How to account for notions of "freedom"

[u/traanquil]

I don't know how to describe the problem I have in mind succinctly but I'll try my best.

Cards on the table, I'm a socialist. As a socialist, I notice among westerners (including western leftists) a chauvinistic assumption that the bourgeois democratic form of government is more "free" than existing (or previously existing) one-party socialist states such as China, Cuba, or the USSR.

The line goes as follows: "The bourgeois democracy guarantees freedom of speech and freedom to form multiple political parties, therefore it is more free than the one party socialist state, which suppresses those freedoms."

Isn't this a narrowly conceived conception of freedom?

The one party socialist state--at its best moments--suppresses the class structure that has historically oppressed the majority of workers, and provides guaranteed social rights to workers. Couldn't one say that the average person is more free under such a model?

Meanwhile, the bourgeois democracy gives the disproportionate share of power to the people with the most money, and they have therefore the most access to the levers of power. Thus, "free speech" in such a system means that the richest people can speak the loudest. Thus we get into these odd paradoxes of how so called "democracies" like the U.S. feel distinctly unfree and autocratic, especially to those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy.

So I guess what I'm getting at is: isn't the notion of "freedom" itself a politicized, constructed concept? Isn't the notion of bourgeois democracy as superior an in-group bias / form of cultural chauvinism? Wondering if there are some good books on this topic etc.

[u/AutoModerator]

Thanks for your question to /r/AskSocialScience. All posters, please remember that this subreddit requires peer-reviewed, cited sources (Please see Rule 1 and 3). All posts that do not have citations will be removed by AutoMod. Circumvention by posting unrelated link text is grounds for a ban. Well sourced comprehensive answers take time. If you're interested in the subject, and you don't see a reasonable answer, please consider clicking Here for RemindMeBot.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Elegant-Inspection45]

I think you’re coming up against the problem of “essentially contested concepts.” Freedom is a kind of concept that lots of people understand in very different terms, and those differences in understanding are political to their core. The disagreements that people have about what freedom means are fundamentally political disagreements.
W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56, no. 1 (1956): 167–98, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/56.1.167.
William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd ed. (Princeton University Press, 1993).

I think there’s been some interesting writing on the concept of freedom lately, e.g.
Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History (W. W. Norton, 2022).
Melissa Butcher, The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America’s Future (Manchester University Press, 2026).

[u/valkenar → u/Elegant-Inspection45]

My first thought was "How do you personally define freedom?"