The Right (have been known to) claim ‘there’s no such thing as society’. They rail against ‘political correctness gone mad’, ‘big’ government, standing up for individual freedom against ‘the nanny state’. The Left, on the other hand, assert that there is such a thing as society and that social relations, defined in terms of various group characteristics, such as class, race, sex, gender, sexuality, ability, underpin social injustices – injustices which should be addressed by social/governmental interventions into the status quo. This debate is framed by the Right as one of individual freedom versus (unfair, illegitimate) state control of individual choices, which is seen as a moral justification for ‘small government’, for allowing the (presumed benign or at least neutral) ‘invisible hand’ of the free market to play out. The assumption is that the outcome of many individual free choices will be fair and justified by the transactions and arrangements freely arrived at, without imposition of social constraints. People are encouraged to see state regulation, taxation etc. as unwarranted interference in their free (and blameless) lives, for the sake of some ideology of equality. In some cases, this argument is used to justify rejection of the most minimal interferences (e.g. wearing masks in a pandemic), because any state intervention is framed as absolutely unjustifiable – individual freedom trumps public health (including the health of the individual in question).

The progressive Left are accused of having an image of a utopian future for which they are willing to sacrifice present freedoms. When they emphasise the defence of oppressed groups against discrimination, when they focus on ‘identity politics’, they seem to make group categorisations matter more than individual liberties. Their proposals of ways to mitigate inequality and social injustices based on group identity are framed by their opponents as unfair to the individuals whose actions will be restricted or whose taxes will be levied and used to pay for such interventions. And again, this framing is made absolute, and used to demonise proposed government interventions intended to benefit everyone, like environmental protections, or universal healthcare.

However, the Right’s idea of free individuals interacting in a free market is itself a romantic myth, utopian to the extent that it imagines we all find ourselves equally free to make our choices in the first place. It assumes (pretends) that the only restrictions on individuals that matter are those imposed by ‘the state’, and that without them we are all free. But this is to ignore the ways in which ‘the market’ and other social forces can benefit some more than others, so that inequalities arise which restrict the available choices of some individuals and groups. Once such inequalities of power and privilege are established, the actions of the ‘invisible hand’ will be unlikely to lead to fairness or freedom for the individuals or groups on the unlucky side of the tracks. Inequalities in social or economic capital are just as restrictive of individual freedom as are state regulations, if not more so.

The libertarian image of the free individual in a free market is one of a self-sufficient individual, who can walk away from any deal if they don’t like it, the economist’s fantasy of the perfectly informed, perfectly rational agent, playing on a level playing field, paddling their own canoe. This image leaves out the mutual dependencies we all share, however privileged we are. And it omits the effects of luck and of ignorance on our choices and their unintended outcomes. Most of us cannot make our own canoes and certainly will not have planted the trees from which we carve them.

The idea that the outcomes of free actions in a free market will be justified and fair, whatever those outcomes are, suggests that those who end up worse off have only themselves to blame – they didn’t play the game as well as the winners. But the real conditions of society and the world are not a level playing field. Rather, they form a fluctuating and uneven network of forces and ties, in which we are all embedded. ‘Winners’ are rarely if ever purely ‘self-made’, nor are ‘losers’.

(It is no coincidence that the Right tend to be opposed to environmental legislation as well as other types of regulation – the self-sufficient individuals they imagine are like pioneers, staking a claim in the wilderness and exploiting it to their own ends, assuming that this imposes no restrictions on the freedom of others. The unregulated freedom they demand presumes an infinitely available resource, an endless ‘West’ into which we can expand (or the possibility of unlimited growth, as required by much economic theory).)

Against the Right’s image of this disconnected, self-made individual, taking whatever they can get from nature regardless of the consequences, perhaps there is a more realistic vision of freedom as that of individuals in societies, which means societies with structures of mutual support, cooperation and compromise, acknowledging our dependence on each other and on the ecosystems we are part of. (One small aspect of this might be the rejection of political institutions based on adversarial, winner-takes-all electoral systems, which undermine the possibility of nuanced compromise or recognition of the legitimacy of difference, and encourage a politics based on totalising illusions like ‘the will of the people’, ‘the national interest’, ‘the public’.)