The Multifaceted Value of Freedom in Sociopolitical Contexts

Freedom is one of those words everyone uses but few define the same way. Is it the absence of rules? The right to do whatever you want? Or something far deeper – the ability to truly govern yourself, develop your potential, and participate meaningfully in society? Two of sociology’s founding thinkers, Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim, rejected the shallow, transactional view of freedom promoted by utilitarians, and each built a richer, more demanding account of what genuine freedom requires. Their perspectives remain essential for understanding why political rights alone are never enough.

Why the utilitarian view of freedom falls short 🔗

The utilitarian tradition, most associated with Jeremy Bentham and Herbert Spencer, defined freedom in negative terms: freedom is simply the absence of external compulsion or restraint. You are free as long as no one is physically stopping you. This idea shaped early liberal thought and remains deeply embedded in everyday political language. But both Marx and Durkheim found this definition inadequate – even misleading.

For utilitarians, a worker who technically “chooses” to accept a 14-hour workday in exchange for wages is free because no law prevents them from walking away. Marx and Durkheim both saw this as a fiction. Real freedom cannot be reduced to a formal lack of constraint when the underlying social and economic conditions make genuine choice impossible. Durkheim explicitly opposed social contract theorists and utilitarians like Spencer, who argued that society is simply the product of self-interested individuals calculating their personal advantage. For Durkheim, this view missed the social foundations that make any kind of meaningful freedom possible in the first place. Both Marx and Durkheim argued that utilitarian principles undermine social solidarity and unfetter egoism, which ultimately destroys the conditions for a flourishing human life.

Marx: freedom as autonomy and self-realization 🔗

Marx’s theory of freedom is built on a critique of alienation – the process by which capitalist production strips workers of their ability to exercise meaningful control over their labor, their lives, and their own development. For Marx, there is an internal connection between self-realization and self-determination, meaning that genuine freedom is not just the absence of obstacles but the active exercise of distinctly human capacities.

Alienation as the obstacle to freedom 🔗

Under capitalism, workers produce goods they do not own, perform tasks they did not design, and have no say in how their collective labor is organized. Marx described alienated labor as activity that does not allow for the exercise and development of essential human capacities, making it fundamentally unfree regardless of whether a formal contract exists. The act of laboring, which should be the fullest expression of human creativity and agency, becomes something done under compulsion rather than out of genuine will. Marx was clear that self-realization undertaken under coercion cannot be called free – the unalienated labor of a truly human society must be voluntary in the deepest sense.

Rational autonomy and collective self-governance 🔗

Marx’s conception of freedom is closely tied to rationality. Rational freedom, as developed by Marx, emphasizes communal character over individualistic liberalism. True freedom is not achieved alone. It requires a form of social organization where individuals collectively and consciously govern the conditions of their shared existence, rather than being governed by impersonal market forces that no one controls. For Marx, genuine freedom involves expressing both an individual and a communal essence – it is bound up with participation in a certain kind of society, not the isolated self-interest of the liberal individual.

This is why Marx rejected the liberal idea that political rights – the right to vote, the right to own property – constitute real freedom. For Marx, under capitalism, political freedom becomes a means of struggle rather than an end in itself, because the formal political sphere is subordinated to the economic interests of the dominant class. Legal equality without economic autonomy is a hollow promise.

Durkheim: freedom through social regulation, not despite it 🔗

Durkheim approached freedom from a very different angle, but reached a similarly radical conclusion: freedom is not the absence of social rules – it is, in fact, produced by them. This may seem counterintuitive, but it is central to Durkheim’s entire sociological project.

Social solidarity as the foundation of individual autonomy 🔗

Durkheim focused on the problem of reconciling freedom and morality, or individualism and social cohesion in modern society. His key insight was that individual autonomy does not precede society – it emerges from it. As the division of labor in modern societies becomes more complex, increased specialization enhances individual autonomy and freedom while simultaneously increasing social solidarity. People become more distinct, more individuated, and more personally free precisely because they are embedded in an elaborate web of social interdependence.

