Freedom is Other People

Ezequiel Spector's Freedom as Social Cooperation: A Theory of Liberal Democracy proposes a fourth conception of freedom alongside the negative, positive, and republican traditions: freedom as a cooperative practice for the development and realisation of life plans. I argue that the book's most original contribution is its conceptual tie between freedom and interdependence, but that its focus on what makes us free leaves underexplored the ways in which the institutions necessary for cooperation also constrain us. I close by considering whether the view is best read as a theory of freedom or as a contractarian theory of distributive justice.