ABSTRACT
This essay explores the difference between liberty and freedom. On the one hand, liberty is exercised through the will and expressed in terms of “agency,” “people’s will,” and “individual rights.” On the other hand, freedom involves a power exercised through a suspension or surrender of the will, and it is articulated especially intensely in relations of friendship and neighbourliness as well as the vulnerability they involve. Although freedom provides a vocabulary for questioning, thinking critically about, and even setting aside liberty, yet liberty remains the dominant way in which we conceive of free polities and societies. It is precisely this “repressed” distinction that the essay is after, based on an imaginative excursus through the thought and practice of M. K. Gandhi, who engaged the relation and distinction between liberty and freedom – or, in his terms, between political swaraj and true swaraj – with an extraordinary intensity. Registering the salience of freedom for the Subaltern Studies collective, the chapter also seeks to take the arguments initiated by Dipesh Chakarabarty’s Provincializing Europe in a distinct direction. The essay covers immense ground in a short space. It attends to Gandhi’s ambivalent relationship with liberalism, the absence of the “will” in – and other critical attributes of – Gandhi’s delineation of swaraj, and the radical newness of satyagraha as envisioned and articulated by Gandhi. At the same time, the essay raises the key question of the ever-existing potential of violence even in a politics of non-violence – immensely ethical stakes that Gandhi’s visions themselves could not escape and ones that fly around as cruel shards in our violent worlds today.
