What is Freedom for Nations and Persons?

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 8 Jun 2026

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

Where Do We Go from Here?

1 Jun 2026 – Why are democratic freedoms under attack in the US and worldwide?  Why does it appear that democracy is failing or has failed?   What will it take to restore human freedom and dignity?   The United Nations was founded in 1945 on the principle of “the sovereign equality of nations.”  The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was published in 1948 declaring, in effect, “the sovereign equality of all persons.”  Philosopher Paul Tillich asserts that democracy is a way of life that does justice to the dignity of every human being, that is, to their freedom, equality, and indivisible “fraternity” (1990, 135).

Is there not a contradiction between the “sovereign equality of nations” and the “sovereign equality of all persons”? The first fragments humanity; the second unites us. The first denies freedom, while the second makes freedom possible. Below we will see why the first is ultimately a declaration of war while the second represents an authentic declaration for global democracy.

For Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant in the 18^th century, legitimate government that does justice to the dignity of every human being is predicated upon the principles of right, that is on the universal moral principles within which each person has a dignity that must be protected by law. Rousseau called this moral basis for government “the General Will,” which he distinguished from “the will of all.”  The General Will is a priori; it is the moral framework that grounds democracy.  The “will of all” can be anything; the people might vote to abolish democracy and replace it with an authoritarian leader as they did, for example, in Nazi Germany in 1933 or in the USA in 2025.  The Constitution must be designed in such a way as to preserve the General Will and guard against subversion by the will of all.

A number of democratic theorists have argued that the core principle in democracy is the idea of the autonomy of citizens (e.g., Held 1995, Gewirth 1996).  Gewirth argues that legitimate government combines the goods of “freedom” and “well-being” for all its citizens. Freedom maximizes their ability to set life-goals and pursue these with reasonable chances of success. Well-being means that health, education, housing, social security and other goods are provided by the governmental system so that freedom can be empowered in persons in a reliable and predictable manner.

Jürgen Habermas (1979) has demonstrated the intrinsically social character of all human life which is constituted through the medium of language: “the process of individuation through which [the ego] emerges runs through the network of linguistically mediated interactions” (1992, 170). Held argues that there are “seven clusters of [socially mediated] rights” that enable the autonomy of citizens: “health, social, cultural, civic, economic, pacific, and political rights” (1995, 191). Both thinkers argue that vast economic disparity within a society that aspires to be democratic represents an impossible impediment to the promotion of autonomy, equality, and freedom among citizens. Philosopher of democracy, Robert A. Dahl concludes that, “the presumption of Personal Autonomy, joined with the Idea of Intrinsic Equality, helps to provide a sturdy foundation for democratic beliefs” (1989, 88).

According to these thinkers and many others, therefore, the popular propaganda meme that “freedom” means “less government” and fewer regulations is false. All seven clusters of rights require governmental and social authority for their realization and protection. The outdated model of democracy in which government is a regulating force over the people understood as a collection of individuals pursuing their own aims is, therefore, incorrect. Government is not an alien force imposed upon previously existing individuals to keep order. It is an intrinsic part of our common, socially-constructed humanity. Self and other, individual and society, arise together in experience. Selfhood is a socially constructed aspect of the whole.

A democratic polity must be an integrated web of institutions, organizations, movements, groups, ideas and communications composed of individuals within which the vast diversity of persons and ideas are unified through a governmental, social, and civic framework. The “coercive nature of law” cannot therefore be its fundamental quality, if properly understood. Rather (as philosopher of law, HLA Hart, 1961, put it) the law formally constitutes and empowers people in dozens of ways to actualize their autonomy as citizens and integral participants within the web of society. Democratic government is not a limitation on freedom, rightly understood, but engenders an integral dimension of actualized human freedom.

What emerges is a concept of democratic autonomy and equality in which freedom is understood as an inseparable aspect of our social nature as persons-in-society. It is the feeling or awareness of being empowered and validated in relationship to others within a governmental, social, and cultural context that condones, certifies, and enhances that feeling. In short, freedom reflects the quality of one’s relationships. It is not an independence prior to those relationships.

