most human relationships in reality reflect some degree of ownership of one person over another. We recognize freedom as something distinct, he suggests, only because so many people in history have had to live in the state of not having it at all. Even now, all of us are under someone’s authority to a degree, whether it’s our parents, our partners, our employers, or the state. It’s the way this authority is exercised through the law and the eyes of society, the amount of agency we have in these relationships, and our ability to negotiate within them that determine how free we really are.
