W., Ending Tyranny
John Lewis Gaddis has an article in The American Interest arguing that G.W. Bush may have redefined, or more properly resurrected, America’s global mission for the 21st century. In his second inaugural address, Bush announced, “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” (Actually, footnote 1 of the piece identifies Gaddis himself as the potential source of this political redirection, but I’ll trade a little self-promotion for a good idea.) As Gaddis rightly points out, this phrasing combines both of Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty (positive liberty, which imposes a form of liberty on people, and negative liberty, which opposes authority and allows people to choose their future).
But this isn’t what I really want to point out. What interests me is that this reflects the concept of justice Peter Marcuse offers in Searching for the Just City. For Bush/Gaddis, the American mission is to eliminate tyranny over a nation’s people. (While “tyranny” is not defined, Gaddis does make clear that democracy can foster tyrannical behavior itself and is thus not necessary directly correlated to freedom from tyranny.) For Marcuse, everyone’s mission is to eliminate dominance and subservience.
The crucial difference [with authority] is that power is based on social, political and economic inequality among people, inequality which is socially created and structurally embedded. The holding of power involves a socially created relationship of domination and subservience among individuals and groups. A just action is one not affected by such relationships
Justice, it would seem, is freedom from tyranny.
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