Political Freedom Can Coexist With Determinism

Einstein loved Spinoza enough to write him a poem in German at age 36 — and accepted Spinoza’s view that free will is an illusion. Yet Einstein also believed in democracy, defended civil liberties, and fought for the right of people to live as they chose. On its face that is contradictory: why fight for the freedom of beings who, by your own account, cannot freely choose anything?

The contradiction dissolves once you notice the two “freedoms” name different things. Metaphysical free will is about whether a decision is uncaused by prior states — a question for physics and neurophysiology. Political freedom is about whether one agent’s behaviour is constrained by another agent — a question of power, not causation. A person whose every neuron is determined can still be coerced by a state, and being coerced is meaningfully worse than not being coerced even if neither condition is “freely chosen” in the metaphysical sense.

So the position is consistent: humans are determined systems, and it matters enormously which determining causes act on them. A society that lets people pursue what feels like their own ends produces different outcomes — and different felt lives — than one that does not. You don’t need libertarian free will to prefer the first.

This is why the paradox is only apparent. Einstein wasn’t being sentimental about Spinoza or hypocritical about politics — he was holding two claims that operate at different levels. The mistake is assuming political freedom must be cashed out in metaphysical terms. It doesn’t.

The same gap shows up elsewhere. We talk about “responsibility” and “blame” as if they require [[Free Will Is an Illusion (Spinoza)]] to be false; in practice, those concepts do useful social work even on a determinist reading, because they shape future behaviour — themselves a determining cause.

Related Concepts

• [[Free Will Is an Illusion (Spinoza)]] — the metaphysical claim Einstein accepted
• [[A Thinking Falling Stone Would Believe It Chose to Fall]] — the analogy underlying that claim
• [[Flexibility Over Rigidity]] — holding two views at different levels rather than collapsing them

Source: [[Avshalom Elitzur on Spinoza, Einstein, and the Illusion of Free Will]]