Philosophy, particularly in the analytic form that still dominates the discipline in anglophone universities, is avowedly ahistorical, sometimes anti-historical. Abstracted from time and place, it applies the clear eye of universalised reason to certain perennial concepts and fundamental problems. History, by contrast, at least in its current, broadly cultural incarnation, insists on the contingency and practical embeddedness of ideas, and on the concomitant plurality, partiality, and opacity of human understanding.

In The Second Treatise of Government, John Locke seems to support what Quentin Skinner identified as the neo-Roman theory of liberty. That is to say, according to Locke, in order to be free, it is not sufficient to be free from constraint or coercion. It also necessary for you to be free of dependency on the will of another person. The sheer fact of absolute monarchy, of ruling by will rather than law, constitutes an act of war, and the people have the right to take up arms against it. However – and here his story becomes strange – Locke also defends prerogative power. That is, he defends the right of the magistrate to exercise their will over and above the rule of law. This chapter will explore this apparent contradiction and try to make sense of it in Locke’s terms. It will conclude that Locke points to an irresolvable tension between the will and the good, and that while the languages of political thought cannot be historically disentangled, they can have distinct and rich philosophical lives.

This introduction provides an overview of the historiography of freedom and of republicanism, placing Skinner’s work on neo-Roman freedom in that context.

South Africa has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. With two thirds of young people excluded from employment, turning jobless youth into self-made entrepreneurs has become the mantra of the state, NGOs and the Church. In June 2015, at a government-funded ‘career exhibition’ targeting unemployed youth in Zandspruit informal settlement in Johannesburg, the leader of a youth-run NGO told the young people gathered not to wait for jobs but to start their own businesses. “Your future is in your hands, not government's hands,” Sibongile shouted, valorizing individual entrepreneurship as the solution to the crisis of youth unemployment.

During my time in Zandspruit, I found that many young people promoted the idea and aspiration of starting their own business. One young man by the name of Itumeleng wrote a self-help book called Be the Boss of your Future. In the introduction he writes: ‘A bit of shocking South African statistics. Only one out of every nine matriculants (14%) will get formal, salaried jobs. Only 9% will undergo tertiary education. As many as 80% will remain officially unemployed. To survive in such a harsh environment you need to start your own business’ (Dithupe, 2016, 32). Echoing the entrepreneurial messages from the state, Itumeleng presents self-employment as the solution to unemployment but also as a way to obtain economic independence and social mobility. The framing of entrepreneurship in the ‘township economy’ (or informal entrepreneurship) as a route to improved life chances rather than a ‘coping strategy’ (Rakodi, 1995) reflects important shifts in the ways in which researchers and policy makers conceptualize the informal economy. At the time of the career exhibition in Zandspruit, there was much talk about the Gauteng provincial government's Township Economy Revitalisation Strategy, which frames the ‘township economy’ as a generator of jobs, entrepreneurship and economic inclusion, rather than poverty and marginalization. This shift reflects the emergence of a new development paradigm that views the informal economy through the neoliberal lens of entrepreneurship and job creation (Roy, 2010; Dolan and Rajak, 2016; 2018).