The Freedom-Stability Tension: An Overview
While is it commonly agreed that individual freedom and social stability are in tension and that too much of either comes at the expense of the other, general conversations seldom discuss what the tension itself really entails, or why striking a balance is indeed necessary. Hence, this piece gives an overview of how the freedom-stability tension has been conceptualized in the Western tradition before outlining what freedom-stability imbalances might actually look like – reinforcing the general intuition that a middle ground must be found.
Historical Perspectives on the Freedom-Stability Tension
From the earliest political thought, philosophers have recognized and sought to address a fundamental tension between individual freedom and social stability. Four historical perspectives have had a particular imprint on the discourse.
The tension was first conceptualized by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651). In his work, Hobbes takes a strong stand in favor of stability which he sees as paramount, arguing that the chaos of the natural state of freedom leads to misery and anarchy. In his view, people must collectively yield much of their freedom to a common authority (even if oppressive) in return for peace, stability and security.
A century later, in an attempt to reconcile the two seemingly antagonistic notions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced the concept of the general will whereby individuals willingly surrender some of their freedom to a collective authority they participate in shaping. In Rousseau’s framework, this marks a transition from a natural to a civil state of freedom enjoyed under a just, structured social order. This, in turn, yields security and an equal sphere of liberty to all, protected by the rule of law. By entering into a social contract, Rousseau argues that freedom and stability can be reconciled without net loss of freedom as one trades the instability of license for the stability of mutual guarantees. His social contract enables individuals to collectively constitute the authority that secures everyone’s freedom. However, he assumes an ideal citizenry (morally strong and cohesive) that willingly and continually aligns personal interest with collective will – something that rarely materializes in full. Further, as he claims that the individual might have to be “forced to be free,” his social contract opens the door to paternalism or even coercion in the name of freedom. Hence, Rousseau offers a resolution in principle, not necessarily final in practice. It demands conditions (ideal citizenry, continuous and willing alignment) that are hard to actualize, let alone sustain over time, without resorting to conformity or suppression. Although imperfect, it was nevertheless a constructive and ambitious attempt to address the freedom-stability tension.
Next comes John Stuart Mill who, in On Liberty (1859), articulated the harm principle – one’s liberty stops where it begins to harm others. This reflects the clearest and most influential attempt to draw the boundary between personal freedom and social order. Mill therefore champions a maximum sphere of individual freedom constrained only by the minimal rules necessary to prevent chaos or harm. He believed in individual autonomy as the engine of progress and sought to curb it only to guard against violence and anarchy. While acknowledging that a society must be stable enough to protect citizens’ basic rights, he resolutely argued that the collective authority must err on the side of liberty in all matters that do not truly endanger others or the public peace. Hence, while Mill recognized Rousseau’s transformative voice and his contribution to the idea of popular sovereignty (fundamental to Mill’s thought), he feared that the general will would subordinate the individual to the collective, risking moral conformity, social and political coercion, and suppression of dissent. He held that Rousseau’s emphasis on collective moral would threaten the very individuality that he himself believed was essential for liberty, development, and social vitality.
Mill’s approach remains widely influential in the West, yet it does not account for the indirect societal consequences of private actions, as though the individual somewhat developed in isolation from the social and environmental contexts they interact with. In fact, it proves increasingly inadequate in today’s complex, interdependent societies where the notion of harm is diffuse (misinformation, ecological impact, algorithmic influence…), where individual actions scale up to collective problems, and where environmental degradation is eroding the very basis for social stability.
Finally, in Four Essays on Liberty (1969), Asaiah Berlin contended that human values are plural and often conflicting, and that not all can be maximized at once: actualizing one may require sacrificing another. Hence, conflicting values such as individual freedom vs. collective stability must be continuously balanced and negotiated. He warned that the utopian attempt to perfectly harmonize them in the name of a higher stable order or a collective ideal risks slipping into oppression under the guise of liberation for the people’s sake while framing dissent as lost consciousness – a rationale used by totalitarian regimes to equate stability with the people’s supposed true freedom. It naturally follows that he was skeptic of any solution that claims a neat resolution. Although it was meant to embody the collective good, Berlin considered Rousseau’s general will – emphasizing collective self-mastery rather than sheer individual liberty – deeply double-edged. He claimed that the general will could all too easily morph into a totalizing force hijacked by darker powers.
Berlin was also skeptical of any single rule, however elegant, that claimed to capture the trade-offs between freedom and other values like order, dignity, or social cohesion. Consequently, he was ambivalent regarding the harm principle: he saw it as aspirational but incomplete. While noble and necessary in Berlin’s view, the principle was too abstract to function as a universal guide. Indeed, what counts as harm is often culturally, morally, and politically contested – particularly in plural societies or when the freedom paradigm itself informs how harm is perceived or judged.
Hence, Berlin offered the most conceptually rich and cautionary account yet didn’t try to resolve the tension. Rather, he insisted that the conflict between freedom and social order is permanent, demanding perpetual negotiation. While insightful in his analysis, he offered no actionable framework to navigate the tension itself.
Taken together, Hobbes, Rousseau, Mill, and Berlin offer a conceptual map of the freedom-stability tension: its nature and inevitability. Some attempts at resolution – as well as warning against doing so – have also been put forward: while Hobbes strongly favors stability, Mill champions individual autonomy which he sought to maximize. Rousseau proposed the most constructive, although imperfect, reconciliation as he thought to align individual freedom with collective stability. Berlin, for its part, stressed continuous negotiation rather than resolution, believing the latter contained too many dangers for individual freedom.