Can this consequence of authentic democratic polity be intentionally cultivated? It has often been pointed out that even Robinson Crusoe on his island survived and flourished because he remained a social being drawing on his education and the other trappings of civilization to flourish within his physical isolation. In 1861, John Stuart Mill declared: “The first question in respect to any political institution is how far they tend to foster in the members of the community the various desirable qualities, moral and intellectual.” The qualities of the persons in a community emerge inseparably from their political institutions that frame their existence.

This is indeed the key question that most democracies have failed to ask. Yet in no society are children given the authority of full participation in civic life because they have not grown to sufficient adult autonomy to be able to participate responsibly. How is such autonomy to be measured?  Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg famously studied the growth process toward autonomy during the 1980s and, like dozens of other thinkers working in the same field of human growth, produced a schemata of human growth that is important to note.

Kohlberg (1984) posited six stages of moral/cognitive growth. From early childhood stages that culminate in a “good boy/girl” conformity that he called “Stage 3,” we grow beyond this to a stage in which we see right action as following social laws and doing our duty (stage 4). Beyond this we move toward an emerging autonomy in which we see ourselves as an individual within a “social contract,” and within which we can critique even the call to “duty” (stage 5).  Nevertheless, true autonomy (the ability to think for oneself under the guidance of universal principles of consistency, coherence, and universality) does not arise until stage 6. At this stage, moral reasoning involves abstract principles of human rights, justice, and equality that can serve as a critique of the surrounding social norms and place the individual in a relation of thoughtful autonomy to those norms.

The implications of such findings are immense for social thought, education, and democratic theory. In the United States (and likely most other nations), the majority of citizens have not grown beyond stage four in which they see thought, morality, and action as requiring “obedience to authority.”  They respond positively to authoritarian leaders and not to invitations to dialogue and debate the great issues confronting society as a whole. It is no accident that one of the first things fascist regimes do upon the assumption of power is target intellectuals—those persons who understand the complexity of issues and who are often willing to challenge blind obedience to authority.

Freedom is a priority for immature people in the sense that they believe it means the capacity and “right” to live from impulses and inclinations as a separate, individual being.  Hence, since government and society are thought of as external to their privatized individuality, the idea of obedience to external governmental authority only indirectly impacts their individuality. Nevertheless, at least since the work of Kant in the 18^th century, many of those who have grown to intellectual autonomy (Kohlberg’s stage 6) understand that freedom is a function of our socially grounded being, and that personal freedom requires a discipline of “self-legislation” inseparable from living as a socially-grounded person. Hence, freedom is connected with the life-trajectories of persons that sublimate impulses and inclinations to self-governance under the sway of guiding purposes and principles. In Freedom’s Right, Alex Honneth declares:

The ability to question social orders and demand proof of their moral legitimacy is the basis for the whole perspective of justice; therefore, individual self-determination, i.e., the power to arrive at one’s own judgments, is not just some contingent human quality, but the essence of our practical-normative activity…. It is no longer clear what it would even mean to demand a just social order without simultaneously calling for individual self-determination. Therefore, the fusion between conceptions of justice and the idea of autonomy represents an achievement of modernity that can only be reversed at the price of cognitive barbarism (2014, 17).

An authentic democratic society is one characterized by the “perspective of justice.”
And the very legitimacy of that society requires citizen growth to Stage 6 autonomy, the capacity to arrive at judgments that critically evaluate the norms and conditions of society from the point of view of further growth, evolution, and self-realization. It is just such autonomous critical activity that the authoritarian personality of Stage 4 repudiates as destructive of “the nation.”

The questioning of a one-dimensional affirmation of existing conditions is perceived by the authoritarian personality as undermining the certainty and legitimacy of the authority that gives their lives the capacity to execute a meaningful duty under direction of these conditions. Military service is perhaps the most obvious paradigm of such ideologized obedience. In the United States military service is considered exemplary public service. To “Make America Great Again” is to restore an unquestioned authority to power that quashes the doubt and uncertainty exacerbated by the mature evolutionary questioning of present circumstances in the name of a higher legitimacy or more comprehensive justice and freedom.

