The problem of the relation between “freedom and necessity” was known to Aristotle and endlessly discussed by the mediaeval Schoolmen. Kant uses it as one of his celebrated “antinomies”, where it is presented as an insoluble contradiction. In the 17th and 18th centuries it cropped up in mathematics as the theory of chance, related to gambling.

The dialectical relationship between freedom and necessity has resurfaced in chaos theory. Doyne Farmer, an American physicist investigating complicated dynamics, comments:

On a philosophical level, it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next. At the same time, I’d always felt that the important problems out there in the world had to do with the creation of organisation, in life or intelligence. But how did you study that? What biologists were doing seemed so applied and specific; chemists certainly weren’t doing it; mathematicians weren’t doing it at all, and it was something that physicists just didn’t do. I always felt that the spontaneous emergence of self-organisation ought to be part of physics. Here was one coin with two sides. Here was order, with randomness emerging, and then one step further away was randomness with its own underlying order.[26]

Dialectical determinism has nothing in common with the mechanical approach, still less with fatalism. In the same way that there are laws that govern inorganic and organic matter, so there are laws that govern the evolution of human society. The patterns that can be observed through history are not at all fortuitous. Marx and Engels explained that the transition from one social system to another is determined by the development of the productive forces, in the last analysis. When a given socioeconomic system is no longer able to develop the productive forces, it enters into crisis, preparing the ground for a revolutionary overturn.

This is not at all to deny the role of the individual in history. As we have already said, men and women make their own history. However, it would be foolish to imagine that human beings are “free agents” who can determine their future purely on the basis of their own will. They have to base themselves on conditions which have been created independent of their will – economic, social, political, religious, and cultural. In this sense, the idea of free will is nonsense. The real attitude of Marx and Engels towards the role of the individual in history is shown by the following quotation from The Holy Family:

History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing its aims.[27]

There is no question of men and women being merely blind puppets of fate, powerless to change their own destiny. However, the real men and women living in the real world of which Marx and Engels write, do not and cannot stand above the society in which they live. Hegel once wrote that “interests move the life of the peoples”. Consciously or otherwise, the individual actors on the historical stage ultimately reflect the interests, opinions, prejudices, morality and aspirations of a specific class or group within society. This is really self-evident from even the most superficial reading of history.

Nevertheless, the illusion of “free will” is persistent. The German philosopher Leibniz remarked that a magnetic needle, if it could think, would doubtless imagine that it pointed North because it chose to do so. In the 20th century, Sigmund Freud utterly demolished the prejudice that men and women are in complete control even of their own thoughts. The phenomenon of Freudian slips is a perfect example of the dialectical relationship between accident and necessity. Freud gives numerous examples of mistakes in speech, “forgetfulness”, and other “accidents”, which, in many cases, undoubtedly reveal deeper psychological processes. In the words of Freud:

Certain inadequacies of our psychic capacities…and certain performances which are unintentional prove to be well motivated when subjected to the psycho-analytic investigation, and are determined through the consciousness of unknown motives.[28]

It was a fundamental tenet of Freud’s approach that none of human behaviour is accidental. The small mistakes of everyday life, dreams, and the apparently inexplicable symptoms of mentally ill people are not “accidental”. By definition, the human mind is not aware of unconscious processes. The more deeply unconscious the motivation, from the standpoint of psychoanalysis, the more obvious it is that a person will not be aware of it. Freud grasped early on the general principle that these unconscious processes reveal themselves (and therefore can be studied) in those fragments of behaviour which the conscious mind dismisses as silly mistakes or accidents.

Is it possible to attain freedom? If what is meant by a “free” action is one that is not caused or determined, we must say quite frankly that such an action has never existed, and never will exist. Such imaginary “freedom” is pure metaphysics. Hegel explained that real freedom is the recognition of necessity. To the degree that men and women understand the laws that govern nature and society, they will be in a position to master these laws and turn them to their own advantage. The real material basis upon which humankind can become free has been established by the development of industry, science and technology. In a rational system of society – one in which the means of production are harmoniously planned and consciously controlled – we will really be able to speak about free human development. In the words of Engels, this is “mankind’s leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.”

  1. Quoted in Gleick, op. cit., pp. 251-2.

  2. Marx K. and Engels, F. Collected Works, Vol. 4, p. 93, henceforth referred to as MECW.

  3. Freud, S. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 193.