Ibsen and Brandes on freedom and liberties and the state as the curse of the individual

The Danish critic Georg Brandes was shocked by Ibsen's radical view of freedom and his claim that the state was the curse of the individual. According to Ibsen, the reason for this was that Brandes was unable to distinguish between "freedom" and "liberties". Because, writes Ibsen: "What you call freedom, I call liberties; and what I call the struggle for freedom is nothing other than the ever-living acquisition of the idea of freedom". This means that freedom is not something you can have, but something you must constantly search for:

He who possesses freedom differently from what he sought for, he possesses it dead and spiritless, because the concept of freedom has in it that it is constantly expanded during the acquisition, and therefore if someone during the struggle stands and says: now I have it, - then he thereby shows that he has just lost it.

Ibsen perceives what he calls the "dead side inside with a certain given standpoint of freedom" as "characteristic of state societies" - and his conclusion is therefore that: "The state is the curse of the individual".

For Ibsen, citizenship is the same as the "individual's rise" in the political and geographical concept of the state. Therefore, he takes the conclusion that the state is the curse of the individual one step further:

Undermine the concept of the state, set up volunteerism and the spiritually related as the one decisive factor for an association - and that is the beginning of a freedom, which is worth something.

The basis for Ibsen's model of an association based on voluntariness and the spiritually related was the patrician class in Skien. He therefore emphasizes the immediate, the urge, the process, the inner or internal and the individual – in contrast to the regulated, abstract, fixed, external and bourgeois.

Ibsen's argument is not based on nostalgia, a longing for something that was lost, but it is an emphasis on what he perceived as necessary to create development and understanding of development.

What he argued for was not the patrician class as a class, but its way of being and thinking that had characterized this class and made it a creative force in the development of Skien and Norway for several hundred years. The patrician class was not really determined by the desire for profitability and profit, but was concerned with the value that lay in the refinement process itself. It is this process, the constant expansion and dynamism that Ibsen perceived had been lost in the state and politics of the new, strictly regulated civil service state.

For Ibsen, the civil service state was therefore the end of development, because in the civil service state there was no longer any place for the qualities that had created it.

The state must go! I will be part of that revolution. Undermining the concept of the state, set up volunteerism and the spiritually related as the one decisive factor for an association.

Ibsen therefore did not want to return to the patrician class as a class, but he wanted to move forward to a society that could continue the dynamics and relationships between people that had characterized the patrician class.