agent with the capacity to interfere in my choices at their own discretion, unchecked by my interests or my ability to contest them. Two consequences separate this from Berlin's negative liberty, and both are load-bearing for everything that follows. There can be domination without interference. The slave of the kindly master, the employee whose boss could dismiss her on a whim but happens not to, the tenant at the landlord's pleasure — all are dominated, and so unfree, even while nothing is actually done to them. What they lose is not options but standing: they must anticipate, appease, and self-censor. Pettit later summarised the ideal in what he calls the eyeball test — citizens are free when they can look one another in the eye without reason for fear or deference. There can be interference without domination. A law that constrains me does not dominate me if the power behind it is non-arbitrary — forced to track the common interests of those it binds, made under known procedures, applied equally, and open to contestation through courts, elections and free criticism. Such law interferes, but as a fair rule of the game rather than as a master's whim. This is why the republican tradition could regard the rule of law as constitutive of freedom rather than as its price. The criterion for evaluating institutions therefore shifts. The negative-liberty question is: how much does this arrangement interfere? The republican question is: does this arrangement leave anyone subject to the uncontrolled will of another? The two questions can give opposite answers about the same policy, which is exactly the point at which the Japanese material becomes instructive. The career of the word: how jiyū acquired its republican shading The claim that jiyū harbours a yearning for security against arbitrary power is a historical claim, and it needs historical grounds. The characters 自由 — literally "following from oneself" — existed in classical Chinese and Japanese long before contact with European liberalism, and in Tokugawa-era usage the word often carried a pejorative note: acting jiyū meant acting wilfully, selfishly, as one pleased. When Meiji-era translators confronted the English words "liberty" and "freedom", this connotation was precisely their difficulty. Fukuzawa Yukichi, the era's great importer of Western concepts, discussed the problem in his Conditions in the West (Seiyō jijō, 1866–70), warning readers that the Western idea was not to be confused with selfish licence; Nakamura Masanao's 1872 translation of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty , under the title Jiyū no ri , fixed 自由 as the standard rendering. Douglas Howland's study Translating the West (2002) documents how contested this settlement was: the word had to be argued into respectability, and the argument was conducted in terms of lawful, civilised liberty as oppo