Rousseau, in his Social Contract, says that “man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains,” and I think he was a bit lenient as I believe even when a man is born he is in chains: chain of relationships – he is someone’s son and may be someone else’s brother; chain of religion – he is born in a family with a particular set of beliefs that influence him; chain of interdependency – he is born with an umbilical cord attached to him and has to take his food from his parents and needs his mother to change his nappy; chain of society – he is part of a society with certain political, social and economic systems. Thus, it would be appropriate to say that man is neither born free nor he lives so.
What within an individual is freedom? What action in him has led people to believing that an individual is free? Is there any such action? There isn’t! Yes, some may say that man is gifted with the power to think that may enable him to make his choices. This capability of making choices is termed as freedom by them. But does it really make an individual free. No! Terming something as something else does not change its nature. If a pen is called a gun, it does not become so. A pen is a pen and a gun is a gun! In the similar fashion freedom is freedom, anything else is not freedom. If a man has the capability to choose, it is always limited; defined and determined by his context. Let’s suppose a person goes to a shop to buy himself a perfume, can he choose any perfume he wants? Never! His choices are limited in so many ways. The most important one is the money in his pocket. Let’s say he has 5000 rupees that he has reserved to buy perfume, so he can only choose any of the perfumes rated exactly the same amount or below it. He is not free in the true sense of the word.
The ones who beat the trumpet of individual freedom are actually dodged by the cunning ideologies that have been presented by some of the well-know political philosophers in Europe. The Renaissance in Europe brought with itself the rise of individualism and with the rise of individualism, the concept of freedom started flourishing speedily. There were political philosophers who even reached to the extent of calling freedom the ultimate aim of human life and suggested that states must guarantee the individual freedom to every possible extent. But absolute freedom could never be maintained and the concept of liberty started finding strong position in the political systems and enjoys the same in current systems of most of the countries of the world. In the process many philosophers did their best to come up with some sort of definition and explanation; Laski said, "I mean by liberty the absence of restraint upon the existence of those social conditions which in modern civilization are the necessary guarantee of individual's happiness." Liberty – absence of restraint! Can anyone imagine an individual with no restraint! It is not possible, even in the space; as even in the space there is a restraint of wearing space costume! Thus living in a society and being termed as social animal, it is not possible to experience no restrain.
Let’s listen to some of other propagators of individual freedom in addition to what has already been mentioned. McKechnie, may be realizing the awkwardness of Laski’s views said, "Freedom is not the absence of all restraints, but rather the substitution of rational ones for irrational." Freedom has been linked with Rationality, which means there is a dependency on rationalism, and what does it suggest? It suggests that freedom is bound to be rational and when something is bound it is not free, thus McKechnie’s concept of individual freedom becomes as pathetic as that of Laski’s and even worse.
There have been many other efforts as well to prove that individual freedom is some existing phenomenon and human beings must waste their time in understanding it. The philosophers like J.S. Mill and Bentham served their whole lives in propagating the concepts of individualism and “laissez faire”; however, the thorough study of these thinkers, if we ever make such study instead of just quoting them to prove ourselves right, will clearly depict that their discussions focused on the relations of an individual with the society and in order to guarantee that the individuals get their due rights within the states it was necessary to consider every individual as ‘free’ but it never suggested that an individual is free in the true sense of the word freedom as they knew it was not possible.
In fact, only positive interpretation of the word freedom and too much propaganda about it has made it very attractive and this attraction has made us imagine that we have it and this scenario is really very pitiful. First there is no absolute freedom, second it is just our imagination that we have something that is not there! It’s like looking for a black cat in a dark room that is not there!
The only freedom, which is a reality and which is the basic human right, is the freedom of human beings within a political system. This type of freedom insists on making human beings capable of having a harmonious collective life and at the same time pursue their ideologies and their objectives as per their own individually. Though they are not free to pursue whatever they want and whatever they do, they can to a certain extent feel free and independent and realize their dreams and understand their individuality.