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Book Review: Bob Jessop, The State: Past, Present, Future

Foucauldian thought, Hamilton defines freedom as the ‘combination of my ability to determine what I will do and my power to do it’ (p. 10). Freedom thus depends on power, and Hamilton argues that being free requires the power to control economic and social institutions through the political system, the freedom to choose and influence political representatives, the institutional and ideological opportunity for groups to agitate against common social obstacles, and the social space for individuals to resist social convention. Even then, for the individual, freedom may still include a further subjective meaning beyond these conditions for a free society. While clearly republican in affirming the centrality of politics to freedom, Hamilton eschews notions of ‘the people’ or the ‘common good’, following Machiavelli in characterising politics as being about conflict between social groups. He also places representation and the competition of ideas at the centre of this agonistic politics, as opposed to both the traditional republican emphasis on direct participation and more recent accounts of deliberation. Although Freedom is Power traces four domains of freedom, it is really the idea of freedom through political representation that Hamilton implies is most absent in today’s polities. Thus he proposes a range of institutional reforms to give light to this larger theoretical insight, including new representative institutions at the local level, a national legislature for non-elite representatives of the poor, and a constitutional review every 10 years. Powerfully illustrated with examples from the recent global financial crash, Freedom is Power marries a traditional problem of political thought – freedom – with realistic assumptions about power in contemporary societies. Hamilton’s conception of agonistic group politics resonates in a world increasingly heterogeneous, unequal and frequently oppressive; a world in which the scale and interdependence of social ties makes the representation of groups inevitable, and where the clash of cultures and growing post-colonial consciousness requires new political imaginaries. While some might disagree with Hamilton’s analysis of the varieties and significance of forms of contemporary power, in particular the absence of the post-national and global, by linking theoretically the problem of freedom to the question of power, Hamilton returns freedom from moral philosophy to critical social and political inquiry.