The war of emancipation is not over

Public power portends incompleteness of individual freedom, but its retreat or disappearance augurs the practical impotence of legally victorious freedom. The history of modern emancipation veered from a confrontation with the first danger to facing the second. To deploy Isaiah Berlin's terms, one can say that, once the 'negative freedom' had been struggled for and won, the levers needed to transform it into 'positive freedom' – that is the freedom to set the range of choices and the agenda of choice-making – has broken and fallen apart. Public power has lost much of its awesome and resented oppressive potency – but it has also lost a good part of its enabling capacity. The war of emancipation is not over. But to progress any further, it must now resuscitate what for most of its history it did its best to destroy and push out of its way. Any true liberation calls today for more, not less, of the 'public sphere' and 'public power'. It is now the public sphere which badly needs defence against the invading private – though, paradoxically, in order to enhance, not cut down, individual liberty.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 51