Durkheim argued that liberty itself is the product of regulation, not its opposite. His reasoning was direct: you can only be free if others are prevented from using their superior power – economic, physical, or otherwise – to dominate you. Rules and social norms are not cages; they are what keep the powerful from crushing the weak. Without them, freedom belongs only to those with the most power.

Moral individualism and the limits of pure self-interest 🔗

Durkheim saw individualism as a kind of civil religion in modern societies – the idea that the human person is sacred had itself become the shared moral value holding differentiated societies together. But this was moral individualism, not egoistic individualism. Durkheim opposed the notion of complete personal autonomy, advocating instead for moral individualism where societal regulation guides individual behavior toward collective ends. A society of purely self-interested actors pursuing maximum personal utility is, for Durkheim, not a society of free people but a society in a state of anomie – normlessness – where individuals are unmoored and ultimately unfree.

Durkheim argued that even when an individual acts in an autonomous way, they are morally bound by the limits of society. This is not a constraint on freedom – it is its condition. A person who has rejected all social bonds in pursuit of total independence has not achieved freedom; they have achieved isolation, and with it, the loss of meaning, purpose, and the collective structures that make self-development possible.

Where Marx and Durkheim agree – and differ 🔗

Despite their differences in method and emphasis, Marx and Durkheim converge on a crucial point: genuine freedom requires specific social conditions, and those conditions do not arise automatically from removing restraints. Both thinkers reject the idea that freedom is simply a natural state that society disrupts. Instead, the right kind of social organization actively produces freedom.

Where they diverge is in their diagnosis of what prevents those conditions from emerging. Marx locates the primary obstacle in class relations and economic exploitation. Alienated labor under capitalism makes genuine autonomy impossible for the majority of people, because the economic structure systematically prevents them from exercising control over their own activity and its products. Freedom, for Marx, ultimately requires the transformation of those production relations.

Durkheim, by contrast, focuses on social integration and moral regulation. The threat to freedom is not primarily economic exploitation but the breakdown of social solidarity – anomie, the weakening of shared norms, and the excessive individualism that leaves people without meaningful social bonds. Durkheim’s argument was that a reformed society could reconcile individual freedom with collective constraint, without requiring the kind of revolutionary transformation Marx demanded. Durkheim was a political liberal who advocated individual freedom and opposed impediments to the free operation of the division of labour, while also supporting social reforms that could restore solidarity.

Rationality, autonomy, and the societal conditions for true freedom 🔗

Both thinkers understood freedom as inseparable from rationality and autonomy. For Marx, rational freedom means consciously and collectively governing the conditions of social life – not being subject to blind economic forces that operate like natural laws beyond human control. Marx envisioned freedom as a transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom – a state where human beings, through conscious collective action, bring the conditions of their existence under rational control.

For Durkheim, rational autonomy is developed through socialization and moral education. Durkheim addressed how individuals could be autonomous within the social order, where regulation and discipline were required to maintain social order in modern differentiated societies. Autonomy, in this view, is not pre-social – it is cultivated through education, institutions, and the internalization of social norms that represent the collective moral wisdom of society. Durkheim presented a sociological insight into the co-evolutionary relationship between individual freedom and social order in modernity, arguing that when individuals genuinely internalize shared moral ideals, freedom and order are not opposites – they reinforce each other.

What both perspectives demand is that we think beyond the minimal, negative definition of freedom as simply “not being stopped.” Real freedom – the kind that allows people to develop their capacities, govern their own lives, and participate meaningfully in collective existence – requires economic conditions that prevent domination, social institutions that foster solidarity, moral frameworks that guide behavior without crushing individuality, and rational structures that people can consciously understand and shape. These are not constraints on freedom. They are its prerequisites.

What do you think? Can genuine freedom exist in a society where economic inequality gives some people far more power to shape the conditions of others’ lives – or does that kind of power imbalance make real autonomy impossible for the less powerful? And do you think social norms and shared moral frameworks enable individual freedom, or do they inevitably impose a kind of conformity that limits it?

References

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