Introduction

      Readers picking up a book entitled Obedience is Freedom, with chapters entitled ‘Allegiance’, ‘Loyalty’ or ‘Obligation’ and so on, may be expecting an academic treatise. Perhaps they will expect this introduction to start by listing some examples of how obedience is today considered irredeemably toxic. Then, a discussion of freedom, suggesting today’s preference for interpreting this as individual self-fulfilment often leaves people frustrated, isolated and at times even enslaved. The ground would then be prepared to state the thesis of this book: a rediscovery of obedience (and subcategories like allegiance, loyalty and obligation) promises a more enduring and genuine freedom than that offered by today’s self-fulfilment paradigm. Indeed, many great thinkers have long since argued that an avoidance of restraint serves only to intensify the degree to which we are restrained, and that genuine and enduring freedom is to be found through obediently entering into the ways personal choice is ever limited by the networks of responsibility in which we live.

Having outlined the basic position in the Introduction, such readers might expect the chapters to outline, in prosaic terms, exactly how the themes under discussion contribute to that more authentic freedom lacking in today’s world. These would then begin with comments on the etymology of the chapter heading. These terms often combine elements of restraint or obedience with expressions of spontaneity or freedom. The word obligation, for example, derives from the past-participle stem of the verb obligare, meaning ‘to bind’, and yet also from the noun obligatio, which is connected with expressing gratitude; hence the old English phrase ‘much obliged’. From findings such as these, some discussion of ancient texts would be expected, particularly those of Greek and Roman philosophy. Then a critical discussion with more contemporary voices could follow, working towards the overarching conclusion that obedience is not only connected with freedom in ways we seem to have forgotten, but that these two are so mutually dependent they are indistinct: hence, obedience is freedom.

      A reader expecting a book of this nature, however, will not find it in this volume. This is not a systematic or polemical text that seeks only to argue in explicit and straightforward terms. Rather, the book includes concrete histories describing specific events from the last three or four decades. It also engages not only with writers on obedience and freedom, but with literary interlocuters like Charles Dickens and Karl Ove Knausgaard, neither of whom would usually be expected to be found in a book of this nature. While there is philosophical discussion, there are biographical reminiscences too and much material that is taken from my own life, particularly in drawing on cultural phenomena that others of a similar age and background might recognize.

      Discerning readers who want to understand the sources for the notion of freedom that underpins this book are recommended to read some St Augustine and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (which is not to say I pretend either thinker would endorse this book). Those wanting to understand more recent discussions would be advised to read Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and maybe The Cunning of Freedom by Ryszard Legutko. Readers of this book need to know why Obedience is Freedom has been written in an offbeat way.

      This stems firstly from the intellectual fecundity of more offbeat realms of discourse in the UK and USA, particularly, since around 2016. As a young academic, I took great interest in witnessing freer, more engaging and often more genuinely insightful work emerge in obscure online publications than in peer-reviewed journals and the volumes of academic publishing houses. Rather than argue the now well-worn trope of ‘this thing you think is left-wing is actually conservative’ and vice versa, it seemed more effective to enter into such things with elements of narrative. Concrete stories and their atmospheres disclose things that contemporary presuppositions struggle to relate. A great many conceptual binaries beside obedience/freedom have been broken in recent years, but these binaries can be glimpsed in a restored state by observing how they interrelate in recent history.

If there is a method on display here, it is synaesthetic – an attempt to bring together things we cannot imagine being the same, like seeing smells or hearing the sensation of touch. These types of interrelations are often only lightly buried in the recent history of Western cultures, just under the surface, where obedience and freedom can still be seen as two sides to the same coin, each requiring the other.

      Secondly, while it has become increasingly apparent that much interesting writing is happening ‘outside’ the authorized platforms and credential system, the content of this writing is often similarly ‘outside’ dominant ideological paradigms. These paradigms are most commonly associated with identity politics, although its roots go back much further, as I argue later on. A discourse that takes place ‘outside’ the dominant worldview reminded me of a time when alternative manners of living were being explored by those