I would have liked to have seen freedom discussed on a more philosophical level rather than the nakedly political. It felt as if the discussion was hijacked by a somewhat tedious and relatively straightforward discussion about the merits of the market and the state in providing services. Isn’t this old news? I thought this was what the latter half of the 20th century was about.

The more important issues seem to be the longer term challenges that face us. They may not define the whole 21st century, but they will be significant over perhaps the next fifty years. Our notions of freedom should be discussed in terms of the key challenges ahead: threats such as terrorism and nuclear proliferation as well as environmental and technological change, particularly the rise of the internet. What impact will changing technology have on the way individuals relate to each other and their interactions with corporate and governmental bodies? These are critical questions for our future which have been insufficiently considered and not fully addressed.

For example, the internet has created numerous organic and novel ways in which people have been able to relate. It has spawned self-sustaining, de-centralised communities which variously share knowledge, extend cross-cultural dialogue and allow people to pursue their interests to an almost limitless extent. This, of course, can also be used to sinister ends, but the implications for individual freedom are plain.

At the same time, the way we use the internet has the ability to centre great power in the hands of few people. The hegemony of Google is, in this respect, quite an interesting development. There are thousands of ways of searching the internet but we seem to have all decided that Google is the only method to do so. I would say that 70% of my current interaction with and knowledge of the outside world is filtered through the lens of this one organisation. It is merely an example, but a good one I think in highlighting how quickly something so diverse has converged to an arguably unhealthy extent.

These questions lead into bigger questions about the viability of the nation-state as the basic unit of political organisation. In a global, de-centred information society is the nation-state ‘fit for purpose’? What alternatives are there?

The list goes on and the questions/challenges ahead are fascinating and difficult ones. We need to be more forward-looking and recognise that the world has changed and is changing more rapidly than ever. It will require rigorous and creative intellectual debate to ensure we have the tools to combat the consequences of such change.

Whilst I agree that philosophy offers a crucial addition to the discussion of freedom using this to overwrite the 'nakedly political'is to assume that the world has fundamentally changed, that 'old' political debates have been resovled and/or are no longer relevant. Since the latter half of the 20th century the terrain of debate has been and continues to be set in terms of liberalism, be it free market liberalism (capitalism and technological innovation are inextricable) or liberal democracy (democratization initiatives remain biased to the Western model). The long historical roots of these means that change occurs only in the sense that the ideologies and their consequences have a global impact, hence my favouring a return to their political and philosophical roots. The challenges facing 21st century society bear similarities to the challenges facing theorists since the enlightment, in this sense the continued existence of debate about the market and the state reflects the continued importance of the relationship between the two, have the 'old' political problems surrounding these been overcome enough to move forward??

To use your example of the internet.. the changing interaction this brings is founded on the divison of economic resources, hence the hegemony you mention. How these resources are distributed and the role of the state in this distribution remains a fundamental question (hence Google's compliance with China), this question is ultimately as old as the problems that we face in the 21st century. Individual freedom is not only limited by the hegemony of knowledge controllers, such as Google, but also by ability to access which remains nationally based and determined by the amount of resources distributed by the market/state, the new element is that this distribution is now globally unequal, perpetuating 'old' problems.

The eagerness to move beyond the market and state as bearers of responsibilty for 'new' problems is largely consequent of the perception that individual freedom has changed. However we remain largely wedded to the nation-state for interaction, community etc, our freedom remains determined by jurisprudence,free market thinking and an international system that is still governed in the Hobbesian sense.

Epochs of rapid change breed an outpouring discussion about how to face 'new' problems, in doing this we move forward to quick and fail to remedy the structural roots of the problems.To envisage a world with new problems and new challenges to freedom we have to first recreate the 'old' world and the 'nakedly political' running of it.

Hi tas33, hi georgiegirl,
I agree with both of you. It is probably true that the fundamental questions surrounding freedom have an old and distinguished heritage, perhaps any apparent sheen of novelty is a result more of long and contented disinterest on our part rather than genuine innovation on the part of internet pioneers or terrorists.
Nevertheless, the "ignition" was a false start. The contributions of Lawson, Vaizey and Brown were clearly lunch-hour throwaways, predictable and depressing, that didn't bother to scratch the surface of any of the important debates surrounding freedom. The poor decision to allow Lawson to open the proceedings can perhaps bear some of the blame. Clearly unwilling to explore some of the more pressing issues surrounding freedom (of speech, of national determination, of religion, from torture etc.etc.etc) that have been raised by his party's government, he instead shepherded the debate onto the relatively safe ground of the state/market/individual/community matrix. Yawn. We have been here before, and usually with far more eloquent, concise and rigorous thinkers. The failure of Vaizey to step outside the parameters established by Lawson was frustrating, and although Brown raised some genuinely interesting points with regard to the apparatus of government, his conclusion was a fitting end to a near-debate that struggled to come to life through to much woolly thinking. Nobody is going to disagree with such bland homilies as "[seeking] to let a thousand flowers bloom, [wanting] people to achieve, to prosper, expand their horizons, to become more reflective, to choose, to be themselves and to dream."
Too much of what preceded in this debate was a dry, talmudic discussion of competing definitions: social liberalism or liberal socialism etc. Overall one got the impression that the protagonists were all too comfortable slipping back into the partisan suits of armour that they, and their parties, had been wearing since Neil Kinnock was elected labour party leader. Yet the inability of this well-trodden battleground to encompass all but a small portion of the challenges facing any state was plain to see.
I make no pretence at innovation in proposing a number of more fertile areas for discussion, areas where party positions are not so entrenched and where we might run the risk of sitting MP's saying something genuinely interesting. To enshrine freedom of expression and speech without debating its outlying ramifications in today's world is to foreclose an important debate. All too often a quote misattributed to Voltaire ("I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it") is trotted out as justification for words and pictures that have proven to be fatally inflammatory. Elsewhere we are so keenly aware of the causal relationship between provocative expression and potential fatalities that we arrest a pacifist senior citizen under a counter-terrorism act. I am proposing no simple solutions, but it seems to me that when Mill proposed freedom of speech as a precondition of the necessary desecration of holy cows that pushes society forward, he would never have considered freedom of speech as itself being exempt from competition in the "marketplace of ideas".It is vital that politicians take the bull by the horns and deal with the subject lest we remain vulnerable to accusations of double standards.
Another tactic would be to take a leaf from the book of a young, innovative historian of the Russian revolution. In his article "Carnivals of Freedomology" (forthcoming) he analyses the instrumentalisation of the very concept of "freedom" by political agents. We are all familiar with the freedom to/freedom from dichotomy, yet the offhand way in which restrictions on our "freedom to" (privacy, assembly etc) are instantly justified by an avowed increase in our "freedom from" (terror, identity theft, welfare fraud) should make us all question how the rhetoric of liberty is being employed. Generations of pollsters have learnt that freedom is a buzzword that, tacked onto any given initiative, makes it more appealing in the eyes of voters. At root, however, politics is largely, necessarily, the business of determining limits on freedoms of various stripe, and we should be suspicious of those in the business that debase the very concept by proclaiming it as their goal.