Freedom-Stability Imbalances: What Too Much of Either Looks Like
The Western canonical thinkers above sought to bring balance to what seemed to be an inherent antagonism. We now explore why achieving such a balance is crucial by succinctly outlining what significant freedom-stability imbalances might indeed look like.
Unrestrained Freedom Breeds Instability
When the scales are heavily tipped towards freedom, society might experience economical, social, political, or ecological instability. The following dynamics can then be observed:
Economically, unrestrained economic freedom has historically led to instability in the form of boom-and-bust cycles and social upheavals. The late 19th-century era of laissez-faire capitalism, lacking a critical regulatory framework, saw rapid growth but also wild financial panics, gross inequalities, and labor revolts. More recently, the 2008 global financial crisis revealed how decades of deregulation and free-wheeling financial innovation (justified in the name of market freedom) created systemic vulnerabilities that brought about a catastrophic market collapse – requiring massive state intervention to restore stability.
Politically, a climate of unregulated freedom without stable norms can foster – or at least allow for the development of – polarizing or spurious speech; a conflicting relationship with reality and scientific data to advance personal or corporate agendas; instrumentalization of state apparatuses; and factionalism where competing, self-seeking political interests vie for ascendency. This unravels the social order, undermines the foundations of governance, and erodes social trust. The US offers, of course, a prime example of this, although it is not alone in walking that path. Taken to an extreme, political instability can lead to institutional breakdown.
Socially, unfettered individual freedom can erode social cohesion. If most citizen insists on pure autonomy, society may enter a condition Emile Durkheim called anomie: a state of normlessness, loss of solidarity, and social disintegration that occurs when individuals are insufficiently regulated by common values. Durkheim observed that when people have excessive freedom without moral guidance or social constraints, they often feel rootless, aimless and isolated, and experience higher rates of despair, deviance, and self-destruction. The surge in feelings of social alienation and the fraying of community life in highly individualistic contexts qualify as socio-psychological instability that eventually has collective repercussions such as dysfunctionality, institutional distrust, heightened social tensions or even crime, and an overall weakening of the social fabric.
Ecologically, we can observe the so-called tragedy of the commons: when many self-serving actors have unrestricted access to a common resource, they tend to overuse and ruin that resource in the pursuit of personal interests, causing a long-term collapse that hurts all parties involved. If every corporation or individual exercises maximum freedom to produce and consume, exploiting natural resources and polluting without restraint, the cumulative effect is environmental degradation and eventual crises that destabilize the ecological and social systems that ultimately support life and order. This is the direction humanity is collectively heading.
As one can intuit, there is such thing as too much individual latitude: unbridled freedom for the individual inevitably leads to a stability crisis for the collective. Such instability tends to build up for some time behind the scenes until such threshold where it dramatically unfolds, often outpacing society’s ability to respond and offer timely correction. Populations, exhausted by chaos, may then turn to strongman rulers or regimented regimes, largely sacrificing freedom just to regain stability. Thus, a society championing unchecked freedoms may well be sowing the seeds of its own demise, generating structural instability that ultimately imperils the very freedom it sought to maximize.
Excessive Stability Suppresses Meaningful Freedom
At the opposite end of the spectrum, a society might prioritize order, control, and predictability above all else to the point of dramatically constraining, perhaps even forsaking, individual freedom. Such a pursuit of maximal stability creates an environment of oppressive rigidity where authorities become inclined to monitor, regulate, and standardize every aspect of life. The extreme case is a totalitarian regime: the ruling power engineers conformity and uniformity in the quest for total control so as to eradicate unpredictability. People, reduced to cogs in a machine, are left with little to no autonomy or agency. The result is a society that has achieved lasting order but where human vitality, spontaneity, and creativity have become casualties – suppressed and enfeebled. Largely forgoing the creative power of the human spirit, such a tightly controlled system grows increasingly limited in its ability to adapt, innovate, correct course, think in new ways, and renew itself. Taken to an extreme, it would be doomed to cultural, societal and technological stagnation, and would become extremely averse to change which it cannot properly handle. In fact, it would arguably become brittle and might shatter when eventually strained, whereas a more flexible system could bend.
Finally, extreme order would bring about a society that is inherently hostile to the human nature and the pursuit of meaning – the primary driver of human life, and the key to individual fulfillment. Hence, public frustration and discontent must be constantly suppressed; should the veneer of perfect harmony and ultimate stability crack, it would reveal underlying tensions, resentment, and desire for change. Consequently, everyone lives in fear – the people afraid of their government, fearing for their lives should they deviate from norms and expectations; and the government afraid of its people and apprehensive about the slightest instability, or even the specter of it. Excessive, terror-enforced stability delivers miserable lives for everyone involved.
Therefore, significant imbalance in the freedom-stability tension – be it skewed toward one end or the other – proves detrimental to human society and, ultimately, to people themselves. The challenge, then, lies in striking a sustainable middle ground between individual aspirations and social order. While heeding Berlin’s recommendation against seeking perfect resolution, Freedom for contends that freedom and stability can indeed be reconciled in constructive ways.