This more insightful concept of freedom as a quality of the whole of society in which the individual personality participates was not readily available in the 18^th century when the great democratic revolutions were taking place and when the US Constitution was written. The 18^th century was also a time when the world appeared vast and hence necessarily divided into independently governed territories. It often took one to two months to cross an ocean from one continent to another. By the early 20^th century, a more insightful understanding of freedom was possible.

The world had shrunk due to increased speeds of transportation and communication. Just as the 18^th century fostered an erroneous individualism with regard to government so it cultivated a fragmented nationalism with regard to this or that world territory. As Boswell and Chase-Dunn express this: “nationalism is legitimated by the same ideological forces that promote individualism as a constitutive element of global culture” (207).

Both are erroneous, since both are products of an outdated view of the human situation. (The nation-state system is called “Westphalian” because it was framed at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, nearly 400 years ago.) By the 20^th century, a more correct view was emerging called the “sovereignty of humankind.” As Zen Buddhist scholar Masao Abe puts it: “sovereignty rests precisely with all mankind in the sense of one self-aware entity which has become profoundly aware of itself as ‘mankind’” (1985, 249). The holism today that is beginning to emerge within human awareness in the 21^st century was intimated in the early 20th century through the work of such thinkers as Jan Smuts in Holism and Evolution (1926) and the political thought of John Dewey during this same period. Smuts sees the evolutionary holism of the Cosmos as bringing “freedom” into the world in ever greater holistic forms.  And both thinkers connect freedom with the mature human “personality” as a central ideal for society (strikingly similar to the idea of intellectual and moral autonomy sketched above).

Dewey declares that “in every individual there lives an infinite and universal possibility; that of being a king and priest.” He declares, “From this central position of personality result the other notes of democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity—words which are not mere words to catch the mob, but symbols of the highest ethical ideal which humanity has yet reached—the idea of personality is the one thing of permanent and abiding worth, and that in every human individual there lies personality” (1993, 62-63).

The three great values of democracy (liberty, equality, and fraternity) live directly intertwined with the ideal of a social personality that transcends egoistic individuality and unites people in social freedom  (themselves wholes within the greater wholes of society, Earth, and the Cosmic order). Freedom arises from the holism of the human personality, human civilization, and Cosmic creative evolution. Just as we encounter an immature individualism within nations in people who fail to recognize the social and evolutionary character of personality and its freedom, so in the world system of sovereign nation-states we encounter the sentiment called “the self-determination of nations.”  Nations want to be respected as “sovereign” because they seek to determine their own destinies.  This idea appears as deluded as it is impossible.

Today some 194 sovereign nation-states operate within a global economic, political, institutional, civilizational, and environmental framework that pervasively impacts decisions made by each government within this matrix of forces. There is no escaping this civilizational matrix and no such thing as self-determination within it. Actions taken by each fragment impact all the others, depending on the size of the nation and the significance of its action. The on-going war of aggression against Iran by Israel and the United States underlines this inescapable principle. The entire world is thrown into shortages of fertilizer, fuel, and other necessities. From these actions, uncontrollable inflation is taking place worldwide, along with possible, global economic depression.

The Westphalian system itself serves to structurally divide these sovereign territories from one another and emphasize their fragmentation. David Held writes: “The competition among states was driven not just by the ambitions of rulers and internal or domestic considerations, but also by the very structure of the international system: individual states, pursuing their own security, had to be prepared for war, a process which itself generated insecurity in other states, which sought to respond in kind” (1995, 54). In a number of writings, Immanuel Kant had already pointed out that the greatest contradiction to human freedom was war, and that the structure of the world system was that of a war-system: “As a matter of fact,” Kant writes, “the establishment of a universal and enduring peace is not just a part, but rather constitutes the whole, of the ultimate purpose of law” (1965, 128).

Freedom of individual nations, within this system, is impossible, because freedom is a social phenomenon arising from the relations between the parts of a whole, just as autonomous personalities emerge from their empowering relationships and the social matrix within which they are being nurtured. As Alan Gewrith (1996) put it simply, legitimate government forms a “community of rights” supplying both well-being and freedom to its population. He makes clear, in this context, that well-being is a necessary component of freedom. Hence, freedom arises from the holistic quality of the entire community.

Exactly the same dynamic applies to the collection of individual sovereign nation-states. The freedom of each is inseparable from the freedom of all, just as it is within a democratic society. Do national communities and cultures possess a potential for evolutionary development comparable to that of individual persons?  Most surely they do.  And yet this development is compromised on every side by relations of wealth and poverty, by economic imperialism, international debt, the competition of nations for markets, war preparations, and the struggle for national well-being, power, and prestige.

If all nations could be embraced within a global economy designed to work for the common good of all, would their freedom be empowered?  If the world transcended the war-system and the two trillion US dollars now spent by nations to pursue an illusive security, would their freedom be enhanced?  Under the present world system, the idea of self-determination of nations remains on the level of Kohlberg’s Stage 4 of moral and intellectual development. The nations are under the illusion that they are independent from the whole.

Nations think of themselves as separate individual entities rather than as nodes within the civilizational matrix of humanity.  They think in authoritarian terms of “who has the power with which I should align my self-interest?” They do not see themselves as an utterly significant and necessary field of activity within the greater field of human civilization.  Hence, it is impossible for them to be free and self-determining. The freedom of self-determination is the freedom to actualize the potential of the part within the embrace of an empowering whole. It is only the united whole of civilization that can bring freedom to the nations.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, as noted above, expressed a somewhat similar insight in the language of the 18^th century. The human political ideal is “to find a form of association the defends and protects the person and goods of each associate with all the common force, and by means of which each one, united with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before” (1974, 23).  Like his contemporary John Locke, he imagines an illusory individual freedom prior to government, but at the same time he realizes the absolute necessity of human association that ideally must preserve and enhance this freedom. He is wrong that there is an individual human freedom prior to our social nature and participation in community with others. He is right that we can find a form of association that brings freedom to each part within the whole precisely because that collective freedom embraces the whole within the moral framework of what he called “the General Will.”

The Constitution for the Federation of Earth provides precisely this General Will for human civilization as a whole. It assures the development of each human personality within the embrace of the whole and also enshrines the integrity of each individual nation within the whole. In Twenty-first Century Democratic Renaissance (2008), philosopher Errol E. Harris traces the development of democratic theory from the ancient Greeks to the present. He concludes that democracy as conceived within this history is not possible today within nation-states. We have moved to global level with global problems and issues that today defeat efforts at democracy within all so-called sovereign nations.

The only route to a world in which the values of a developing personality within the framework of liberty, equality, and fraternity flourish and blossom is the route of democratic world government under the Earth Constitution. Freedom is a civilizational phenomenon. It emerges from the holism of the human personality within the matrix of society, planet, and Cosmos.  The very structure of the cosmos embeds all individual parts within holistic fields that are embraced by ever greater fields up to the Cosmic whole itself. Freedom for both persons and nations, as Jan Smuts declared, is a product of holism. There is no authentic human freedom, for persons or for nations, without ratification of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

Citations:

Abe, Masao (1985). Zen and Western Thought. University of Hawaii Press.

Boswell, Terry and Christopher Chase-Dunn, The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism. Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Dahl, Robert A. (198 ). Democracy and Its Critics. Yale University Press.

Dewey, John (1993), The Political Writings. Hackett Publishers.

Gewirth, Alan (1996). The Community of Rights. University of Chicago Press.

Habermas, Jürgen (1992). Postmetaphysical Thinking. The MIT Press.

Harris, Errol E. (2008). Twenty-first Century Democratic Renaissance. Institute for Economic Democracy Press.

Hart, HLA (1961). The Concept of Law. Oxford University Press.

Held, David (1995), Democracy and the Global Order. Stanford University Press.

Honneth Alex (2014). Freedom’s Right. Columbia University Press.

Kant, Immanuel (1965). The Metaphysical Elements of Justice. Library of the Liberal Arts.

Kohlberg, Lawrence (1984). The Psychology of Moral Development, Volume Two. Harper & Row.

Martin, Glen T., ed. (2016), Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Institute for Economic Democracy Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1974) The Social Contract. New American Library.

Smuts, Jan (1986). Evolution and Holism. The Gestalt Journal Press.

Tillich, Paul (1990). Theology of Peace. Westminster/John Knox Press.

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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 8 Jun 2026.

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